Longest Post EVER!

February 27, Saturday

Word of the day:
Boot = trunk of the car

Today everyone but Natalie and I went up to Mount Wellington. Natalie wasn’t feeling the hike and I had been there yesterday so we decided to just stay at home.

Natalie came over around 11. We tried to decide what we would do today but the weather was pretty yucky so we were limited. I had wanted to go to Launy (Launceston) today but everyone else was going hiking so I figured that could wait for another day. Natalie and I made some delicious lunch and were extra loud to be sure that Richie the Rat wouldn’t come around. We then went up to the library to use the computers.

Then we headed over to the grocery store (we LOVE Coles!). I finally needed to buy groceries. I bought kind of a lot of stuff so I was SO thankful that Natalie was with me to help me carry all of it. We always take reusable shopping bags with us and when we were walking home one of them broke. Luckily it only had some plastic juice bottles in it but it was still difficult carrying all that stuff home.

When we got home we put all the groceries away and watched some awesome Aussie television. I ended up falling asleep until around 5. Then I went back up to the library to get online so I could talk to my wonderful best friend Catie. J We didn’t get to talk long because the library was closing soon. Oh, have I mentioned the obnoxious music that plays at the library when it’s about to close? The music starts playing and then a voice comes on that says “The library will be closing in 30 minutes. If you are working on a computer, come to a stopping point and save your work now. If you would like to check out any books go to the desk now.” And then it keeps reminding you every 10 minutes and the messages get longer and longer about what you need to do before you leave. It’s pretty annoying.

By the time I got back home Stacey and Joey were back from their hiking adventure. They had had a long day so I cooked dinner for everyone. I made spaghetti and garlic bread and then cookies for dessert. We are pretty limited on what we can cook because of the cooking supplies that we have. I told Jules that I am going to borrow his kitchen one day so I can make Nanna’s chicken enchiladas! Everyone said that dinner was delicious. It’s nice having a real home cooked meal after so many sandwiches. We think we are going to try to take turns once a week where we will cook for everyone else.

After supper we watched movies. We were going to watch television but the stations that play normal TV shows stopped airing stuff until 6AM. At first I thought that it was maybe the kid’s station so that the kids wouldn’t stay up late watching TV but that was the normal ABC type of station. Bazaar!? Where are the infomercials!?! Since we couldn’t watch TV, we watched movies. First we watched Zoolander and then Hitch. After Hitch I was going completely stir-crazy!

Natalie, Joey and I walked down to Coles just to get out of the house for a bit. On the way down there Joey got egged! Some car drove by and threw something at us. None of us really knew what was going on…I saw that they had thrown something but I wasn’t sure what. It wasn’t until after they had driven off that Joey told us that he had gotten hit with an egg in the middle of his back. Good thing he had two shirts on so he was just able to take the egged on off. He was just glad that they had hit him instead of one of us girls or else he would’ve been super mad. Poor Joey!

When we got back from the store Natalie headed back to her place. Joey and I stayed up and watched Wedding Crashers. Right as that movie was ending Stacey woke up so now I’m lying in her bed writing this as she is uploading photos from her day.

Stacey and I just figured out how incredibly expensive the gas is here. There are 3.79 Liters in a Gallon and at the price of $1.70 a Liter it would cost me $90 to fill up my 14 Gallon tank. HOLY SMOKES!!!! No wonder there are so many people walking or using the bus system!!!
There is a political group here called The Greens. They’re all about keeping Tassie natural and, go figure, green. I’m not sure what the other political parties are but that’s a huge one around here. All around town you see stuff supporting The Greens.

It’s way past bedtime. Tomorrow we are going to try to go to the Botanical Gardens! The issue could be finding a way to get there. But we will surely try our hardest! Cheers!

February 28, Sunday

What a boring Sunday! They always seem to be that way!

Today we all slept in and just woke up on our own timing. I had gotten a text at 4 AM asking if a tsunami was coming my way. Obviously since I was asleep I had NO earthly idea what was going on. It wasn’t until Natalie came over and told me about getting a phone call from her grandma at the same time in the morning that I knew about the earthquake in the ocean that was causing a lot of tsunamis. I believe we are a lot farther south than where the bad weather is headed. It was pretty rainy here today though. It would be sunny yet raining at the same time. It was bazaar.

Marina got back from her camping trip at Brunei Island. It’s always SO good when she makes it back home. J

After bumming around the house and watching movies, Stacey, Joey and I walked down to the Chicken Feed which is basically a Dollar General. Stacey needed to buy some paint for the painting class that she is taking. They were closing in two minutes so we had to be super quick. Next we went to Woolworth’s (we have nicknamed it Wool-Worthless and Dub-Dubs). I found the movie Step Brothers there for super cheap so I bought it. We like to all watch movies together and we were running out of them pretty quickly. After Wool-Worthless we went to our favorite store, Coles. Coles has got to be our favorite place in Sandy Bay, beside La Bella’s Pizza that is. We always joke around that we feel at home as soon as we walk into Coles.

