It has been eleven days since my last blog post and for this I apologize. I was without internet for the whole weekend so. There was not much going on last week besides trying to get all my work done before we left for our weekend trip out in the middle of Western Australia. Bright and early friday morning, I use the term morning loosely here since most people would consider 4 o'clock in the morning the middle of the night, all of us awake and get on a bus to the Perth Airport. We are taking a Notre Dame mandated trip out to the mining town/area of Kalgoorlie, which is about an hours plane flight due east into the outback. There are two more of these stipulated trips payed for by Notre Dame later in the semester, and the goal of them is to take us to places we otherwise might not go in Australia in order to gain some insight into the local culture of a non-city part of Australia. After we all get on the plane it is a short hop. skip, and a jump over to Kalgoorlie but somehow they managed to find time to serve us a breakfast on the plane, which I was ever grateful for. The reason being that the breakfast provided by Martin and Jane, the two adults charged with instructing us and who organized the whole excursion, at 8 seemed more like lunch to me. It was termed a "barbecue" breakfast. We stopped at a park after exiting the airport (most nice parks in Australia have free electric grills at them) and cooked up some sausage and bacon (ham) for sandwiches. At this park there was a playground as well and while we were waiting for our food, the logical thing for college-age kids to do is play on it--a theme that continued throughout the weekend. It also had a great tree for climbing which I took full advantage of. After the park it was a drive into the mining town that is Kalgoorlie for a wander around the town and then three successive talks with various organizations regarding different aspects of life in this area. The town itself reminded me a bit of an old out-west town. One was an conservationist involved in trying to keep the land healthy, one an Aborigine who explained as much of their culture as possible, and one was an anthropologist working to get land claims for the Aborigines. The combination of a lack of sleep and viewing powerpoints had a certain effect on a majority of our group at one point or another during these talks that culminated in a lot of head bobbing with their eyes closed, chin on their chest, or in some extreme cases head on the shoulder of the person next to them. Watching this provided the entertainment when the conservationist's talk became pretty dry....
After that it was on to the SuperPit. We had a two hour drive out to this mining site with a giant hole in the ground. For the whole weekend we had a older coach bus drive us around since all the sites we went to were spread out so it was roughly an hour and a half drive to all the different locations. The pit itself was pretty impressive in a physical sense. The productivity of it since the goldrush days however has decreased significantly. They now consider 1.5 oz of gold per ton a rich supply. I still don't understand why the world arbitrarily put so much value on gold and made it worth tearing up that much of the earth for it. We eventually headed up to Moropoi, our lodgings for Friday and Saturday night. This was the true outback experience of the trip. Moropoi is a little traveler's station literally out in the middle of nowhere in the outback. Sidenote: the dirt is soooo red/orange in the outback. I had heard it was but actually seeing it was awesome. The drive to this place and the country we passed looked exactly as the stereotypical image of rural Australia. The sunset on the drive there was immaculate. When we pull into the dirt road entrance to Moropoi the sun had set and it was already dark out. This place was run by an aboriginal family which added to the authenticity of it. We got served a delicious meal of some green soup (supposedly pumpkin soup according to Martin), kangaroo meat with vegetables ad rice, and then a apple pie type dessert with ice cream . This meal was served to us and the nicety of the meal contrasted so much with the run down houses/trailers that made up the station. We then spent the night around a campfire, which was throughly enjoyable since I have been itching for a fire for the longest time. Per usual I got designated as the fire-tender; I guess it doesn't matter what group of friends I am in, I will always be in charge of making/maintaining fires. It doesn't bother me since it is a job which I love.
This is where I will leave you for today since I do not want to condense information into the rest of this post or make it to long. The rest of the trip tomorrow, followed by a top ten list of things I am going to miss at Notre Dame this semester. Adios.
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