Almost There

Just finished my very last final, which means that soon I'll be walking home from the JCU campus for the last time.

It's strange to be packing up and leaving forever after four months. Very strange. Of course, mostly what I'm thinking about is the flight and how happy I'm going to be to be home.

I've heard that things like blogs and facebook and email keep people from having the real study abroad experience, but I don't think I'd have made any more friends or spent any less time being homesick without the internet. Maybe I'm defective in general.

Anyway, my day trip/spontaneous adventure plans for the past two weeks fell through, since I had a paper to write and tests to study for, and there weren't any good day tours available to places I hadn't been already.

After my exam on Saturday, my friend from the Whitsundays and I and her roommates all went downtown and got ice cream and sat on the beach for a while. The water's much colder, but it's no longer jelly fish season, so swimming's safer!

Other than that, life has been pretty uninteresting. I'm glad exams are over, though.

Tomorrow I leave for a 4-day trip to Mission Beach! I get back Sunday afternoon, so I'm going to pack, hopefully do a quick blog about Mission Beach, and prepare for the trip home.

Monday evening I fly to Brisbane (for the most uncomfortable birthday night ever!) and then Tuesday morning I fly to LAX. Less than a week. Pretty mind-blowing.

Aussie Slang That I Keep Forgetting To Mention:
-They pronounce fillet (as in, chicken fillet) "fil-LET" instead of "fil-LAY".
-"Swot-up" means study (as in, things to swot-up on for the exam would be areas to focus on when you're studying... like cramming, I guess.)
I can't remember the others... so clearly they're aptly named.

1 month left

No pictures today... I'm just so happy to be caught up with all my adventures that I thought I'd update with babbling.

I just calculated that out of the 19 weekends I've been/will be in Australia, I've only stayed at home doing nothing of interest for 5 of them... and one of those was right after getting back from vacation when I had a paper due, and another one was right after classes started. So I'm feeling pretty productive. It's true that I didn't get to Tasmania or anywhere too far from Townsville, but Australia is a HUGE country that is very time-consuming to travel in. It isn't like going to a European country where you can sprint around the entire continent on weekend trips.

I had my algae practical exam today... the less said about it, the better. Afterwards the professor gave us all pizza and beer, though. Some other American students and I agreed that we were living the Australian dream, right there.

Also I found a tree frog in the bathroom the other day! My housemate was pretty excited about it- he said he hadn't seen one in a while. (Actually, there were a ton of them in the bathrooms in the Boulia camper park... We had to check the toilets before using them to avoid awkward situations). I got to pick this one up, though! They're so sticky and cute!

I only have one month left in Australia... I'm not anticipating the reverse culture shock that everyone assures me students have. I've had a good time here, but I'm plenty ready to be home. I miss all my friends that kinda get me.

But, with only a month left, I've started plotting my final weeks.

I think I mentioned this before, but I'm going to spend the weekend alone on Magnentic Island, exploring. I'm making sandwiches in preparation tonight.

Next week is the last week of classes, and I'm so ready for it. I'm over classes. I've got a lab report due on the last day, but I've already kinda sorta started it, and I kinda like lab reports, so hopefully I won't lose too much sleep over it.

After that is a week-long break. I'm spending mine on the biggest, longest, and most expensive trip of my time here- I'm going out to Uluru (in the middle-ish). It's a two-day bus trip out there. Katie (my cousin) went out there when she was in AU and said it was amazing and a must-do.

After that is two weeks of exams. I only have four exams, though, so I'm looking into interesting day trips for the days when I don't have exams. After exams I'm going out to Mission Beach, which is the closest that the rainforest and the reef get to each other. Immediately afterwards I'm packing up and heading to the airport to go home.

And yes, when I'm studying/working on reports/doing dishes my mind goes straight to that plane ride home. It's getting harder and harder not to dwell on it. Obviously this won't be a problem when I'm traveling and having fun... but I suspect this next week is going to be very, very grim for me.

