I have more than three friends, I swear

Wow, I haven't updated in a while! I've just been doing normal things, so this probably won't be too exciting. Mostly pictures of people you don't know, so I'm sorry if it's boring.

About two weeks ago Soxi took me and Ashley into the city to this dance club. They played awesome music and we had a great time. Ashley and I took pictures under the Central Market sign, and I was wearing the shiniest shirt in the world. The Central Market is really cool; there are so many stalls selling, among many other things, really cheap local produce. It's a lot of fun to spend a day walking around there.


Me, Ashley, and Soxi in a dance club that played Spice Girls and Hanson songs. What is not to love??


Last week was also the Uni Hall Pub Crawl. We had a fantastic time and a lot of the pubs were really nice. We got these huge yellow shirts to wear, and a few days before the event Cindy, Ashley, Soxi and I altered them and made them amazing. They had a picture of Borat on the front and said 'High Five', and a lot of people in the city were very clever and giving us high fives as we walked around. I didn't drink much, but I have been trying to be more outgoing and adventurous and was talked into riding a mechanical bull at a pub called the Woolshed. I stayed on the longest out of all the people who tried, and it was really hard and I turned very red. My legs were sore afterwards, and at one point I almost fell off by tumbling over the bull's head, but I stayed on! Also, the American flag blow up thingy to fall on? Awesome.




The weather in Adelaide is ridiculously moody. Since I returned from my trip, it had been pretty chilly (around 16 degrees celcius), so when it hit 20 C/70 F, I insisted that we go to the beach. We've been for the past two weeks, and the last time we went it was very windy. I was not happy about this or the fact that my picture was being taken.

We did go swimming despite the chilliness, and afterwards James and I decided we needed to bury Soxi in the sand. Then, we made her into a bodybuilding mermaid.



Adorable ladies at the beach!

Yesterday was Hall Ball. This is like a huge prom that the Hall puts on for us Hallies. It was a fun excuse to get dressed up. I borrowed a dress from Ashley because we are the same size. I was a little apprehensive about wearing it, mostly because of cleavage, but I got over it. The day started with a champagne, strawberry, and pancake breakfast in the morning, and the actual event was held in the Adelaide Convention Centre. There was about an hour of mingling and champagne, and then a three course dinner and dancing.





Um, yeah. I have other pictures from the night, but they're mostly silly. After the dinner and dancing we went to a bar for even more dancing, and we left around 2:00 AM. When we got back to the hall, the weather was gorgeous: 75 degrees with a slight breeze, half a moon giving just enough light to see but not so much that it blocked all the stars. Soxi said that it was too bad we couldn't go to the beach, but then we decided: why couldn't we go? So we were at the beach until four in the morning, and there were lots of cartwheels.


When we got to the beach, we took off our flip-flops and left them by the stairs that led down to the sand. When we returned, our shoes were hidden among the rocks! We suspect the myriad of other people that were for some reason on the beach at 3 in the morning. Anyway, we were able to find Soxi's and Ashley's shoes without issue, but I lost hide-and-seek against my shoes. At least they were only a $2.50 pair of flip-flops.

We didn't get home from the beach until 4 in the morning, and when I went to bed at 5 the sun was coming up. I slept until 1, and then tonight went to a Wayang kulit performance, which is Javanese Shadow Theatre. The puppets were incredibly detailed, and the music was pretty cool, and it was outside and the weather was beautiful. The end, for now! Two more weeks of classes left. Next weekend I have two birthday parties in the city and surfing lessons, hooray!

Last Days of Vacation

I’m writing this after a few days, and I’m going to try and remember as much as possible but I may forget some things.

My checkout time at the hostel was 10, but my train didn’t depart Alice Springs until 3, so I had the whole morning to wander around. I left my backpack at the hostel and went into town, where I passed by a sign I hadn’t seen before for something called the Baby Kangaroo Rescue Centre. Well, I couldn’t pass this up, so I walked in. The centre rescues joeys whose mothers have been killed, often by cars. Because they would spend most of their time in the pouch, the centre has volunteers who carry the joeys around in pillowcases close to their bodies so they feel the warmth and breathing. And if you walk in, you can be one of the volunteers! I got there around feeding time, so I saw the joeys be hand fed and then go for a hop around. They were SO CUTE and little!

When they wanted to go back into their pillowcases, which was after only about five minutes, they scratched at your leg and you held the pillowcase down, wherein they dove in headfirst and did a sort of somersault to get comfortable. I was given Nikki to hold, and she was so adorable, but she napped the whole time and had little kangaroo dreams wherein she kind of kicked me in the boob. But I forgave her because of her cuteness, and also I felt kind of bad about eating her elders. I had a picture taken of me with her, but she was so sleepy that just her ears were sticking out. I may as well have been holding a giant rabbit. Here is the picture of me holding a bag of giant ears, and please excuse the incredible squintiness and general frightening-ness of my face. I have no idea why I looked this terrible.

Reluctantly I left the rescue centre to get some lunch, and then it was off to the train station.

I was sitting in the cheapest car, where you only get a seat to yourself, but the seats were really big and I was lucky enough to get a window seat. There was a bit of confusion where someone was sitting in my seat when I got there, but luckily we got that sorted out without any problems. The seats were bigger than airplane seats and much more comfortable. We pulled out of the station and within half an hour we had peeled away from the road and there were no signs of civilisation for miles around, just desert scenery stretching far in every direction, with flocks of galahs occasionally rising from the scrub and cattle scattered on the plains. I took pictures every once in a while to show the changes, but you really had to be there to see it.

After being on the train for three hours I ventured off through the lounge to the dining car to get some dinner. By this time the sun was setting over the desert, and the train would flush kangaroos that would go bounding across the scene. It was incredible to see. After dinner, I went back to my seat to read and fell asleep. I woke up in the middle of the night to see a huge, red moon just coming up over the horizon.

I got up around 8 in the morning to find that we were passing through Port Augusta, close to the water and somehow passed from desert to farm country. I got breakfast and passed the time reading and watching the scenery pass by until we arrived in Adelaide at 12:30, ahead of schedule!

I was very happy to be back, and as I was waiting for the bus in the city I ran into a friend of mine. We decided to go out and have dinner in Glenelg since it was such a nice day (after I showered and did a wash, of course). So to cap off a wonderful trip, I went out to dinner with a friend and then we sat on the beach in the late afternoon, occasionally wading into the water which I was happy to find out was warm, so I plan on spending my weekend there. We watched the sun set, where I saw the green flash for the first time EVER and which induced much arm-flailing, and then we got ice cream and headed back to Flinders.

It was so wonderful to have my own bed in my own room with wonderful clean sheets and not having to wake up until 7:45 the next morning. I had the best night’s sleep I’ve had in ages.

And this morning was good too, because my hot teaching assistant who I have a minor crush on gave a great lecture in my Fiction for Young Readers class on fantasy and speculative fiction, which I love. I also got my first assignment back, 25% of my grade, and I got a D (for Distinction), which I am assured is difficult to achieve and is about equivalent to a low A, although that’s kind of nebulous. So hurrah!

Now that I am not travelling this won’t update as regularly, but if anything exciting happens in my life I will be sure to write about it. I plan on getting my official open water certification this month (finally) and I’m going to Kangaroo Island on 26^th October, so you can look forward to that!