The World's Most Dangerous Sport, Scuba Diving, Bungy Jumping, and JESSICA

FYI: you can click on pics in this post to see the whole thing a bit larger

It's been two weeks since my last post, and I'll tell ya what, it's been a happenin' fortnight.

Besides school, which has been increasingly ridiculously busy, I've been doing a lot of fun and memorable things (which probably accounts mostly for why school has been so busy!!).

On Saturday, the 8th, Andy, Mikkel, Joe, and I went lawn bowling.

Our friends Lisa (Sweden), Manuella (Italy) and their friend Yanna (sp?) joined us too. Don't get too scared now kids, but it is the most dangerous sport in the world (see here for proof). I'm pretty sure it's because the vast majority of competitors are over the age of 80 and it's strenuous for them to be out in the sun for the 2 to 3 hours that it can take to finish a bowls game. It's a lot like bocce ball, where you have a target ball and try to roll other balls as close as possible to it. The bowls, the balls that you roll toward the jack (target ball), are not exactly spherical and roll in a curve. The perks: it's good cheap fun ($10 for a year membership), free use of the barbecue, and the cheapest pub beers I've found at $3.70 per schooner.


On Sunday, May 9th, Eric (Bonet), Carly (Blackowiak), Joe, Craig (Love), and I went to a Newcastle Knights NRL rugby game vs. the Gold Coast Titans. It was a pretty well-fought game, but the Knights ended up losing 36-38 or something close like that. The Titans had an Aboriginal player, Preston Campbell, who seemed to just own the field. The price for tickets were just $16 for general admission that put us right behind the end zone area (whatever it's called in rugby) and beers were only $5 (unlike the 7-10 you'd pay at a US sports event)
The field:

The mascot:


The week following consisted of getting ready for my trip to Cairns with Mark (Ciszewski) and a paper on Aboriginal Education in Australia and how a certain act is working to fix the problems with it.

Cairns Trip
May 12th:
Mark and I arrived at Cairns (pronounced "cans") airport at around 10:30 PM. Cairns is a very popular tourist destination in Queensland. To save money, we were just going to sleep in the airport, but it turned out that the airport was just a "glorified pole barn" as Mark put it, which was true. I'm pretty sure we would've been kicked out if we tried to. Instead, we caught a free shuttle to Nomads Backpacker Hostel ($18pp), had a quick dip in their pool, and were out for the night.
May 13th:
We got the hostel's meager, yet free brekkie in the morning and caught the hostel shuttle to the downtown area. We then found the place to take our scuba refresher course before the liveaboard trip we were going to take the next day. The rest of the day consisted of just wandering around Cairns not doin' much at all, and just takin' a few pictures. We stayed in Corona's Backpackers ($16pp), right across from Gilligan's, the holy grail of all backpacker establishments, which had a pool and club and everything.
Mark on a Cairns Street:

Pool at Gilligans:

May 14th:
Today was the first of our two day scuba diving trip on the Great Barrier Reef! We were at Cairns Dive Centre at 8 AM and left the harbor in Cairns around 8:45. I took a seasickness tablet just before we left, which I'm pretty sure was the right choice.
The boat we rode out on (the Sunkist):

It was about a two hour trip out to the boat we stayed on, called the Kangaroo Explorer.
Here are a few noteworthy pics from the trip out:

The boat we stayed on was great!
The boat:

About 30 people lived on it the night we stayed on it. It was $355 for 6 dives (including a night dive), the room, and meals. The diving experience was absolutely incredible! We rented an underwater camera (actually just a digital camera in a waterproof case) to capture it all. I did do a night dive (saw sleeping turtles and a shovelnose shark) but the pictures wouldn't have turned out from it. It was kinda freaky at first being 30 feet under the ocean's surface at dark, but we had flashlights called torches, and the moon was bright enough and the water clear enough that it wasn't actually as dark as I thought it would be.

Some Dive Pics:
thats a turtle I'm touching (I later swam along with it)

Giant Clam:


White Tip Reef Shark (about 6 ft long at depth of 20m) that we tried to chase down for a better picture:

Three clownfish peekin out (one of my favorite pics)

Hawks-bill turtle:


May 15th:
We woke up at 5:45 am and did three dives. The rest of the night consisted of free meals from the Coronas hostel we stayed at and a few brews and pizza from Cairns Dive Centre.

