Apparently Untitled

So the first week of classes is almost over with, only two more to go for me, and I am surviving.  Taking classes a month before we normally would is a hard feeling to shake off and get back into the swing of things.  The weirdest feeling though is having to be in school a full month before the college football season starts.  No one should ever have to start their college classes without having a football game to watch within the first couple of weekends.  Which is one reason the majority of Notre Dame kids here bought tickets for the Aussie Rules Football game this weekend between the West Coast Eagles and Frematle Dockers.  This game is a huge rivalry game here, from what we picked up on, and so we got our tickets pretty early.  For those of you that have never seen anything regarding A.R.F. here is a YouTube video with some pretty spectacular plays from the 2008 season.  I am pretty excited to go and see Australia's favorite game live. 

Since not much exciting has gone on since my last post and tyring not to bore you with just the events of our days, I will try and provide some flavor of Australia that I have picked up so far.  One of the biggest differences that I have noticed, since I partake in this action a lot, between the US and Australia is that Australians do not wear hats hardly at all.  At least not baseball style hats.  If anything they wear these overlarge stocking caps that hang off the back of their head not unlike this.  I feel as though the local population can automatically pick me out as an American when I wear my hat.  I will admit, however, that I do not wear a hat as often now that I lost old ASU. 

Despite being here during winter and their "wet season" it hardly rains as much as I expected it too.  Being from a temperate climate were it can deluge for hours at a time (ex. I was informed this morning 7" of rain in 1 hour in Milwaukee yesterday) I thought it would be a bit more here. It did not rain at all during orientation week, during which the weather was beautiful, and now it has rained almost every day but only for about 5 minutes at a time randomly throughout the day. 

My last topic I am going to comment on before I have to run to class in ten minutes is the file sharing network at Thomas More College is awesome. We finally got it set up once all the full time students came back and gave us the correct IP address and everything.  I have downloaded (legally, since I never download illegally) about 30 movies so far and some music.  I am planning on getting a ton more but it is a decent start. If anyone wants some music and can wait til december let me know what you want and I can probably get it for you.  I am currently in the market of trying to find some good Australian bands that haven't made it to America yet.

And So It Begins

Heres a brief summary of the past couple days before I have to head off to the first day of classes.  Friday night was a bunch of fun as a large group of us took over a bus and headed downtown to a bar called The Mustang which was pretty nice. It had a live band that had a soft spot in their hearts for Michael Jackson, as well as a lot of tvs so we could watch some Aussie rules football if we didn't feel like dancing. After being their a while we then left and headed over to a club called Paramount.  It was a two level establishment with another live band, though not as good as the Mustang's, and bar on the bottom level and the actual club part on the upper level.  This was the first club I had ever been to and it was pretty awesome as far as I could tell.  Plenty of strobe lights, other lights going crazy, techno music, and dancing.  Throughout the night we met up with some other Notre Dame kids from the Fremantle program that decided to come to the city for the night who were pretty cool. Hopefully I will get a chance to see them again while I'm here.  

Saturday was mostly spent back at Cottesloe beach swimming in the frigid winter waters of the Indian Ocean and watching Ocean's 11 that night. Yesterday consisted of going and finding my classroom buildings in the morning, then going into the city again in the afternoon to pick a couple things up that I needed, and the day was capped off by having my mind blown away by the movie Inception.  Most of the other ND kids had already gone to see it earlier in the week, but we managed to scrape together a couple people to enjoy the best movie experience I have had in a while.

Here are some random observations/conclusions so far:

1) Notre Dame "Darting" is NOT that bad 

(For those who don't know darting is our class registration system).  The class registration system here is very complex in trying to figure out and you are not even guaranteed the timeslots you want.  You have to rank preferences of the class times you want for each lecture and tutorial and if you don't get your first choice, schedule clashes will most likely happen. I got lucky and got all my first preferences but a lot of people didn't.

2) Australians love these kind of trucks for some reason. They are all over the place.

3) They call anything that we would call garbage "rubbish".  This is one of my favorite things so far. I can't really explain it except that I seem to have an affinity for the word rubbish and think its a much cooler word than garbage.

