Explore. Dream. Discover.

Sorry I have not posted in a couple of days, but I have been busy planning trips! This weekend, I am going with a club called Unimates, which is for International and Australian students, to the Blue Mountains! It is a day trip on Saturday where we will go to Wentworth Falls Lookout, Leura Village, Echo Point, Three Sisters, and then bushwalking along the cliffs. We end up at Scenic World where we will be taking a steep aerial cable car ride. I hear the mountains are amazing and is a great opportunity for pictures! 

In two weeks, from April 7th-11th, I am going to Melbourne with 7 of my friends! This will be my first trip outside of Sydney, and I am super excited. I hear that Melbourne is an amazing city with a lot of character and different things to do. We are going to stay at a hostel in the center of the city near an amazing market that everyone talks about. 

I am then going in 4 weeks to New Zealand from April 20th- May 2nd for the mid-semester break. I will be spending from April 20th- 23rd in Auckland, and April 24th- May 2 touring the South Island. I have been researching out the best place to go bungee jumping, and my friend George promised he would do it with me. The other 5 of my friends going are all too scared to go. I guess they do not know how to live it up!

In 5 weeks, right after New Zealand I will be going from May 6th- 8th with my roomate Clair to her hometown in Bathurst. This is about a 3 hour drive away from Sydney, but I am super excited for this experience. I will get to meet her family and get the true Australia adventure of being with an Australian family for the weekend. 

Next, from May 12th- 16th, I will be going to Tasmania with 2 friends for the weekend! My friend Jessica knows some girls who are studying abroad there, so we are going to go down and explore Tasmania for a couple of days. I think I am most excited to see a Tasmanian Devil (I hope they spin in circle like the cartoon!). 

I am in the process right now of planning a sailing trip around the Whitsundays, which are a group of 74 Islands right off of the Great Barrier Reef. The trip is 3 days, 2 nights and you explore a couple of the main islands. When we sail, it is on a pontoon boat which sounds like a lot of fun. I hear the sailing trip is magical and I will be snorkeling for 2 days! Right after that, I think all of my friends and I will head down to Cairns, which is the Great Barrier Reef. Since I have another "study break" from June 3-12, we were thinking of doing both Whitsunday and Cairns since it is right next to one another. 

On top of all this, I still want to go to the outback for a couple of days, which will probably take place before I travel with my family for two weeks from June 24- July 9th! I may also try and fit in a trip to the Gold Coast, but there are just not enough weekends in the semester to do all of it.

I know this sounds like crazy traveling, but as Mark Twain once said, “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” These are memories I will have for a lifetime and this experience only happens once, so I am going to live it up!

On Friday, I went with a group of 9 friends to Bondi Beach for the day. Bondi Beach, which is one of the most famous beaches in Sydney, is only 0.6 miles from one end to the other. The beach is surrounded by beautiful cliffs, houses, and apartments. Around Bondi there is a downtown area with a lot of shopping and places to eat, which reminded me a lot like Downtown Huntington Beach. The sand at Bondi is really fine, which is the opposite of what I am used to. The whole time I kept putting my feet in the sand because the sand was so soft!

The weather was really good on Friday, and believe it or not, I actually did not get sunburned! We were there for a couple hours, and right when we left it started to rain, which was perfect timing. Supposedly there is a television show called Bondi Rescue, which sounds like it is a lot like Baywatch. While we were laying out on the beach tanning, the film crew came by to start setting up to film. Unfortunately we did not see them actually film, because it started to get cloudy and begin to drizzle. Overall, it was a great beach day and I got more tan which is always a bonus.

On Sunday, I had my second field trip with my Sports and Learning in Australian Culture class. We went lawn bowling, which was so much fun! Lawn bowling was in North Sydney, so we had to take a 10 minute train ride to get there. When we arrived, it looked exactly like a country club. There were retired aged men all sitting around, some bowling, while drinking beer and hanging out wearing white jerseys. 

 Lawn bowling is a sport in which the objective is to roll a slightly asymmetric weighted ball as close to a smaller white ball called a "jack". The ground you roll the ball on is on very well-taken-care-of, grass that almost looks too perfect. This is necessary so the ball can roll smoothly.

There is a dot on one side of the ball that shows which side is weighted. This is important to know so the person playing knows which way to curve the ball to get close to the jack. There is a gutter behind the jacks that is full of sand, so if you throw it too hard, it will land in the gutter. You have a team of about 4-5 people, and play against another team. Each team has a colored set of balls so you know whose is whose.

We practiced for about 5 minutes, and then it started to POUR! I do not mean rain, I mean POUR! My class waited inside for about 30 minutes until it cleared up, and once it did, the sun came out and the weather was perfect. It reminded me too much of Boulder weather how it could be 20 degrees and snowing in the morning, and then 70 degrees and sunny by the afternoon. Once the rain went away, we broke up into teams and played in a tournament. I am not exactly sure how the scoring works, but the team who gets their balls closest to the jack gets the most points. Out of about 12 teams, my team was the only team to not score any points. I guess lawn bowling is not our thing, but I definitely did improve by the end. A couple of times I actually hit the jack, which could be good and bad depending where the other balls land. At the end, they had finals for the winners bracket and the losers bracket. The winner in the winners bracket got a trophy with a cup on it, and the losers bracket winner got a horses butt trophy. I had such a fun day though and a great experience lawn bowling. If I lived in Australia, I would definitely take it up as a sport.

I am excited for what is in store for me. With a bunch of trips planned and exciting new things to do and see, focusing on schoolwork is hard! Do not worry mom and dad, I am getting it all done! Check back on Wednesday for another posting!

Heaps of Love,

Heidi