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The Opera House
No matter how many times I see the Opera House, it never gets old. This morning when I turned on the news, the first thing I saw were a bunch of children making snow angels, and then the weather reporter came on and told me how everything is starting to freeze over at night now that it's getting closer and closer to winter. It's really quite depressing. It's dark now at 5 PM, and I find myself thinking about hot chocolate and fires and Christmas decorations, all the while starting to get Christmas music stuck in my head.
And then I realize it's the middle of May and that Christmas is still 7 months away. I think that I could eventually get used to pretty much everything here and how upside down Australia is, but I do not think I could ever get used to it being freezing cold in May. And it's only mid-Autumn! (They don't say Fall here.)
Luckily for me, college life is keeping me too busy to have Christmas music stuck in my head all day. I know I missed last week's blog, but I do have a good excuse. After four months of writing, re-writing, researching, and starting over from scratch multiple times, my thirty-page research proposal for
my honors thesis has been officially turned in! And, from here on out I get to make up my own timeline for my project, as long as I have the first 30 pages of the actual project handed in the first week of November, so I'm giving myself a well deserved month off from thinking about multiracialism and multiculturalism in the United States and instead focusing on enjoying my last month of studying abroad.
Last week, some of my "mates" (that's Australian for friends--and you thought Chinese was the only foreign language I was taking) took me out to Chinatown and to explore more of the Sydney area. For the amount of Chinese people living in the Sydney area, Sydney's Chinatown was kind of a let down. On my last Chinese exam, my teacher wrote an essay on the exam (which I then had to decipher) about how Sydney's Chinatown was one of the world's best, comparable to London's and California's. First of all, I'd just like to point out that California has more than one Chinatown, as California has over 14 million more people than all of Australia combined. Second of all, Sydney's Chinatown essentially one street. I'm
going to go out on a limb here and guess that my Chinese teacher in Australia has never been to San Francisco. Or the Bay Area. Or Cupertino.
It's so weird to think that Australia is roughly the same size as the United States (as long as you don't include Alaska), yet the city of Shanghai has about 10 million more people living in it than all of Australia combined. So you can imagine how weird it is for me going from Shanghai to Sydney.
In other news, I decided I'm going home a little earlier so that I can go to Olivia's graduation and so that I can road trip to Mexico with Rachel in the middle of June. It'll be interesting driving all the way to Mexico with just Rachel in the car and no adult supervision (I'm just picturing how our last family road trip to the Grand Canyon went and that was with both my parents in the car), but it'll be great because there is a serious lack of good Mexican food here and so I intend on stopping at every single place where I can get an enchilada the entire way to
Australia's Coat of Arms
Fun fact: Australia's one of the only countries that hunts and eats both animals on its Coat of Arms on a regular basis. Mexico and back. My mouth's watering just thinking about it.
Because I'm cutting my Australia experience about three weeks short, I've started to kind of freak out that I'm not going to have time to do everything I want before I leave. I would have loved to go to New Zealand, Western Australia and Tasmania, but since it's getting cold here and I'm running out of time I will have to save that for another trip which I know I will make soon. My friends and I just recently did the walking tour of Sydney, something I've been meaning to do for about three months now. It was a three hour tour, and it covered most of the historical Sydney and Australia stuff, including everything you need to know about all of the convicts Britain first sent here. What I liked most was that everything was relatively recent, kind of like the United States. In Europe, everything is super old. However, in both the US and Australia, everything that is considered "historical" happened in the last 200-300 years (as long as you exclude the indigenous people and the Native Americans that were there thousands of years first, but that's
Forgotten Songs
This artwork represents all of the native birds that used to live in the Sydney area. They play all of the noises that the birds used to make. a whole different story). Anyways, the walking tour was a great way to hear more about Sydney's history, as well as some myths and legends too. After the walking tour, we went to a place called Pancakes on the Rocks, where I was literally in the biggest food coma of my life. (Well, the biggest food coma since my mom took me out to lunch at an Indian buffet 4 months ago and I literally could not eat for two days after that--I can't wait to go back this summer!) I had a Mexican crepe-wanna-be-enchilada and then for dessert pancakes covered in ice cream and strawberries. Yum!
And on that note, I'm off to go make some dinner. I promise to write next Tuesday!
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