Hello again folks. It's that time of the week again. The time where I remember that I have a blog and things to write about and document both for my own sake as well as, at least hopefully if you still read this, your entertainment.
The past week has been pretty eventful it seems, or perhaps not the past week, but the time since I've written the last post. The time between when I write seems to be forever, but it's really only a week. But I guess since I don't have my normal routine set here and I have no homework to do, time seems to pass by a lot slower. I'm no longer in the fast-paced world of being a student on a term schedule and having a million deadlines to meet, no longer in the US where everything is driven by productivity and profits. No longer, at least for now.
It's really a strange feeling being this un-busy. It almost makes me feel guilty, but then I go to the bathroom and see my IQP partner "inconspicuously" browsing facebook at the bottom of her monitor much like I do. But that's only during work. At (my temporary) home, I just really have nothing to do. I feel like there are a lot of things I WANT to do, but I don't really want to take the time to do them, I don't really know what I'm doing. It's like coming to Australia didn't really fix the issues within me. It's just put me in a new environment and changed the circumstances a little bit.
I also don't know why I started writing this when I did because I have a meeting at 11:30 which is pretty far away, but we have to do some prep work before our meeting. And it takes me forever to write these things because they are pretty long and even though I say I don't filter myself too much, I still do make some quick edits as I'm typing. Either way, it takes a pretty long time to write these posts which is good because it takes up time at work, AND I have a word document open and I'm typing so it looks like I'm doing work on the report or something. Overall, it's just a great way to pass time at work without being overly obvious and also I can upload it without wasting my precious 25mb/week I get at the apartment.
Well back to what I did this past week. We went to Sydney this weekend and it was pretty cool. By now you've probably already noticed my new profile picture, and at this moment some of my classmates are at work uploading pictures on facebook and tagging me. It seems that that's how they pass their workdays. They probably have faster internet too, and they can use their own computers… Enough complaining about my work setting, maybe. But actually it's probably not the internet here that's the problem. The real limiting factor is the processing capabilities of this "computer" I won't describe it again because I complain about these things every post.
So back to Sydney, we flew in Saturday morning because if we flew in Friday night we would've had to pay for another night in a hostel which is basically just $45 wasted for nothing. So Saturday morning/afternoon was spent just walking around the city, exploring and stuff. I took a few pictures, my classmates took way more. It was pretty fun just exploring the city and seeing all the iconic landmarks, and planking in front of them. That evening all but 3 of us had purchased bridge climb tickets which give you a 140m high 360 degree aerial view of the city. The only downside is that is costs $188 to get up there. Something I was unwilling to pay. You can't even take pictures up there and have to pay $30 more for just two pictures. Needless to say, I did not want to empty my bank account for 3 hours of amazingness. I'll take a longer tour and eat relatively well thank you very much.
Instead of paying for that I had a pretty quiet evening just chilling and talking with the two others who did not pay for the bridge. We walked a little more around the city, chatted a lot, chilled by the iconic view of the Opera house where I was enlisted by a couple to take their picture. Well that one I'll take a little tangent for. Basically we're sitting their talking and taking a few last pictures as the sun sets over the opera house. A couple comes up to me and has some extremely specific directions as to the picture they want taken. I apply the rule of thirds and take the picture she asked for. I show her and she's elated saying, "Oh, that's perfect! Thank you!" I smile in return with a, "No problem!" and as I'm about to sit back down another couple, younger this time and with a super nice camera, come up to me and say, "Sorry, but I reckon you're pretty good. Mind taking a picture of us?" So off I went again to apply the rule of thirds and take a nice picture because I don't take a lot of pictures, but when I do, they're freaking amazing. But not really. So I take a picture with the fancy camera, which makes taking pictures way more fun, and go to sit down again, but the older couple again realizes that in their first picture they had not asked me to capture the iconic angle of the opera house saying, "I'm realizing that we have the icon of icons here and we'd be silly not to capture it". So I take another picture and everyone goes on their way happy with the photos I produced.
Tangent done, back to Saturday night. Well actually there's not that much left. We basically headed back to the hostel, pooped from a day of exploring out in the sun, grabbed a bottle of something on the way back and relaxed and drank our drinks before calling it a night. Which reminds me of how weird is that when I go to a liquor store and buy a 6 pack of something for way too much I don't even get carded. It’s going to be a weird 3 months back home.
That brings us to Sunday. We booked our flight back for that evening so we had pretty much the entire day left for us. We woke up and checked out of our hostel and headed out to the wildlife sanctuary which is exactly what it sounds like. And of course by now you've probably already seen the 15 pictures that've been uploaded and tagged of me on facebook, and if you haven't yet, you probably just went or are going to check right after this. Basically it's a zoo, but there are animals, namely kangaroos, that you can pet and feed and all the profits go to saving and preserving the wildlife. Basically it was pretty amazing and we played with and fed the kangaroos for a long time and took a ton of pictures. There were also some koalas that we took pictures with, but those are still in fenced areas probably because they can/would probably destroy some annoying little kid if left in an unsupervised environment. Also while at this wildlife sanctuary we ran into one of my classmate's high school friends. It was mind blowing that they happened to both be in Sydney, Australia at the same wildlife park on the same day. That and apparently he had lost a TON of weight since high school.
After the park and copious amounts of pictures, the group decided that it would be worthwhile to check out the Hard Rock Café Sydney. So we departed on our quest to find the Hard Rock Café, which wasn't too hard. We ate lunch and it was super expensive. All my class mates bought mixed drinks along with their meals which doubled the price of their already expensive meals. I just ordered a pulled pork sandwich for $20 and enjoyed it. The serving sizes here were the largest I had seen while in Australia and they had Heinz ketchup. You might think Heinz ketchup is nothing out of the ordinary, but in Australia most of the ketchup here is not Heinz and they're all a good deal sweeter than the standard American tomato sauce, which is what they call ketchup. So a hefty, albeit expensive, meal was eaten and then we embarked out into the surrounding mall in search of souvenirs. By the end of the Sydney trip I picked up a magnet bottle opener that has the Opera House and the Bridge pictured on it and a couple of tea towels. The bottle opener was used the first day of purchase and the tea towels are in my bag of things that I don't use.
Cue airport scene without problems. At least I wish that's what happened. Instead we were delayed in boarding the plane by about 20 minutes, but then when we were all happily seated on the plane waiting to take off they told us that we had to wait for the engineers to come and see if the water in the cabin was anything bad even though they told us it was probably from condensation from the humid climate. So we sat there and I read Cell by Stephen King. In the end the engineer arrived and said it was fine and we took off, but not before having sat on the run-way for almost 2 hours. The entire flight from Sydney to Melbourne only takes about 65 minutes so we were sitting on the runway for longer than we were in the air…
We arrived back at our apartment with no problems, and we took Monday off for Superbowl Monday. I don't even want to go into the details of that game and it's the only sporting event I watched every year.
Sorry if the last few paragraphs seems rushed, but I started writing this at like 10 this morning and it's now 4 in the afternoon and we're leaving in about 5 minutes so it is indeed a little rushed. The term is half way over. Mind = Blown. At least IQP work is picking up and I have something to do at work now.
P-P-PEACE
