Delayed Message

Oceania » Australia » Western Australia » Perth » South Lake
February 24th 2006

Published: February 24th 2006

Sorry about the delayed message everyone, my internet just was just hooked up today.
Well it’s official, I’m at school in Australia. Oh sorry, Uni, they don’t like the word school, it only means elementary school to them, and since I look like I could be in elementary school, it just throws everyone off. So I’m at “Uni”, just arrived today and whoever said Perth was picturesque was a genius. It is so damn beautiful here, it makes the rest of Australia look like the ghetto, no offense to all my friends over on the east coast. Alright so before I go on gushing and make everyone vomit, I’ll just quickly reminisce on the rest of my Sydney experience. So the second day we were in Sydney, Char and I dropped off Becca at the university and went down to explore Sydney. Let me just say for the one zillionth time that Char is AWESOME! It was like having my own private tour guide with a car and who paid for my coffee. Seriously Char when you come to Queen’s you’re getting the gold star treatment. Anyways so she took me by the first jail and casually mentioned her criminal ancestors (okay, so we’re not talking the mafia it was a grandmother like five generations back and she stole a hankerchief or a hat or something but still she got sent to the other side of the world for it, someone might have overreacted with that sentencing). For those of you who don’t know this (and most people are probably smarter then me and didn’t just discover this five months before they left for Australia) Australia was actually colonized by the convicts of England. That’s right, the Brits discovered this amazing place that was warm, green and on the water and said to themselves, this is great we now have a place to dump the rubbish of society, and they continued to live in a place where it’s cold and rainy ten months of the year…brilliant. Alright so then we moved onto the Sydney Opera House and Char explained that it’s made up of all these white tiles (or possibly off white) that fit together to form a giant sphere and that they actually held a contest for the design but the actual design was thought to be to expensive so they tried to change it but in the end it cost them much more than if they had stuck to the original plans, oh politicians, so smart. So now there are actually rooms filled with concrete because they built them and didn’t know what to do with them. I suppose concession stands were out of the question at the time. Directly across the water from the Opera House is the Sydney Harbour Bridge. It was built during the Depression as a way for the government to supply jobs for the massive number of unemployed people in the country. However, this lack of money also meant a lack of safety equipment and there were a few people who mysteriously vanished while they were pouring cement to make the pillars. There is actually one part of the bridge where you can see a piece of rubber that looks like a shoe, the question on everyone’s minds is; does the shoe have a foot? There has been only one person to survive a fall (or a jump depending on how you look at it) from the bridge and it was a worker who was helping to build the bridge. The only reason he survived was because he threw his hammer in before himself so it broke the water’s surface and he didn’t feel like he was hitting a wall of concrete. Although I’m sure he never walked quite the same. So there’s your Sydney history lesson for the day, feel free to skip any guided tours you were thinking about taking. After this Char left me to have a buddy lunch with Becca and I went shopping in downtown Sydney. Unfortunately the rest of Sydney had the same idea, it was like shopping on Christmas Eve, pure madness. So I skipped that and went to have lunch. Yet again, the rest of Sydney seemed to think this was a marvelous idea and there were no seats to eat anywhere, I went to three different food courts! So I ended up at a McDonalds where I guess it was a little faux pas to bring your significant other for lunch. Now let me just warn those of you who will one day be in Australia and also feel the urge for a McChicken sandwich. It does not taste the same, it’s not bad, but when you’ve finally given into the urge to just grab something that’s familiar and you find out it’s not, it’s a little disappointing. How does McDonald’s taste different, maybe it’s real chicken, I couldn’t tell you, all I know is it’s not like home.
That night for Valentine’s Day dinner, Char, Becca, Justine (another Queen’s girl) Nick and I met up with Justine’s buddy, Matt and his friend Sam for some Thai food. Now both of the Australian boys will also be coming to Queen’s next year, so be prepared girls, they’re great guys. We ended up sitting in the restaurant drinking and talking for over three hours. Now here’s a weird story about how small the world is. Nick went to high school with Justine and was staying at a friend of the families so Char offered to drop him off. When she asked him the name of the street he was staying on she realized that one of her old boyfriends had lived on the same street. Then when we got there and she asked which house it was she realized it was the same house as her ex. She assumed that they had moved and asked Nick the name of the family and it was her ex’s family that he was staying with. It really is a very small world. Alright well the new school activities are about to begin so that’s all the time I have for today. I’ll tell you all about the new school and residence in the next one. And I know you are all desperate to call me in Perth, the number is 618 94239326 and I know you have to put in some numbers before that but you're going to have to figure that out on your own cause that's all I've got. Okay well I'm off kayaking. Love you and miss you all.

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