Saturday the 27th

Saturday was a big day because we celebrated my host mom Michelle’s birthday with a classic Australian barbie.  Daniel cooked an amazing gourmet meal consisting of delicious potato salad, stuffed mushrooms, these amazing roasted peppers with tons of stuff on them, chicken kebabs and steak.  Then after her celebration we went to an Australian Football League game.  It’s hard to explain but it is a lot like soccer and rugby put together.

My host brother Daniel grilling up some amazing food!

Best potato salad I have ever had (well, with the exception of my grandma’s)

This is Braeden and my host parents Neil and Michelle. Poor Braeden was covering up his face because everyone was making fun of his pimples.  He is the youngest and always gets picked on, the poor thing.

Neil is so funny, he absolutely adores this dog.

Michelle opening up her presents

I can’t believe I get to eat this food on a regular basis, however, this meal was extra special. 

It was so sweet.  Neil was talking about how a lady was asking him about his family and she asked how many kids he had and he responded with four…plus four.  I thought that was so sweet.  I could not have asked to be put with a better family.

Braeden is one of my favorite people ever.  Neither of us had anything to do on Friday so we walked to Majors Bay and had some amazing gelato and then hung out and watched Moulin Rouge. It was a really good time.

At the AFL game cheering (not rooting, hahaha, root is a very bad word in Australia, gotta be careful…) for the swans.  We had amazing seats and they gave us these cool noise maker things and our theory is that they are made to actually sound like swans, who knows?

I met this guy who is from Wisconsin, it was really random.  And I was talking to some Aussie guys who found out I was from Minnesota and were asking me about the timberwolves.  They knew more about them than I did.  Such a small world…

AFL!!!! There are 18 guys from each team on the field at a time.

This is our group with the addition of some friendly Aussies.  It was a really good day.

Canberra!

We went to Canberra the capital city of Australia this past weekend and had a really good time.  It was about a 3 hour bus ride out of Sydney.  The first place we stopped at was the Parliament House but it was just to use the bathroom and walk around.   That’s the parliament house behind me-

  I randomly found a heart in the grass- pretty cool

We spent the day Friday at the Indonesian Embassy, New Zealand High Council and the Aboriginal embassy.  People talked to us about their countries and we got to ask them questions.  They even gave us afternoon tea!

We stopped at a really pretty park for lunch.  These are my roomies and Greg and Eddie-

We also went to some art galleries, museums and Australia’s war memorial.  They have walls and walls of Aussies that have died in war.  It was actually a really interesting place-

Here is a group of ASC students in front of the War Memorial-

This is Barney and Kristen.  I do my service placement with these two and we have a lot of fun.

We work at a resident living place for seniors in Sydney and every morning we do exercises with them.   We get a pretty good laugh out of some of them and this is one of them.  The lady on the tape says “Put your fingertips together now, only the gentlest pressure!” 

Wicked Awesome

So I am a little behind in my blogging but I will try to update it soon.  It has been a busy week! Last Wednesday we went to see the play Wicked.  I have never been to anything like that and it was amazing! The show was so incredible, it totally blew my mind and was absolutely worth the money for the ticket.  Here are some pics of us at the show!

We were trying to imitate the picture behind us if you can’t tell…

I went to the capital city of Canberra this past weekend as a field trip sort of thing, I will post pics from that soon.  This trip is going fast! We already have project week next week and our outback trip the week after that (and my birthday!!!)

The Boat Blog

One of my favorite things about Sydney is that there is water pretty much everywhere you go.   Whether you see a bay, a harbor, or the ocean, there is water everywhere.  I have seen a lot of boats, yachts and even dinghy's.  Here are some pictures of my favorite boats I have seen so far. 

Sydney Harbour

This past weekend, we went out shopping and to Pancakes on the Rocks, which has the best pancakes in the entire world (I’ll do a blog about the food here later).  We had a lot of time in between things to hang out by the harbor and to take pictures.  I have been focusing a lot on taking pictures of people while I’m here because I feel like people often represent a place better than just the landscape.  The harbor is a very romantic place, especially at twilight, and I ended up mostly taking pictures of couples down by the water.  I kind of envy them actually, that they get to be in this beautiful city with their significant others,or even on the same continent as their loved ones.  So here are some of my favorite pictures of people and couples here in Sydney. 

 

Typical Day in Sydney

I am going to take you through what a typical day looks like for me here in Sydney.  I wake up around 7am, pack my lunch and walk the 20 or so minutes to the bus stop at Burwood.  This includes a beautiful walk through Burwood park where it is common to hear birds chirping (or making other random noises, sometimes they sound like monkeys or babies crying) from the tops of palm trees.  There is also usually a group of Asians doing Tai Chi in the middle of the park and older gentlemen playing chess on the life-size chess board. 

Today I had my service placement which takes place at St. Mary’s Villa which is like a retirement/ nursing home.  I helped them with their exercises  and had morning tea with them.  Then we played carpet ball which is kind of like bocce ball.  It was so cute, I really love all of the residents there. 

Then I head off to school for a day of classes, but today I only had hip hop class.  It’s very fun, but very challenging and unlike any kind of dancing I have ever done.  Then usually I will head home on the bus or stop at Maccas (McDonald’s) to use the impossibly slow and unhelpful internet and to Skype with Grant where the call is inevitably dropped at least once during the conversation.

Then I wait around impatiently for dinner time which is always amazing and something to look forward to as my parents are both incredible chefs.  After dinner we sit and visit and watch the “fat people” aka the Biggest Loser Australia.  It cracks me up how much Neil and Michelle both love this show and all reality TV for that matter.  Then it’s time for homework and off to bed around 10 or 11 to wake up and do it all over again.

Weekends in Sydney

The weekends in Sydney are shaping up to be a lot of fun.  Beaches by day and Pubs by night.  This is the Three Wise Monkeys, a great place that we have been finding ourselves at a lot lately.  It’s right on George Street in the central Business District of Sydney.  What I like about the Pubs here is that you don’t have to drink to have a good time because there is plenty of other stuff to do.  Our activity of choice has been dancing on the third floor of the Pub.  They have a good combination of live music  and music played by DJs. 

It’s interesting going out at night here because it’s pretty different from the Twin Cities.  Sydney is probably one of the most expensive and fashionable cities in the world.  When we go out, we throw on jeans and a cute top and think it’s OK but then we get downtown and everyone is decked out in dresses and heels.  We went to a place called the World Bar to see our friend’s host brother’s band.   What we didn’t realize was that this place had a dress code and was super fancy.  They let us in anyways though because we said we knew the band…haha.  It’s just a lot different here so today I went out dress shopping and even though clothes are super expensive here, I found 2 dresses for only 20 bucks!  Here are my roomies and I properly dressed and ready to go hit the town-