Best/worst day of the trip :)

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Wow what a day......
So Penny (an old family friend) works at the Parliament House in the office of the Speaker of the House, basically he is our Nancy Pelosi. As I mentioned yesterday Penny got me a short meeting with him and as if that wasn't awesome enough it gets even better!! I ended up having coffee with him (he paid) for 30 minutes in the Capital. He is such an amazing guy, who is probably the smartest person I have ever met and despite his crazy schedule (after me he meet with the High Councilor of some country I can't spell) he made time to meet with me. We talked about my future plans, his goals for the government, California's drought problem, Obama's visit, etc. The experience was truly amazing and I can't even began to thank Penny enough for making it happen.

Then after that I attended the question session of Parliament, where I sat in the reserved section for the Speaker's special guests (next to ambassadors!). In this question time members of which party ask open questions to the ministers, prime minister, or specific members. The crazy part was they literally just yelled, cussed, and fought the entire time. At one point the entire government side (the majority) walked out of the room! There was a huge debate today regarding the resignation of a minister (he belongs to the prime ministers cabinet) because of his implementation of one of his policies that led to the deaths of 4 Australians. At one point a certain member cussed and the Speaker gave me warning, if another warning if given he would have been kicked out of the room (this happens a lot). It was so incredible to see how different their government is from ours. I figured their procedures would be more like Britain (very formal) but they are the opposite.

After that amazing part of my day it went a little downhill. The temperature went up to 34 C today, which is high 90s to 100 so it was miserable. While Penny worked I walked around all the national galleries for about 5 hours and ended up burning not only my arms, face, and shoulders but also the tops of my feet (damn this hole in the ozone and man is this going to hurt tomorrow). Afterwards Penny and Wal took me to an art gallery opening (free food and wine 😊 and then out to dinner. My time at their house has been amazing and I hate to leave tomorrow but we are moving onward to Sydney. We are taking the bus which will take about 3 1/2 hours. We will be there for 2 weeks and actually we got very lucky and have a vacant house to stay in the entire time. I am excited to be able to unpack for a while and relax a bit.

P.S. I saw my first, second, and third Huntsmen today (basically the daddy-long-legs of Australia but is the size of a Tarantula. Oh and by the way the third one is sitting on the floor of the bedroom next to mine 😞 Despite closing the door and stuffing a towel into the crack I know I will not be able to sleep tonight. Its going to be a very long day tomorrow.

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