May 16th:
We had no idea what we wanted to do until our departure at 7:10 PM, so I decided to go bungy jumping. Mark didn't go, because he had already done one in Queenstown, New Zealand that was higher. The one I did was 50m or about 160 ft, so a 16 story building. The ground rush from the feeling of actually being close to the ground when falling made for a bit stronger adrenaline rush than skydiving, but I'd have to say that skydiving was better overall just cuz it didn't last about 4 seconds.
View from the bottom:

View from the top:

The jump:

The freefall:

The splash:


May 18th:
The most anticipated day of the last 4 months. Jessica got here! I caught the 2:33 AM train to Sydney and met up with her at about 7:40 AM when she got out of Customs. From now on out, this journal will include the stuff that we both get to do together!

The Last Two Months

Well, it's been two months since I last posted to this. Ooops!! I've been really busy with school unfortunately, but I have done a few fun things since my last post on March 1st. Oh, this is my house that I've been living at with Joe from Arizona since mid March. It's a four bedroom place with a decent backyard and everything included (utilities, laundry, internet). It has rooms for four people usually, but there's only two of us here. There was an Aussie girl named Roz here for the first two weeks we were here, but it was only temporary for work, and I think we'll have the house to ourselves, that is until the day finally comes in 13 days when Jess gets here!!

Here's a map showing how close we are to the ocean...about two blocks...




The weekend of March 20th was my friend Eric's 21st birthday, so we (me, Joe, Eric, Brian, Mikkel, & Andy) went to Sydney for the weekend. It was awesome. The six of us just crammed into a 4 star hotel with a lobby like so...

The first night in Sydney we hit up Star City casino to lose, I mean win, some money. It was an incredible place with valet parking and the whole get up. We all played different games. Joe was the only one who came out ahead. The second day, we walked around to see what there was to see in Sydney and saw the famous Opera House and Harbour Bridge.

Mikkel in front of the Opera House

Eric, Brian, Andy, and Joe (from left to right) in front of the harbour bridge.

That night, we started off the night having a few brews from the top of the Sydney skytower, the tallest structure in Sydney.

Joe and I in front of the Skytower Bar

Mmmm doesn't that look tasty

The towa

The rest of the night was spent celebrating his 21st, with 21 drinks of various forms for him, and we closed down the casino at 4 AM. Night=success. The next day we hung out on Bondi beach, one of Australia's most famous beaches.

Bondi

April 2nd-the 9th was our Easter Break here. I made the mistake many times over of calling it Spring break all though it is Autumn here despite the 70 degree weather during the days here. For the break, we (me, Andy, Craig, Mikkel, Brian, Joe, and Eric) spent time in Surfer's Paradise (yes, that is the name of a city), Byron Bay, and Brisbane, which are all up the east coast from Newcastle. We flew into Brisbane on the morning of the 3rd and immediately caught a train down to Surfer's Paradise, which looked like this...

Sign at the beach's main entrance

City skyline from the beach

YHA Main Beach Hostel

We didn't do a whole lot there besides going out at night and hanging out by the beach during the day. They had some pretty good nightlife and also a great surfing beach. We didn't surf at all but we did go body surfing (swimming and letting the waves catch your body and take you towards shore), which was short-lived because we got caught in a rip current along with about 20 other people and decided not to go back in after that.

After two days in Surfer's Paradise, we took a coach that the 7 of us were the only passengers on to Byron Bay, which looks like this from a scenic lookout.


While there we did some random things. One was a day trip to a town called Nimbin, which has a history of being known as a hippie village that smokes a lot of the green stuff (no mom not tobacco). No, I didn't take part in the local festivities, but it was definitely a very interesting place.

The tour bus called "The Happy Coach" and bus driver. Notice "Be Happy" on the front of the bus and the driver's dreads.

The VERY colorful street and store facades on Cullen St.

A waterfall we stopped to see on the way to Nimbin

Also while in Byron Bay, Mikkel and I went skydiving. The view of the coastline from the plane was incredible, and the rush I felt when I watched Mikkel jump out and then I jumped out was like nothing else. I am definitely going again. I bought a video of it that you can see here. You need to click pause and then play in order to see the video.

After Byron Bay, we went to Brisbane and stayed there for two nights until we flew back on the morning of April 9th.

View of Brisbane from our Hostel's roof.

This past weekend, I went rock climbing/hiking/camping in the Blue Mountains with Craig, Joe, and Eric, but I'll have to save that for the next post since it's super late here and I have to get up to work on school stuff tomorrow.