Prelude to picspam

I wish I had a secretary taking notes for me, so that when I get back there'll be a giant memo on my desk:
While you were away:
_x_ Part of Marietta caught fire again
___ The entire Republican Party collapsed upon itself
___ Your parents rent out your room
_x_ The Health Care Reform Bill passed
_x_ Your friends have decided to dress you up as a Kill Bill character
___ Several of your friends left for Spring Break and did not return

I also had a very exciting weekend, America!

My Rainforest Ecology class had an introductory field trip on Saturday- we went out to Paluma, which is a mountain about 60 miles from Uni which contains rainforest. We mostly just looked at trees and tried to identify them to family. I'm not very good at it- which is disconcerting. I'm brilliant at identifying trees to species at home. Of course, none of the families I know so well even exist down here. Even the 'beech' trees aren't in the same family as North American beeches.

:-( It's hard not being in Kansas anymore.

Anyway, Paluma has a little town up at the top, a bit of a summer-home place... Not unlike beach towns, except less built-up. We're going to be staying up there for a weekend in a few weeks while we do our individual research projects (I'm working on mosses with another girl from America- on this more when I know what we're actually doing). It looks like the weekend will be a lot of fun.

Then on Sunday my housemate offered to take me to the local aquarium- he and his daughter have a family pass, and since it includes two adults he figured I could save $20... he goes there about every other weekend and is rather jaded about the whole thing as a result, and therefore doesn't think it's worth the cost of admission.

And it's true- it's not as nice as the Baltimore Aquarium. There were no whale skeletons. But they did have some really cool reef fish... as one would expect. I hope at least some of the pictures I took turn out, but we'll see.
(The best part was the sea snake. I really hope at least one of those pictures turned out. *never got over her Chamber of Secrets-fueled love of snakes*)

Afterwards we stopped at a hardware store and I bought a folding chair, so my room is finally furnished to my satisfaction and there will be pictures of it eventually.

We also had a cyclone scare- Cyclone Ului was supposed to hit us Saturday, and there were warnings and everything else... it swerved and we didn't even get a decent wind. However, we *did* have a huge flood on Monday! The park across from my house was completely underwater, and my housemate called me out and we splashed around in it barefoot, which was great fun and struck me as a rather Aussie thing to do. Sadly, the rain stopped today, so the park wasn't flooded when I woke up, so I haven't seen it in daylight yet.

And that was my weekend. I still haven't got my pictures off my camera, but my next two entries (unless something exciting happens) are going to be just pictures of Paluma and fish.

Candy Bar Update:
Turkish Delight: Turkish Delight is a bit infamous in the US, because apparently (I haven't read them) it's the absolute favorite food of one of the kids in the Narnia books, but nobody in the US has any idea what it is. I've heard that it's disgusting, that it's ok, that it's brilliant...

First off, Turkish Delight is *very* big here in AU. All the Easter stuff is out, and they have Turkish Delight-filled chocolate eggs (chocolate eggs filled with things are apparently the big treat most kids get at Easter), Turkish Delight boxes of chocolates, and Turkish Delight shots- which will get you wasted faster than anything else on the planet, according to the anime club.

So I felt that I should buy and consume a Turkish Delight bar. It's this fruity red gummy substance, covered in milk chocolate. Alisa (my wonderful roommate at home) and I crashed a Hawaii club meeting one year and made this dessert with them... I can't remember what it was called, but it involved cornstarch and coconut milk... anyway, if I (or Alisa) remember its name, it's the same sort of thing as Turkish Delight.

(Turkish Delight shots are next).

Boost: This is a log-shaped candy bar with a chewy chocolate center with cookie bits in it, surrounded by a circle of caramel, and coated with milk chocolate. Pretty good.

Nestle Aero: This is the same thing as a Cadbury Bubbly, but Nestle stuff was on sale at the grocery story so I thought I'd mention it. And since we're more likely to find Nestle products than Cadbury ones at home, I hope that Aeros find a place on the US market. These things are really addictively good.

I also purchased a fresh passion fruit today, so I'll let you know how I deal with that.

Spinsterdom- beta version

"It was true that there was no one in the bungalow but herself and the little rustling snake."