4) The totem should fall down at the end since he had already spun it in that level before.

5) The grass never seems to grow here. It is almost like walking on a golfing fairway since it is very short.

Well I am now off to my first day of classes, which is why I am mostly here I guess.  It should be an interesting time hopefully.  I am taking Behavioral Psychology, Vertebrate Zoology, Popular Music and Culture, Human Reproductive Biology, and the one I am most excited for: Psychosocial Aspects of Exercise Science.

Orientation Week: Part II

So we left off after an eventful day of enrollment on Wednesday. Thursday provided possibly the most fun yet that I have had here as all the study abroad students at the University could go on a trip to Caversham Wildlife Park.  However the day started early for me because I woke up and walked through King's Park up to what is aptly named the DNA Tower, as it is a lookout tower with two winding staircases up to the top platform.  From there I got some clutch pictures of the sunrise over the city, which is what I came for besides some of the morning exercise that I am so fond of.  After breakfast we all headed over to pick up the buses on the campus and were greeted with three large buses that were painted and eye-wrenching lime green and yellow.  The insides were really ragged besides the four large surround speakers and two subwoofers in the back that were very underutilized on the hour drive over. I could barely hear the music.  After a drive through the Swan Valley wine country we arrived at Caversham.  This park was basically a zoo in which we walked through, while actually being able to interact/pet some of the animals.  The first "cliche" Australian animal that we got to take a photo with and pet was the wombat.  This creature is much bigger than most of us thought (not me of course since I know how big wombats are) but what surprised me the most was when our guide said they could run up to 40 km/hr.  This was one of my goals of my trip, to pet a wombat, so I was very happy when we got to.  We then walked past many other Australian animals including loud squawking birds, sleeping echidnas, and some dingos.
After all those we arrived at the kangaroo pen where we were instructed to grab a handful of food, not to pet them on the head, and find your favorite kangaroo.  And so all of us eagerly wandered around the pen to find the kangaroo that we wanted to feed.  Alan was the first to find one after approaching it tentatively and offering it an offering of food.  I soon found a little joey that looked like it wanted to have a nibble, and it did exactly that. After just a tiny bit of food it hopped off but I soon found my kangaroo friend that finished the rest of the pile in my hand while letting me pet it and take its picture.  They were so nonchalant about being around humans before, it made it so much more entertaining for us because we could walk right up to most of them.  After our allotted time was up we reluctantly left, but then got shown the koala pen where we had remarkably good luck in interacting with the koalas considering they sleep for 20-22 hours a day since they get so little energy for the eucalyptus they eat.  One guy was very active during his photo shoot and one even had a little joey (their babies are called joeys too) peeping in and out of his pouch and crawling around.

We then headed to a show they put on for us in which they demonstrated sheep-shearing, an essential trade in Australia's past and present, and things that go along with ranching such as milking a cow and cracking a whip.  I refrained from milking the cow. Been there done that.  When we got back to college however we had a most ironic dinner.  The rector and vice-rector put together an authentic Australian dinner for us which included kangaroo, emu, and water buffalo meat in separate sausages for us to eat as well as these Vegemite pastries.  The same animals that we saw and fed that morning fed us.  Oh and by the way Vegemite is this "concentrated yeast extract" that Australians love and is generally hated by all the international students.  The pastries were very good, but usually it is just eaten with cheese or toast and really not that good. It has a very sharp and salty taste (best description I can give at the moment).  The dinner was topped off with some delicious Australian dessert which was like a large meringue with whipped cream on the top. Amazing. Today just went into the city to pick up a few things after more orientation activities with the university, and now I am off since it is Friday night. Til next time.