When we got back to the house I made a potato soup packet that I had bought. It was pretty gross. It was water and soup powder…yum. I tried to eat that but I ended up passing it off to Joey (it’s so nice having a disposal, I mean boy, around the house).

Julian came over tonight and we all watched Step Brothers. Marina, Natalie and Julian all hadn’t seen it…it’s always fun watching a funny movie with someone for the first time. After the movie was over Julian headed home and Marina went to bed. Stacey, Natalie, Joey and I all cuddled up in Stacey’s bed and played some word game that she has on her itouch. I think we almost beat the game. But we decided to put a pause on it for tonight since we all have class in the morning.

That’s pretty much all that happened today! Hopefully tomorrow will be a little bit more exciting!

March 1, Monday

Words of the Day:
Supper = Meal/snack after dinner. Kind of like their fourth meal.
– I refuse to follow this rule. Supper = Dinner in my book.

Today is the first day of autumn. It’s kind of bittersweet. I generally love autumn when I’m in Texas because its football season and the weather turns to be nice instead of just being unruly hot and dry. But here, I wish summer would stay forever. It was a good first day of autumn though. It was a whopping 24 degrees…Celsius that is. Remember the conversion? Double the number and add 30…so, it was 78 degrees Fahrenheit today. Not too shabby, yeah?

This morning Natalie came and woke me. We walked down into Sandy Bay and went to a nice little pastry shop. We got lemon tarts, read the newspaper and talked about “grown up” stuff. It was such a cute way to start our morning. J

We then headed up to the library so that I could email some advisors back home. I was feeling too toasty with my long sleeve shirt and jacket so I walked back home to change clothes.

At noon I had my Public Relations class. I made a friend! YAY! Her name is Maja (pronounced Maya). She has lived here for 10 years but is originally from Serbia (shout out to Darko!). That class was pretty good. Nothing too special happened in it; we discussed the different people involved with public relations and the differences between marketing and P.R.. The professor didn’t have minty’s candy to pass out like she did last week…bummer.

Next I headed home! I had a package from Momma waiting for me when I got there. J Hooray! Today was supposed to be when we were getting all of our stuff for the internet in the mail. And that sure wasn’t in the mail. UGH! This afternoon Marina got a call from the company AGAIN saying that they were missing part of the information that they needed. So we called Essentially Mobile (the store who set it up for us) AGAIN to tell them to send it AGAIN. We’re starting to get pretty annoyed with this dang internet business.
When I got home I started some laundry and made a sandwich. I ate outside because it was SO incredibly beautiful today. I hate having class on beautiful days like this one. I really wanted to just go and sit at the beach and read all day long.

Regardless of how desperately bad I wanted to go to the beach, I went to my next class at 3. This one is Journalism, Media, and Communications. Today we talked all about the newspaper. The main professor wasn’t the one lecturing, it was some other lady who I have no idea who she is. But whoever she was, she was going SUPER fast. It was hard to keep up with my note taking. Thankfully the notes are online so I will be able to pick up what I missed. The class is two hours long and I was writing the whole time!
For this class the professor assigned us a time for our tutorial. Most always you can select which tutorial you want to go to but for some reason she likes to assign your time. So after class I had to go back to the library and try to figure out when mine was. However, I wasn’t on the list! I emailed her and asked her if I could go to one on Tuesday so hopefully she will have emailed me back by in the morning.

When I got home everyone else was here so we hung around and chatted like always. I made some delicious mac and cheese for supper. Jeff and Amy came over a little while later just to get out of their house. We didn’t do much of anything…just hung out and tried to decide what to do this weekend.

Natalie, Joey and I walked down to Cole’s. There is a sign at Cole’s that says “I Live at Cole’s.” It’s talking about the shopping baskets and asking people to bring them back if they see them around town or anything. However I would really love to have that poster. We NEED it. We go to Cole’s at least once a day. We joke around that we are going to know everyone’s names by the time we leave. We will be their American friends!

Every time we walk somewhere one of us most likely has our ipod so we rock out to music. Even if we don’t have an ipod we always sing. We sing the craziest stuff too. Tonight’s walk consisted of music from the Backstreet Boys, Little Mermaid, Taking Back Sunday and others. I guess when you walk as much as we do you have got to stay entertained somehow.

This next weekend we have a holiday! Monday is Eight Hours Day which is basically their Labor Day. It represents the eight hours of work, eight hours of sleep…and some other things that I don’t remember. Amy, Jeff, April, Stacey and Joey are talking about going out to Wineglass Bay from Friday to Monday. Natalie and I may go on a couple of mini trips. We haven’t decided yet.

March 2, Tuesday

Here is my class schedule (as of now). This could be changing depending on when I hear back from Tech about classes being approved or not.

Monday:
Public Relations à 12 – 1
Journalism, Media and Communications à 3 – 5
Tuesday:
Gender, Power and Change à 11 – 12
Journalism, Media and Communications Tutorial à 12 – 1
Wednesday:
Public Relations Tutorial à 9 – 10:30
Gender, Power and Change à 12 – 1
Gender, Power and Change Tutorial à 1 – 2

This morning I had class at 11. I went up to the library a little before class to check and see if I had gotten any emails from Tech about my classes, and of course I hadn’t. Grr.