March 1st: The First Day of Class

Today was the first day of classes here. Well, actually, I only had one class, Computational Mechanics. The first things I noticed when I walked in was that the professor had some big ol' burly sideburns, a wrinkly and stained polo, a baseball cap, and that he wasn't even wearing shoes. I guess this is just another thing showing how laid back Oz is. He did seem to know his shit, though, and I felt like he was actually really good at explaining things, unlike a lot of professor's I've had at UWP.

The campus here is totally different than any other than I've been in. It is like a jungle where you are wandering down wooded trails and suddenly you arrive at a building. It's very spread out as well. I feel like instead of having large buildings to house many classes, they have more of a "let's build a little shack specially for making clay pots" approach instead of having an art building. That may be a bit of an exaggeration, but they do have 3 little buildings that are each for making sculptures.

Today's class was in a lecture hall that's part of the mathematics building. This was interesting as well, because, instead of walking into a building with hallways, this building had a totally open concept. It's just an interconnected web of rooms that, in order to walk to the next room, you are actually outside, but covered by a ceiling. It's pretty different. Today was pretty light, but tomorrow is definitely going to be a lot busier. By the time the semester is fully underway, I'll have 7 straight hours of class on Tuesdays. Tomorrow, I have 5 (I think) but maybe more. I still haven't fully figured out there systems of lectures, tutorials, computer labs, consultations, and whatever other odds 'n' ends course delivery methods they use. We'll see tomorrow!!

The First Week

It's been tough, and EXPENSIVE to get on the internet until I met Gloria Jean and her coffee shop with free internet. Otherwise internet at the hostel is $4/hour!! So, thanks to Gloria Jean's and finally settling down after my quest to find a place to live, I can write my first post from AU.

So I arrived in Sydney at around 9:30 AM local time on February 13th. The picture to the right shows the sight of my first shower in a bathroom in the Sydney airport. I took a train right from the Sydney airport to a station about 3 blocks from my hostel. I sat next to a big shot Australian state lawyer on the flight from LA to Sydney. It was good to talk to him to figure out some more about AU. I got the low-down on the different sports they play here, including soccer, Rugby league, Rugby Union, cricket, and Aussie rules football. What he didn't tell me, though, is how expensive it is here!!

As soon as I got here I was pretty shocked. To put it in perspective, a can of soda costs about $1.50 and a case of beer (24 375mL cans or bottles) costs, at the least $40. Way more than $12 for the Platteville case (30 12 oz, 355 mL cans) of Keystone light!! I have found ways around it, though. First off, you can buy a good steak in a store for about $2 to $4. Processed food is REALLY expensive here so I'll be doing a lot of cooking. Also, at the hostel (see left), there are free dinner nights 5 nights per week, so that definitely helps. We will be living in the hostel for two more weeks until we move into our house.



When I say we, I mean Joe from Arizona and Mikkel (pronounced me-kell) from Norway. They are the two others that I will be living with for sure. We've already introduced Mikkell to beer pong, well actually, we played "wine pong" with boxed wine because it is way more economical than buying beer here. It will be a four bedroom place about four blocks from the beach. The address is 3 Young St, Cooks Hill, NSW 2300. You can look it up on google maps and look at the street view. I'm going to upload some pictures when we move in. It also has a fenced in backyard for barbies and the landlord is going to let us use his surfboard whenever we want. We will definitely need the practice if we want to surf. It's one of the hardest things I've ever tried, the guys on TV make it look so easy. Here are some pictures of Newcastle Beach, which the hostel is near to. Newcastle has an unbelievable coastline.



I took these pictures today, and it's cloudy, so they don't really do justice, but it's unreal. I have a lot more motivation to get outside and exercise when I can run along beaches like this. Our house is about a 30 min walk from this beach but about a 5 minute walk from Bar Beach, which is equally awesome.

It has been a hectic first week with getting used to the new culture and trying to find a place to live, but everything is falling into place nicely and I'm starting to love it here. Jess will be coming in 84 days and will be staying here for a month. It's like a dream come true to be able to live with her in a place like this!

Ok well I've been at GJ's for about 4 hours now, and I didn't come to AU to be on the internet, so we're gonna play some volleyball on the beach.

Cheers!!

Trip to AU

I'm leavin good ol' Wisco at 4:25 PM on Feb 11th. I'll start at MKE, then have a layover in Minneapolis/St Paul, then LAX, then finish up the 20+ hr flights when I arrive in Sydney at 8:40 AM local time on Feb 14th. After that, it's a 3 hour train ride up to Newcastle to be greeted by this view...not too shabby





Here's a video of where I'll be staying at first...