Orientation Week: Part I

An accurate description of the orientation week so far, in my opinion, was thrown out at the dinner table last night: a summer camp.  I say this because we have had a lot of structured activities during the past two days, as well as evenings free and after dinner activities with the RAs.  On monday most of our day was spent sitting in the Octagon Theatre, unfortunately not watching the people on stage pummeling each other in various martial arts style, but talking to us about all the information they gave to us is a giant clear envelope about registration and enrollment coming up later in the week.  The day of sitting around was capped off however with a trip to the "Tav" on campus where they gave us free pizza and a chance to hang out with all the other study abroad and international students.  We spent most of the late afternoon there before heading back to Thomas More for dinner at six (the time dinner is everyday).  On a side note, another reason it seems a bit like camp is because the meal times are only an hour long so everybody is basically forced to eat at the same time, as well as eat the same food.  Anyway after dinner most of us went out to The Deen, a bar in downtown Perth to celebrate Kate's 21st birthday, which was a novel experience for me at least and quite fun since almost everyone from our ND group went along.

After a night out some of our members were not feeling so well in the morning and either slept through or delayed the opportunity to take a bus tour of Perth and Fremantle that left the following morning.  We started out driving through Kings Park, a huge track of preserved land right behind our dorm (which is called a college here and will be referred to as such in the continuing posts).  This park is a beautiful piece of land with so many exotic trees and plants that I need to photograph some morning or evening.  We got out and walked around at a war memorial that had an overlook of downtown Perth.

The tour then took us to Cottesloe Beach on the outskirts of Fremantle, the closest beach to us.  Despite it being winter here, the weather was extremely pleasant and almost perfect for hanging out on the shores of the Indian ocean for an half hour or so.  Three of our group members, Joey, Alan, and Kevin, decided they couldn't wait until Saturday to go back and swim and jumped in right there.  Our trip then concluded with a bomb fish and chips meal in downtown Fremantle right on the harbour, and a trip to another war memorial overlooking the city of Fremantle with the skyline of Perth in the distance.  Overall a great two days capped off with some life sized chess with Alan followed by Ultimate with Derek, Kelly, Mary Kate, Kevin, and Will in the open areas in our dorm before dinner, and a group movie after.

Beginnings and Ends

I have officially moved into my home in Australia for the next five months as of a couple minutes ago.  After a grueling 15 hour flight on the Quantas A-380 from LA to Sydney, which departed at 10:30 PM July15, our group arrived in the land down under.  The flight actually wasn't that bad despite being so long.  They had private televisions on the back of the seat heads for every passenger which had probably around 100 different movies to choose from as well as tv shows and interactive flight information maps among other things.  My flight consisted of a semi-restful seven hours of sleep, three movies, and a couple family guy episodes, and just like that it was over as we landed in Sydney around 6:15 AM July17.  Luckily no one among our group had a birthday on the 16th because effectively that day did not even exist for us.  If a major world event would have happened I would have had no idea where I was on July 16th.  After going through customs, we had to pick up our bags again, check them for our connection flight, go through security, and get to the boarding gate by 8:10 AM.  Because of some slow baggage appearance half our our group missed the connecting flight and had to wait for the next one at 10:45 AM.  Naturally with my luck I was in the group that missed its flight.  Actually I was only two people away from making the flight because they took us from security to the terminal by buses and wouldn't you know the bus filled up while I was within the next three people waiting.  Turns out it did not really matter as we just met up with the rest of the lucky ones in Perth's airport and then took a couple of busses complete with shag-covered seats over to St. Thomas More College our home for the semester.  

Going back to Sydney to Perth flight for a second I encountered a terrible thing while in flight. A deep sinking feeling suddenly crept up into my mind, the kind you get when you think you have forgotten something.  I looked around my seat futilely as I would have spotted it pretty quickly had it been there.  Got up to look into the overhead storage bin, no luck.  One last ditch effort had me searching through my backpack carry-on, but by that time I knew I had left it in the terminal at the Sydney airport while we were waiting for the flight.  The end of a brilliant, iconic legacy that started back in 2003.  The Arizona St. hat will never grace my head ever again.  Never will the faded maroon cap with multiple fabric splits on the bill, as well as sweat stains on the inside rim be seen in my possession.  We had a good run, and as I sat down after looking through my backpack, I strangely became less upset.  I remembered all the places and things that we had been to and done together in the last seven years, and in doing so it bouyed my spirits.  There would have been no better place to lose my hat than Australia, except for maybe New Zealand, but hopefully some little Australian boy picked it up and kept it as a prize from the airport, who then will become fascinated with a foreign university he had no previous knowledge about and move to the USA to go to school there, meet a beautiful sun-tanned beauty because of his accent and live out the rest of his days basking in the Arizona sun continually fading the hat to a paler and paler maroon.

