I'm done!!

So I had the last of my finals a couple days ago!!!! Whew, it feels good to be done with school over here! I now have 8 days left in Australia and I'm getting kind of sad! I went out with my friends to a mexican restaurant called Taco Bill's earlier tonight where we had a really huge plate of nachos and a really huge margarita which we all shared. This week I'm just planning on spending my remaining days with people and souvenir shopping for everyone back home! (but i really suck at souvenir shopping so don't expect anything very interesting). Also, a group of us are going to have a christmas barbecue before everyone leaves because it's winter down here and it feels like christmas! we actually saw people selling roasted chestnuts on the streets tonight... Anyway, I'm just chilling out for a week and then it's back to the good ol' US of A.

photos for last post...

Sydney Opera House!!! Then we went to a ballet later that night.















Featherdale! Katie feeding a kangaroo







































Inside the Sydney Aquarium!















On the Great Ocean Road















These are Crimson Rosellas in the wild along the Great Ocean Road





























The Twelve Apostles





























This is just some other really cool/pretty stuff along the Great Ocean Road

Yay another update!

So Katie is here now visiting me!!! She got in last monday and we've been hanging around Melbourne mostly. Last week, we did the tourist shuttle and walked around Queen Victoria Market and then hopped back on the shuttle and walked around the Royal Botanic Gardens. After that, we went up to the top of the Eureka Sky Deck building thing. It's a tall building...

On Friday of that week, we left for Sydney!! We stayed in a cute little hostel there, which was nice and cheap. The first day, we walked into the city through the Sydney Royal Botanic Gardens, which were pretty as well. We then realized we didn't have towels, and the hostel didn't provide towels, so we went to some tourist shop and got Australian themed towels to use. Then we went to go look at and walk around the Opera House. It was really pretty. As we were walking around we decided to go look at the box office and see what kind of shows were playing....then we decided to go see one!!! The one we originally wanted to see was sold out, but the ballet still had tickets, so we got them!!!!! An hour later, we were sitting in the Sydney Opera House watching a ballet!!! It was pretty awesome.

On Saturday, we got up early and caught a train/bus to Featherdale animal place thing. It took like an hour and a half of travel time. We got to do the whole kangaroo/wallaby/koala thing again which was cool. It was a long trip back too, and by that time we were pretty tired so we turned in around 9 pm that night, haha.

Sunday we had to check out by 10, so we left early for the aquarium. The aquarium was really cool!! After that, we took a water taxi from there to Circular Quay and got to ride under the bridge and see the opera house during the day which was very pretty. Then we went back to the hostel to pick up the duffel bag we left there, and we went and got lunch at the G'Day Cafe and we ate our food outside next to the harbor with the opera house as our backdrop. We walked around a bit more and watched some street performer lady stuff herself into a tiny box. Then it was time to go home!! It was really a fun trip!!!!

Yesterday, we spent all day shopping at Queen Victoria Market and Brunswick street. I have a buuunch of australia garbage to give everyone when I get home. I also bought this really cute purse/bag and shoes on Brunswick...oh, and me and Katie found an awesome churro place on brunswick, so we shared like 6 churros yesterday. They were delicious. Tomorrow, we have a reservation for the Great Ocean Road! That should pretty much be a full day trip and im sooo excited! It should be very pretty! Hopefully the weather is really good tomorrow. I dunno what we're doing on Friday, maybe going to a comedy club...and then saturday katie is leaving! :(

It's been really fun! I might get a chance to go to Western Australia after finals, but I gotta talk to some people..i don't wanna go by myself. Anyway, school's been okay..it's almost over! yay! I guess that's it...i don't want to put pictures on here cause it takes a really long time and is annoying, sorry!

Picture update

This is for you, mommy!




These first three are from the Moomba Water Fest that was in March.








These are just some pictures of campus I took sometime in April. I think it looks a lot like Harry Potter...it's a pretty freakin cool campus.



Ah yes, and this is when I got my ear pierced and my friend got her tongue pierced!!

Katie is coming to visit me for almost 2 weeks pretty soon!! I am so excited to see her! We're gonna hopefully do a lot of cool, probably touristy stuff, so I'll have better/more pics to post here later!! I'm having a great time down under! I have been pretty busy with school, having to write a couple 1500 word papers and tests and assignments and what not. I have 4 more weeks, and then two 2500 word papers and finals and then I'm done with school! Hooray!

ANOTHER UPDATE YAY!

Sadly, I don't have much to update since my last entry. School has started. bleh. I don't have much work to do or anything, but the lecturers here are realllly not as good as at home and it's harder to do the assignments cause it seems like they just ramble on in class and don't talk about what we really need to know. Oh well. I'm definitely not the biggest fan of the accounting part of my management class...