The book of the week for Children's Literature is The Secret Garden. I hadn't forgotten how much I identify with Mary Lennox, but it's still good to read.

My housemate is out of town for the whole week (which is totally a good thing to tell the internet at large), so I have the house to myself, and I'm loving it.

Up until this weekend, I spent a lot of time doing dishes or laundry or making grocery lists or other sundry chores and thinking, "When I get back, I have one more year at college, and then I'm going to be stuck doing this for the rest of my life." This was not a cheerful thought.

But having the place to myself really changed that. I'm also not feeling too bad about my inability to meet new people. My decision to be an eccentric spinster was a better one than I realized.
(It just occured to me that some of you aren't my college friends and didn't know that I've decided to be an eccentric spinster. Well, there you have it.)

Saturday I walked down to the Uni, attempted to do some research for an upcoming paper, got distracted, decided to cut my losses and go home, and made it to the nursing building before it started to rain.
The nursing building is this oddly-shaped building built over the stream that runs through campus. The ground floor is all open-air, except for the lecture halls and a room with elevators, which leads (presumably) to the second floor. It's pretty interesting, just odd.
So I waited out the storm in there, alone.
Some birds who were watching me get rained on:

The Nursing building:




I spent Sunday doing food-related experiments. I'm not baking while I'm in Australia, because baking involves buying lots of things that I won't use up before I leave, like vanilla and baking powder and milk (which I don't drink), but I did some fooling around with the stuff I had.
I made chicken soup with real chicken in it, which was easier than I expected, and very delicious indeed.

I also had a lot of left-over rice, so I rolled it into riceballs and fried them... This was successful, so I decided to add some sugar to them while rolling them into balls, then fry them. It's more or less an excuse to use more butter.
The fried riceballs were... more or less what you'd expect. They were pretty good... I'm not entirely convinced that they were worth the trouble, but it was some variety.
Dinner:


I also decided to candy an orange, using a recipe I found on Whisk Kid. I threw in an apple that I don't want to eat and some raisins, just to see what would happen. The apple came out pretty good... not the raisins. Of course, the orange worked best.

Not a very good picture:


(The sweet riceballs and the candied fruit is a good example of what happens when I run out of my Choc Creams- those being the off-brand oreo-esque cookies that I buy and consume by the dozen- and need my sugar.)

So I'm actually quite excited about being almost on my own. I figure that graduating will have several advantages, like being in the same country as my firmly-established friends, and being able to bake, and not waiting for my housemate to leave before I feel bold enough to leave my room.

As promised, a picture of one of my bruises, because we're all five years old and like to compare injuries:

A giant moth, with my hand to show some perspective:

And a pretty flower:

The Curse of Culinary Nerdery

Candy bar update:
Twirl- the wrapper said "chocolate twirls covered in [milk chocolate]" and by golly, that's what this was! It's chocolate that's been poured to make twirls... I suspect it blooms a bit, because the twirls were crumbly, and then covered in non-blooming, soft chocolate. I enjoyed it. I think crumbly chocolate is popular here... which I don't understand, but it still tastes pretty good.
My next major goal is to try a Violet Crumble ("It's the way it shatters that matters!"), but I keep finding other candy bars on sale.

We're into the second week of classes, now, and I'm still excited about them... although Rainforest Ecology is not all that exciting, since the interesting stuff is more the field trips (I hope, anyway).

It rained almost no-stop this weekend, so I didn't do much... My housemate/landlord and I decided to stop being the last two people on earth to have seen Avatar on Sunday... I feel silly writing about an American movie on a blog about studying abroad, so I'll just say that as a sci-fi version of a kung-fu movie, it was pretty good. Not award-winningly so, in my book, but as good a thing as any to do on a rainy Sunday.

Enquires to housemate/landlord (I'm just going to call him my housemate, since landlord sounds a lot more formal) have revealed that Cole's grocery stores change their prices based on the economic layout of the neighborhood, and since we live in a very nice neighborhood, he always goes to a different suburb to shop. So, come Monday (my official shopping day until I find something exciting to do on my long weekends), I took the bus down there, picked up a prepaid phone in the mall, and got some groceries.

