photos

to everyone i promised here is a photo website with all my picture to this point. hope you enjoy. i will try to label them all soon. love you all.

http://samminaustralia.shutterfly.com/

so sorry

Hi everyone!! I am so so sorry that it has taken me approximately 2 weeks to post this new blog. I will really try my hardest to increase with the frequency of these posts with time. So since it has been so long there is so much to fill you all in on. Where to start... well i am finally getting used to much of Australia. For example, I do not look the wrong way every time i cross the street now, and i know that you pass people when walking and on escalators on the opposite side than normal for us. I also learned that the toilet does actually flush in the opposite direction. They call sunglasses sunnies and bathing suits swimmies which is just hilarious. Also Timtams (which are basically their national cookie sort of like a better version of an orea) are amazing and as my sister laur has told me plenty of times Tim Tam slams are amazing. for those of you who dont know how a tim tam slam works, i think it is essential to explain. You bite off both sides of the tim tam and then you use it as a straw to sip the hot chocolate and then the whole cookie melts in your mouth. there is nothing like it. soo soo good! i plan for you all to try it, pending the fact that the australian government allows me to bring home a life time supply of them. Also, due to the fact that US is on a completely different metric system (which is the most frustrating thing ever) I know that 1 mile=1.66kilometers and that to convert celsius to farenheight you just need to double the celsius number and add 30. Maybe those facts will come in handy at somepoint for you all. Now I will fill you in on some of the activities I have done in the past 2 weeks. One of the coolest things I did was the bridge climb, which is when you climb over the whole sydney bridge. At the bridges peak, you are 450 ft off the ground. The bridge walk gives you the most amazing view of sydney and everything surrounding. I have never done anything like it. it was so so great, you feel like you are standing on the top of the world. Last weekend I learned immense amounts about rugby. I went to two rugby games. The first game was the rugby game of the son of the guy I will be working for next semester for my internship. He explained all the rules to me so it was very helpful. It is such a weird sport, seeing 15 yr olds (in this case) fully tackle each other as part of an organized sport with no form of padding or equipment is completly a foreign idea. Then later in the day we went to a professional rugby game. It was the last game of the sydney roosters season. It was so cool and just overly intense, but still really just an odd sport. Then today we went to Torango zoo, which is a 15 minute ferry ride from where we live. I have never been to such a cool zoo. we got so up close with all the animals (especially the lions and kangaroos). The zoo was huge and just gave off the feeling that we were in the jungle or like a set from jurassic park. In terms of teh food here, they hav a large variety of food but we have been most impressed with the thai food. I am completly not exagerating when i say 3/4 of my meals are from thai places. and considering to this point, i only really know of one thing i like on the thai menu i am starting to struggle. i am going to need to expand my horizons with the different thai options. so if any of you guys have suggestions about things to try at thai places, i would love to hear them. In terms of my classes, I am learning a lot. But it just is so frustrating to be in classes all the time when all you want to do is explore the city and go to the beach. My mass media class is really opening me up to the world of communication and all the rules and regulations of it. Most kids in the class are communication majors so they already know so much about all of this stuff when it is all so new to me. But i am catching on well enough. We went on a really cool field trip for class the other day which was to their ABC studies (which for them stands for Australian Broadcasting Corporation). We got to go to the news studio and watch a radio talk show being recorded. It was all really cool and something different. In my other class which is all about Australian society and culture, we are learning about explorers and all that interesting for the first ten minutes, but then after 3 hours of it becomes boring. However, i think as we get further into the course everything will get more interesting. We watched this movie in class the other day that was called Gallipoli which is about a battle that was fought against the Turkish during ww1. and it is the battle that was considered to really make australia into its own country and independent status. Mel gibson is in it, but he is probably 16 yrs old in the movie and just looks completley different. The battle was basically a suicide mission but it did unify australia. the movie was great, and i really suggest if they have it in the states that if you have a chance your rent it. Tomorrow i am going to beach to see a kite festival, we do not know exactly what that entails but i cant wait. for those of you wondering how i am going to beach when the temperature is starting to get cold near you, i thought i would let you know that today it was 75 degrees and tomorrow i think it is going to be in the 90s. Sorry to rub that in all of your faces lol. but dont get my wrong i will definately miss the snow and the lovely beginnig of boston's cold winters. I forgot to previously mention, that I love the kids in my program, i g got so lucky with my roommate and all the kids who have ended up being in my group of friends. We have finally started to meet australians which has also made things a bit more excited. Also, i am in the process of putting all my pictures in a shutterfly account that i will give all of you access to. It is really frusterating because i have all of these pictures i want to put up but becuase the internet is so awful here, it would kill my internet to upload pictures. however, on monday i plan to go to an internet cafe to load them all up and ill send you all a link to the website. sorry if this is awful grammar i am so tired cause for me it is late at night now but i wanted to get all of this information out to you. so tons of pictures coming your way soon.