Other than school, I've just been hanging out. There's this library where you aren't allowed to study and you can check out dvds and magazines and what not. I like that place. I went to the Melbourne Museum earlier today (I have an essay due in Australia Now on monday, so I had to go...). It was pretty cool; mostly I like the park that's around the museum, it's really pretty. I don't have any pics for this update, but I plan on taking pictures around campus tomorrow after my 9 am class so yall can see where I walk every day! yayyy!

Sorry, I'll try to do more exciting things so I can have more exciting updates.

First days in Melbourne

So now that I'm about to start school and my adventures are ending, my blog posts will get more and more spread out.

Since my last post, I basically haven't had internet. I did the Melbourne Welcome program, which was very fun. There were about 100 people staying at the residential college I was at. We got to go to the beach and I learned how to surf! I actually stood up 4 or 5 times too and rode the waves almost all the way to the beach. We also went to a zoo and we went to the Immigration Museum. They had a lot of parties and trivia nights planned for us too, so i didn't get much sleep for about 4 days :(

The dorm I stayed at looked like it would fit in Harry Potter world which was very cool! I'm kind of glad I'm not staying in the residential colleges though because the rooms were very small and I wasn't their biggest fan.




















So that program ended today and I'm all moved in to my actual apartment called UniLodge. It's very near campus and near Lygon street which has a bunch of pubs and restaurants and shopping on it. So I've just been walking around and shopping and getting settled in today. I also took an hour and a half nap in my room which was nice. That's about it...I have some study abroad briefings the next few days and then Orientation week starts next week. hopefully I'll get my classes figured out.

My days in Australia....

So it has been about a week and a half since my last post...woops!

After the cool bungy day, we went on a Lord of the Rings tour. I liked that a lot, we got to see where they filmed a lot of the scenes and it was beautiful. They also happened to be filming the new "Wolverine" movie with Hugh Jackman while we were there so we got to see some of those sets.

We left the day after that for Sydney. In Sydney, we went to the Blue Mountains and some animal place. I really liked the zoo place because the wallabies were just running around and you could pet 'em and feed 'em! They were very cute, as were the koalas! We also went on a tourist bus in Sydney and got to see all the touristy things. We saw the Opera House but didn't get off the bus because it was raining a lot. The main thing I remember about Sydney was that it rained a lot and they had this shop that sold really good bread/pastry things and I had an apple one and it was sooooo good!

Next was Cairnes. Cairnes was sooo hot when we got there! We walked along the "beach" the first night and went to a cool animal dome. Our hotel wasn't very near town so walking back and forth wasn't so much fun. The next day we got to go on a boat to the Great Barrier Reef. We went on a semi-submersible ship or something and got to get up close and personal to the reef and its inhabitants!! Then, we went to the beach and went snorkeling in the reef which was cool. It started to rain after that though, which was sad. The next day we went to Kuranda village which is this cool little village in the middle of the rainforest. I got to cuddle a koala there!! She was very soft. I also made friends with some lazy kangaroos! After we walked around a little we went to this pub where I got my first official legal alcoholic umbrella drink! a mango margarita mmmmm it was good! It started raining pretty hard then and we just went back to the hotel and hung out. It rained pretty much the whole next day but we managed to go to some tourist shops and we found a mall so that was nice.

We're in Melbourne now. I'm liking the Melbourne weather and atmosphere a whole lot better than both Sydney and Cairnes...so that's good. It has really good public transportation and today we took a free tourist bus around the city. We stopped off at the university and i saw the civil engineering building and the dorm i'd be staying at for 4 days for the melbourne welcome program (the dorm looks like it'd fit in harry potter world....) We also found UniLodge where I applied for an apartment but never heard back. Apparently I have a spot and they'd been emailing me, but i never got the emails...sucks for me. But i still have an apartment and I can move in whenever. I'm probably going to move in tomorrow because I don't want to have to lug all of my stuff to the dorm i'll be staying at for a few days then lug it back again to the apartment. Anyway, that's all we've done. I really like Melbourne so far and am excited for school to start!!

Adventure town

So today was definitely an adventuresome day...

It started out not uber early like a lot of the other days, which was great. When we got to the little adventure shop to check in for our jet boat thing, I booked myself a spot on the Nevis bungy jump. 134 m. eek! But that will be later....

First, we went on the shotover jet ride. That was REALLY fun! I really thought our driver was going to crash into one of the rocks and when he did the 360 degree turns I almost flew out of my seat! Fun times...

After that, we went back into town and got lunch at a cute pizza place...then it was off to the Nevis bungy!

It was about a 40 minute drive up the mountain. I didn't really feel scared driving up there, just excited. I started getting more and more scared as we got closer to the actual jump spot. And by the time it was my turn, I was almost shaking! My heart was beating to the loud music in the pod that was suspended in mid-air. Jumping was amazing and I would do it a million times again! 134 meters is nothin. We didn't buy any pictures or movies of me because my mom (who was too scared to jump) took some of me going. I got a free t-shirt though!!

So tomorrow we're going absailing maybe and on a Lord of the Rings tour which I'm really looking forward to!