And they are cheaper there. Is this how it is in US cities, too? I've only ever lived in small towns...

It was not very condusive to my exploring a new country to put me cooking for myself for the first time while in said country. The culinary enthusiast (I think they call themselves "foodies" out on the web) in me is very excited to just be cooking to the exclusion of all else, which is just fine with the rest of me, which is shy and doesn't like meeting new people. So any ambitions I have to be social are pretty much foiled by the combination of not being in a dorm, not being social, and cooking.
...This would be ok with me if it exploring the town alone wasn't so much more awkward than doing so with friends.

(...I realize that a lot of people who don't see me every day follow this blog, so some of you might not know that I whine a lot purely for sympathy and don't actually expect you to worry too much when I write paragraphs like the one above.)

So, here are a few more pictures:
The performer at the opening ceremony- blurry.

A lizard

A cockatoo. There's a flock in the park across the street from my house- I've decided they're kind of like blue jays- pretty, but loud and dirty.

I'm pretty sure this is one of those hanging nests that weaving birds make... I was always fascinated with them as a kid and I was Very Excited to see this:

One of the 300 fliers the anime club put up overnight. (I know it was 300 because I asked.)

And the anime club itself. I was *very* happy to see them, as you will recall, and may have come off as just a bit of a creeper, but they let me take a picture, anyway.


I don't have the cord to get pictures off my camera with me at the moment, but I have some photos of a very cute Australian possum and some of the highly nobby houses in my neighborhood.

Sorry that my pictures always get a little cut-off. I can't find a layout I like that doesn't do that.

CeeCee's Grocery Store Adventure

Yesterday was an exciting step forward in becoming a Real Grown-up Person.

I had a tour of the library, which is currently under construction but otherwise seems pretty library-like. On the tour were a couple of the American girls that had been on the welcoming bus with me- they told me how sorry they had felt for me when I got dropped off at a motel alone in the pouring ran (rather how I felt). Then one proceeded to tell me that her room wasn't air-conditioned and was full of bugs, and also that Australia doesn't have the same anti-hazing laws of the US. And since they're at JCU for the first time, they've been getting hazed. Also the drinking age here is 18, so this usually involves booze. Apparently they made a freshman who was allergic to wheat chug some beer the other night and the kid ended up in the hospital. (She said it's more the guys- the girls watch and feel belitted.) So I'm feeling a lot better about being off-campus.

I'm not really here for the culture at all, anyway, I've noticed. I mean, I'm sure Australia has a lot to offer and a cool history and all that, and you study abroad to expand your horizions and become a global blah blah blah. I'm honestly just here for the plants. And as a bio major I feel nice and justified in saying that.

Which isn't to say that I can avoid culture, which brings me to my real topic, which is my first grocery shopping trip.

The grocery store is just a bus ride down the road (it's a little bit far to walk), and it's part of an enclosed mini-mall (which probably has something to do with how hot and sticky it is down here all the time), which includes a dollar-store type deal (except not because nothing in Australia costs a dollar), a hair salon, an eye doctor, a pharmacy (which sells the same stuff US pharmacies do), a café, and a donut shop.

I really do know better than to go shopping on an empty stomach, but... well...

First off, fruit is in-season here right now... as compared to Ohio, which according to what I've gathered from facebook statuses, is currently buried under about four feet of snow but bravely continues to have classes.

They also have more fruit than the US. The papayas are huge (which I guess isn't odd if you're from, say, Georgia, but I'm not). They have fresh figs and fresh dates, for reasonable prices. I think Giant Eagle (my home grocery store) had figs once, and they were $4 a pop. They had something called "dragon fruit", which I intend to eat at some point just because.

The fruit is a little smaller here, too. I bought some peaches and an onion, and they were tiny. I suppose Australia does more organic? Maybe?

(I also bought some navel oranges, Product of the USA, and felt very very silly about it.)