Anyway, I am extremely tired but I had to stay of until the respectable hour of 9 o'clock before I go to bed in order to fight off any jetlag that will try to wake me up at obscenely early hours even for me.

The Layover in LAX

So I arrived in LAX this morning at 9:15 Pacific Time after a peaceful and smooth flight out of Milwaukee.  I got the window seat trapped in by a very sleepy couple in their late 20's who just fell asleep on each other's shoulder so my plane ride consisted of reading, listening to music, and looking out the window once we got past all the boring cornfields.  Of course we flew over the Rockies and some canyons in what I assume was Arizona (not sure if any of them were Grand or not) but the most interesting thing about the flight was flying into Los Angeles itself.

I cannot believe how many people live in this valley.  Once the mountains reach the valley floor the wilderness instantly stopped and BOOM...civilization.  I have never seen so many houses in one place before, and LA just kept sprawling out as we cruised over it I was just waiting to see the downtown that finally showed itself.  To a first time visitor to LA, the miles and miles of sprawling development around the seeming pinprick of the downtown in the middle.  There was hardly any green that I could see anywhere except for one random large park in the middle.  Anyway I have gotten very acquainted with the Tom Bradley International Airport (which I misread the first time and was walking around thinking how weird it was to have a airport in LA with the same name as the Boston superstar quarterback Tom Brady) waiting for my flight which leaves at 10:30 tonight. Hasn't even made it onto the departure board yet but luckily I found and outlet for my computer and therefore can Sporcle, which I am wrapping up this post to do. Next time you hear from me I'll be in Australia. Peace.

Epilogue

First off I would like to welcome you to the first of hopefully many posts in my blog There and Back Again: A Traveler's Tale. I was hesitant at first about creating a blog for a couple of reasons but then came to realize the many advantages of having one offered. First off and most importantly, it will provide a record of my travels and happenings on the far side of the world for my readers. This is all for you guys, my friends and family, seeing as I will be keeping a written account for myself, so I will try to make it as informative as possible, while still being entertaining. Secondly, this blog provides me with a place to share my experiences that is not Facebook. I will post on my grievances with Facebook later however. The last reason I have this blog is the entertainment factor. I originally thought blogs were boring and a waste of time until my good friend Chris Michaski started his blog Theorems of Life. I have found so much entertainment reading and following his blog, it swayed my perception of them and now I have my own. In my last attempt to publicize this great blog please check it out either through the link provided in this post or to the left of the post on the My Blogs column. The other blog there is my buddy's, Alfonso Flores, from home blog occasionally conveying his opinion about the sports world. It's a great fresh perspective on the sporting world so check The Brewcity Blogger.

Alright all friends blog plugging aside (literally), I just want to offer a few disclaimers that go with this blog.

1) The majority of this blog will be travel/activity related, but it will also contain observations I have about the world in case I run out of interesting things that are going on.

2) I cannot guarantee that you will find any entertainment or humor in this blog if I intend there to be seeing as I think my sense of humor lies more along the quick witty side of humor instead of the well-thought-out-finding-irony-in-the-everyday-occurrences kind of humor.

3) I will probably lack the adequate time to do this while over there, but I will try my hardest to keep it updated as much as possible so you will have to bear with any posting irregularity should it occur. Blog posting will come second to the written journal I will be keeping, but I realize that if I start this I have an obligation towards any potential followers.

Alright, I believe that just about covers the groundwork of my blog and I hope you enjoy it. I am going to miss being at Notre Dame for this semester and football season, but honestly, I am ten times more excited about being in Australia for five months than witnessing our team go a mediocre 7-5 in BK's inaugural year and play in some small bowl game.