So far, Queenstown gets an A+++++!!!!! :D

MIDDLE EARTH aka Queenstown

Let's see...I guess it's been a while since my last post.

On Thursday, we went to the Auckland Museum which I liked a lot and we just walked around a lot and rested and ate dinner at this cool place called Patio. I liked that a lot too. It was basically just a relax-a-day...

Friday, we headed off to Queenstown. The flight over there was kind of scary because there were very high winds and the guy had to try to land the plane like 2 times. But we didn't die, so yay! Friday night we just walked around and checked out the town and bought souvenirs. I watched a lot of rugby because the New Zealand Sevens are happening right now. Rugby is an interesting sport...

Today, we got up super duper early and headed off to Milford Sound for our boat ride. It was so beautiful on the way over there and there were a looooot of sheep! The boat ride was amazing too, I thought I was riding on the river in Lord of the Rings!!! I listened to it on the way back, too.

My battery is dying...tomorrow i might bungy yay!!!

Touristy day

Today was the day that we looked and acted like tourists. We had an all day trip around some towns nearish to Auckland in a cool charter bus with people from Australia, England, India and such...

First we went to the Waitomo glow worm caves that were featured on Planet Earth. It was pretty neat, the glow worms look like what the night sky would look like if it had about 5 times more stars.

Next, we went to the AGRODOME! haha, I thought of GUTS! and agrocrag...there were sheep and other animals there which was cool.

Then, we went on over to Rotorua and saw some Maori people perform for us. There were annoying people there talking during their performance which kinda pissed me off.

After Rotorua, we went back to Auckland a different way and we drove through Matamata!!! As soon as the driver told us we were going here, I got excited because the nerd that I am knew that was where they filmed some of Lord of the Rings...it was pretty cool.

All around a pretty tiring day, hopefully we won't do such touristy things tomorrow, but I'm glad I got to see and do these cool things today.

Day 1 Part 2-izzle

So after our relaxing time in the hotel, we headed down to the pier. It took us about 15 minutes of searching, but we found it...the ice bar! It's called Minus 5 Degrees (but it was actually -7 when we were in there). It was pretty cool actually!! It was a small room and everything, even the glasses, were made of ice. I got to buy my first legal alcoholic drink (yay!) and even though we went at 3 pm when no one else was there (which was quite lame), I had fun!

After that adventure, we headed over to the ferry station and bought tickets to Waiheke island. It was absolutely beautiful over there. We walked up and down a loooot of hills and got to see wineries and vinyards and such. Behind one winery was a cool Kinetic Statue Garden or something...anyway, every single one of the sculptures moved when the wind blew, it was very pretty. After that we went to this really cool, really long beach with sailboats offshore and my mom played in the ocean! Yay!

That's pretty much it...we're freakin exhausted and it's only 8:30 pm. We're gonna get dinner then head to bed cause it's gonna be a loooong day tomorrow!

Also, I feel like I'm posting too much so I'm gonna try to keep it down to one post a day....

Auckland

We finally made it to Auckland!!! After a super fun 13 hour flight that involved watching lots of episodes of Flight of the Conchords and Super Bad, we made it to New Zealand around 8 am on Tuesday.

When we finally got to our hotel (around 9:30 am), we couldn't check in so we just wandered around Auckland. Turns out our hotel is right next to the Sky Tower, the tallest building in the southern hemisphere, so we checked that out...it was pretty tight.

After that we went to this park that we saw from the Sky Tower and walked around and laid down in the grass. It was very pretty and nice.

The weather is really good too. After resting in the grassy knoll, we went back to the hotel to see if we could check in and we could! Our room is nice and the shower I had was amaaaaazing. I don't know what we're doing later, but right now it's 1 pm and we're just resting. Stupid Melbourne lady still hasn't emailed me my confirmation of enrollment so I still can't apply for a student visa...UGH. Oh well, guess I'll just have to wait!

...pictures to come later, I'm too lazy to do them now...

So I lied...

My next post is not from New Zealand. It's from the LAX international terminal. Exciting times. I'm sitting in burger king waiting for my 6 hour layover to be over, then it's off to New Zealand!!

I still haven't gotten my visa yet... :( I'm kinda pissed at this Melbourne lady, but hopefully she'll e-mail me my electronic confirmation of enrollment so I can go ahead and apply for a visa...Hopefully this will happen before I leave New Zealand, or I may be stuck there!!! But I wouldn't be too sad about that prolly...

The flights from Austin to DFW and DFW to LA have been good. After we got off the plane in DFW, my mom said, "gee, it sure is cold for L.A.!" .......... She's old and senile.... haha! I also got to sit in the Exit row on the last flight which was awesome because I got sooo much leg room for my super long legs. hehehe!

Anyway, this will actually be my last post until New Zealand. We leave here around 9 pm or so and I think we get into Aukland at 7 am or something....should be a fuuuuun flight!

Numero uno

I am testing this crazy stuff out! I leave in 3 days! I need to pack...

Next post will be from New Zealand...hells ya!