The deli is cheaper than pre-packaged meat here... something that was difficult for me to figure out, because all the weights are in kilograms, so the signs say "Black Forest Ham- $24.85 kg."

I'm still not very comfortable with Australian money. An AUD is worth slightly less than a USD, and also things are just a little more expensive here in general (possibly because I'm used to rural Ohio prices). I'm also not used to shopping for one, so I can't really gauge how much I should be getting just in my own language. And I'm really bad with the metric system.

It's pretty embarrassing. For one, I knew they used the metric system here (and everywhere else- the US just likes being difficult ‘cause we're mavericks). For another, I'm a science major. We never use anything but the metric system. I'm perfectly comfortable with the metric system in lab. In fact, I'm really fond of the metric system in lab. (Except temperatures. I never did figure out Celsius. I don't need to know it here because it's always only one temperature, and that temperature is "sweltering".) But it turns out that when you're shopping in a different measuring system, you really do need to know how to convert between the two, or at least have a vague idea of what the conversion rate is.

I ended up going to the prepackaged meat, finding a package the size I wanted, checking the weight (100 g), and ordering that much of the deli ham. 100 g is a lot of ham, as it turns out. Also $3.75 a kg for peaches isn't really that expensive.

Weights aside, I had to cope with the product differences, which is a little daunting, too. Of course, part of the problem could be that I'm used to small-town grocery stores that don't carry anything too exotic, and Townsville is a fairly large city where you expect more variety. They had little single-serving cups of tiramisu in the yougurt section, and I do believe I will have to look into that some time.

They keep the eggs on the shelves, as compared to refridgerated, which makes sense because the store is air conditioned. (I'm keeping mine in the fridge, but we don't use the AC where I'm staying.) Also, all the eggs are brown, which makes me feel very gourmet when I use them. (Eggs, by the way, are the best thing ever if you're cheap and living alone.)

The major difference that can't be attributed to population was the candy. I noticed this earlier, but they don't have Hershey's here- they have Cadbury's. So the good news is that Cadbury creme eggs are readily available this time of year.

Cadbury's makes hot chocolate mix and candy bars, too, as it turns out. I picked one up (a "dairy milk bar" which I think means milk chocolate), and it was pretty tasty. They have a lot of flavors and different candy bars I'm uncertain about (including ‘bubbles", which I think are like poprock chocolate?), and chocoholic that I am, one of my goals to experience Australian culture is going to be to eat as many of these as I can without having a hideous allergic reaction, so more on candy as I get to it.

On the Welcome Bus, the other girls (who had all been in Australia for a few days, sight-seeing) were munching on these chocolate cookies called "Tim-Tams," and they all assured me that I needed to try them. So I picked up a package, and let me tell you, they are the richest cookie I've ever bought in a grocery store. I don't quite know how to describe them. They're two crisp milk chocolate cookies sandwiched together with what tastes like chocolate Oreo filling, then covered with chocolate frosting. I can't eat more than one at a time, and yet.. they're strangely addictive.

I only bought enough food for the next couple of days, since I got there and realized that I was never going to survive without a very detailed grocery list. Last night I had a ham, cheese, and onion omlette... which is also on the menu tonight.

I've found a couple of really cool cake-related blogs on here, and I was going through hoping to find some recipes for myself, but they're mostly gourmet, fancy type things (or else pastries. Or both), which I'm in favor of, but... I'd like to see a blog that's just new things for singles on budgets- stuff that's cheap, easy, different, and serves one person. It probably already exists somewhere, but if I ever get my act together, I may start one. I mean, looking at fancy food and drooling is nice, and trying to make an awesome cake from time to time is fun, but when I have to plan a menu for the week and I just want food that tastes pretty good and isn't too unhealthy, I don't really have a practical resource.

So, my culinary nerdery aside, it's raining really hard today... probably because I want to take my laptop to Uni today. I was going to take a self-defense course, but it was just a fun filler thing to do, and I couldn't really bring myself to catch the bus in the pouring rain at 10:00, so that's that. I can't wait for rainy season to be over.