I had my first tutorial today! Exciting! It was for Journalism, Media and Communications. I believe that this is going to be my least favorite class. I don’t think that I want to go into the writing aspect of the communications field so it isn’t exactly my passion. I think it will be a rewarding class to have however because it is always good to understand what goes into the fields surrounding your own.
In my tutorial I realized just how much people talk about America. The Aussies are very interested and opinionated about our politics. They all love Obama! I just keep my mouth shut when politics come up. J One time when we had gone out this one guy found out that I am from Texas and started going off on me about George W. That was a bit awkward.

We found out today that not only has our paperwork for our internet STILL not gone through but now they are saying that there is a problem with our phone line so it is going to be another $125 to get that fixed. This stupid internet is turning into so much of a hassle!!! Someone is coming out next Tuesday to fix our phone line. I don’t know if that means we will have internet starting on Tuesday or if it is going to take a bit longer after that. I have decided that I need to just stop speculating about when we will be getting the internet at the house because it never happens when it’s supposed to.

Natalie and I walked down to Cole’s to get stuff for dinner. Julian had told me that he would bring over a casserole dish so that I could make Nanna’s chicken enchiladas. Even though chicken enchiladas are a really simple recipe, it was a little difficult to find everything that I needed. The cheese here is different, they don’t have corn tortillas and they don’t have canned green chilies. What kind of place is this??? I think I was able to find alternatives that would make do though.

April and Amy came over around 7 and brought some dip and then ice cream for dessert. Julian was helping roof his friend’s house today and was supposed to be done around dark so I was waiting on him to get done before I could start cooking. We sat around for quite awhile eating guacamole that I had made and watching our favorite Aussie television show “My Kitchen Rules.” It was starting to get kind of late and we were all pretty hungry so we decided to make quesadillas instead of waiting any longer on Julian to arrive with the dish. They were tasty!

I ended up hearing from Julian around 10. Apparently when he said they would work until dark that meant until after 9. He didn’t have phone service out where his friend lives so he wasn’t able to call me and let me know.

Before bed we continued our little ritual of playing the word game on Stacey’s itouch. J

March 3, Wednesday

I woke up in a wonderful mood today. J

At 9 I had my first Public Relations Tutorial. The Public Relations class is the one that I am currently enrolled in that isn’t supposed to count towards my credits back home. It’s a shame because I really enjoyed the tutorial today. To begin, we paired up and had to find out how our partner would like to be introduced and portrayed to the class. I was paired up with a girl named Kate who has lived in Hobart her whole life. She was really sweet. She talked to me a lot about the different things that I need to do while I’m here.
I was the topic of discussion in that class. The professor wanted to know what I thought was the biggest difference between Australia and America. I told them that the food and customer service were the main difference that I had noticed. After I said that though I decided I should have mentioned the fashion here! Hello 80s!!! (I have never seen so many white washed jeans in my life!)

I then had a little bit of a break so I went to the library to check if I had heard from Tech about my classes…once again, nothing. It’s very frustrating to get here and find out that only two classes have been approved by UTas (the university that I do not even need the credits to count at) and then to not be able to get a response from Tech.
That is the one complaint I have about AustraLearn. I don’t think they have very much experience dealing with UTas. There were communication errors with my internship, housing and classes. I don’t know if it is UTas or AustraLearn at fault but the communication needs to be improved.

At 12 I went to my Gender, Power and Change class followed by my tutorial at 1. The tutorial for that class is really interesting because we are able to discuss what we feel gender means and determines. One point that was brought up is how it is strange that even children to have the desire to determine a person’s biological gender in order to know how to treat that person. Why is that?

All that thinking got me hungry! After class I went home and ate lunch…grilled ham and cheese. Natalie came over because we were ready to kick off our weekend by going shopping in Hobart.

Natalie didn’t bring a sweatshirt or anything so we were on a mission to find her a jacket. I don’t like shopping, but I have never had a more difficult time shopping, or even finding stuff that I thought was cute, than I did today. You really just have two options of what you can shop for here: cheap 80s clothes or overpriced going out attire. We walked around Hobart and the mall for over two hours and didn’t find anything we liked. Finally, just as we were about to give up we found the Surf Shop which is basically a huge Pac Sun. We found the one and only store we will be shopping at for the next 4 months. Of course it was still expensive but at least in those clothes you wouldn’t look like you had been attacked by bleach and/or bad floral print drapes.
Natalie couldn’t decide on which sweatshirt to get so neither of us ended up buying anything but we at least know where to go now! We headed back home around 5:30.

Shopping had made me so tired so I laid down on the couch for awhile. Stacey had made a friend in one of her classes today. The girl had invited us to go out with her and her friends. I was really tired to I decided just to stay at home tonight. Joey went out with her though. Marina, Natalie and I watched some French movie before heading off to bed. It is now time to sleep! I don’t have school for the rest of the week so hopefully I will get to sleep in tomorrow. Julian is taking me out to teach me how to scuba sometime tomorrow. J Hopefully he won’t wake me up too early!

Oh and good news, I haven’t heard Richie at all today!