Best news possible.

Since my last update, I spent so much time on the computer that I failed to get dinner. (Not entirely my fault- the only places to eat are in the student union, which doesn't open properly until classes start.) I know, I know, I came to Australia to use the internet, but I have nowhere to go until orientation gives me a general idea what's going on.

So I headed back to the International Student Center, which was the center of my day, and when he found out I hadn't eaten anything but toast all day, one of the guys made me a ham sandwich on the sly. (THANK YOU SO MUCH. I CRIED.) So I ate outside. I have to say, it is BEAUTIFUL here. When I wasn't online, I was taking pictures. I promise to upload them soon. Possibly tomorrow?

Realized that the buses don't run at night, so I caught the last one back to my motel. My motel room has been growing on me- despite the fact that it is near impossible to find someone to ask questions to. It's really just some rooms over a sports bar and a liquor store, next to a bridge across the Ross River, which is also Very Beautiful. It smells like Marietta there, in a good way. I guess rivers all have the same basic scent about them.

So, it's over a bar, right, so my room smelled like cigarette smoke for part of the evening- fortunately I'm not one of my severely-asthmatic friends.

The buses don't run on Saturday (it's Saturday here), so I woke up this morning and attempted to walk to JCU to meet my "take the students around to look at houses" tour. I tried to get ahold of reception, but, like I said, it's not really a motel so much as a bar that lets rooms, and at 8:00 on Saturday morning, there was no one around. So, armed with a very uninformative google map, I set off. I actually managed to go the right direction, but the roads were absolutely deserted. (Save a couple of dead toads. Toads are the squirrels of Australia- I see them flat on the road everywhere. Also there was a snakeskin that doubtless had once been poisonous.) Anyway, I got nervous and went back... this time got ahold of someone at reception, who 1) showed me that I had gone the right way in the first place, 2) offered to give me a lift. (I told him that 2 kilometers was not that bad a walk- and it isn't, I walk 2 miles to work in the summer and I'm fairly certain that's further, but it's humid out and I'm not going to say no when an attractive guy offers to save me 40 minutes.)

So after all this, I meet up with the other tour-takers- a couple of grad students from Maladives, a comp sci major and his father from India, some guys I think were German but who didn't introduce themselves, and a couple of US grad students. I may be the only semester-abroad student in the whole school looking for off-campus housing. T_T (For those not familiar with the internet, that's a sad face.)

The tour guide was 30 minutes late (he also had dark glasses and was still a little hungover...). The other, who had the huge bus, was much later, but I had appointments, so me and the American girls climbed into the car and drove off to look at places.

My first place had been advertised as a house sit (where you watch the house while they're away), but it was actually a room with a family. They were *really* nice, don't get me wrong, but it was a little pricey for sharing with a whole family. The next place, however, was absolutely perfect- it's ridiculously cheap (which is good 'cause I am stingy like nobody's business), it's a 1/2 hour walk to the school and also close to grocery shopping. (I was so happy I could have cried- my motel is in the middle of a group of gated communities full of upper-middle-classers who don't like their food source to be visible for fear it'll bring in the riff-raff.)

The guy who owns it is really nice- he's looking for one more student. He's also looking for a better internet plan- which I will be more than happy to assist him with, 'cause Ol' Cee wants to Skype and she doesn't want to do it in JCU's computer lab.

Anyway, I took the room instantly- I've got until Thursday to transfer my money to an Australian bank so Chase doesn't swindle me blind... although it occurs to me that I have enough cash on me to pay my rent... yeah. That's how cheap it is. *so happy* ...I DO still need to find a bed, but he says he can give me a mattress... I'll work something out.

That leaves me free for the rest of the day. More pictures, I guess. The way internet works here, you pay based on how much you're allowed to download, so I think how I'm going to work the pictures is load them onto the laptop, then take the laptop to school and post them... this goes for pretty much anything I do online. Sorry, am I talking too much?

It's occured to me that I should just get a diary and write everything in there, so I can stop writing 3-page updates. But that wouldn't be any fun, would it?