ANZAC Day and Opera House fun :)

As crazy busy as it has been with projects, papers, and homework out the Australian wazoo, there has of course been some time for fun!! This past weekend, April 25th, is a national holiday celebrated here in Australia called ANZAC Day which stands for Australian New Zealand Army Corp which celebrates the soldiers of Australia and New Zealand who served their country. The most celebrated army endeavour was the battle of Gallipoli which is pretty ironic because it was a huge failure for the ANZAC soldiers and they fought hard and gained nothing. It shows how Australia tends to celebrate the underdogs. Either way, on ANZAC day in downtown Sydney there is a huge parade and memorial and dawn services in almost every community. I got to see some of the parade in the city and then me and my roommates headed to Red Fern to be part of the Aboriginal Memorial Service. The Aboriginal Memorial service also commenced with a parade which was a lot different from the city's parade. It was simple and yet just as moving. The Service had a really good turn out with speakers that included the NSW Premier, Tony Barry (Sergeant Callahan from the movie Australia, and several influential leaders in the Aboriginal community including Ray Minnecon. It was a really unique and neat service full of traditional welcomes, dances, songs, and concluded with an Australia staple, Harry De Cafe meat pies. I feel like I got a really good grasp of ANZAC day in Australia by witnesses two very different celebrations that were both meaningful to the citizens here.

Regina. Spektor. Opera House!!! Regina Spektor at the Opera House was an amazing concert. The atmosphere of the Opera House just amplified our excitement by about a million! The concert was sold out and it was packed! I was so excited because we (the eight of us who went) had the BEST seats in the house literally. We were on the side of the stage and the grand piano faced us so we got to look directly at her the whole performance. We were in the first rows of our section too so the view was incredible. Regina Spektor is definitely one of the quirkiest artist ever. She said she painted her nails for us and kept laughing/giggling in her little girl voice that she wasn't used to being surrounded on stage. She did all of the beloved classic songs and a couple quirky ones I had never heard before which was also awesome. She played the piano, keys, and the guitar which made me really excited. My favorite song she did was Samson because it was the first song of her encore and the lights were all down except for a spot on her and a light on the disco/mirror ball which made it look like we were floating in the middle of the sky. I think we were all totally mesmerized. After the concert we went and goofed around taking fun pictures in front of the Harbour Bridge and the whole night was a definite success!

You can run, You can hide, But you can't escape my love! Chasing Kangaroos in the Outback

My Outback adventure, was literally an adventure. It started out with a day and a half drive towards our initial destination, Trilby Station a massive station where we were supposed to have our Australian "Outback-y" experience. It rained for most of the second day but it did not register in my mind that that would affect our trip in anyway. It wasn't until Ian, our bus driver who I refer to as "The Drover", started making phone calls that I wondered what was going on. The rest of the way to Trilby Station consisted of all red dirt roads that were at the moment getting flooded and turning into ginormous mud pits that would love to trap a charter bus like ours. This is how we got trapped in the little town of Cobar.

Cobar is a tiny Outback town that has it's claim to fame by being a mining town with a small museum. Our estimated time to stop here and look at the mine was fifteen minutes. That would be literally all the time needed to get a good feel of Cobar. Thanks to the rain, our fifteen minutes turned into a day and a half. We had already spent the allocated fifteen minutes looking at the mine from a lookout point and taking all of the cutesy Amerian pictures underneath the big sign that said, "COBAR" so all that was left to do was the musuem. The museum was quaint and had a variety of things that showed life in Cobar from the past (like most museums do). It did, however, have a little mine shaft that we could walk down and take pictures in which was neat. After about thirty minutes or so there we went to our hotel that our wonderful bus driver/ drover found for us. We spent the night there and then the magical Ian pulled through for us and found us a place to go.

Now, before I go on I need to elaborate a little bit on Ian. Ian knows EVERYTHING one could possibly know about Australia. Anything he said went totally undisputed. He told us that rain like we experienced had not happened in about 70 years where we were and probably wouldn't happen again for another hundred. Trilby Station turned into an island because the flood waters totally surround it and they use helicopters to rescue the sheep. Therefore, we obviously could not get to Trilby so he arranged another trip. He called a previous ASC Outback trip location called Mount Boorithumble and within thirty minutes we were on our way.

Mount Boorithumble is still in New South Wales and is about a 40,000 acre sheep and cattle station. They also grow wheat and barley. The owners said that they call it a "farm" because around there a station implied land owners who hired workers to do all of the work on their station and did not have that relationship with the land. The Townsend brothers own Mount Boorithumble and their sister is one of the host mom's for us American students. When you look at them they look like they belong to Mount Boorithumble and it is evident that they do have the working relationship with the land.

During our stay at Mount Boorithumble we indeed roughed it, but it was good. We stayed in the Shearing shed where the workers would stay when they're shearing all of the sheep and there was a thick layer of red dust covering everything. They had to pump in water for us to use so we all took a "No Shower Challenge" and the results of which I will leave to your imagination. The second day we were there we got to go on a property tour in "uts" or four-wheel drive utility vehicles. We all kept laughing that this would never be allowed in America because we were standing in the back of these giant pick up trucks and our drivers floored it over the dirt "paths" and by the end of our adventure we were all covered with dust and mud. It was the most fun I have had in a while!! We got to see wild emus, the beautiful Australian landscape which was breathtaking and....kangaroos!!!!!

Please think back to the scene in the recent movie "Australia" when Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman are driving along arguing when she sees a cute kangaroo bounding by and she starts "ooh'ing" and "ahh'ing". She is so excited saying how she's never seen a kangaroo when BAM!!! The men on top of their truck shoot the kangaroo and she screams. I had a similar experience. We were riding along when a kangaroo and it's joey bounded out of the bush onto our path and takes off in front of our truck. Our driver, Murray (one of the farm owners) accelerates and starts chasing down this kangaroo! We are all squeeling in excitement and taking pictures when we're getting so close that we could touch it if we wanted. Murray cornered the kangaroo between our truck and the fence so the kangaroo tried to jump over this wire fence but since we were still going incredibly fast it kept missing and bounced off the fence into the truck! All of us silly Americans start SCREAMING when we realize we literally just ran over a kangaroo. Thankfully the kangaroo got up and bounced away or else I would have been legitimately traumatized! My first real roo sighting ending with the roo's death!!!! Not okay!

After our kangaroo near-death experience a couple of us took a walk and got to see the men herding all the sheep in to be tagged the next day. Instead of horses and dogs like in all the movies, they now use motorcyles and dogs! A couple new born lambs couldn't keep up so Ian had picked them up in one of the trucks but stopped when he saw us and let us carry them in! They were so precious and surprisingly very snuggly! They were completely content to let us carry them and some of them snuggled up against us and fell asleep. Ironically for dinner that night we had...lamb. Needless to say, I stuck with the sausages (hot dogs).

On our way home from the Outback we stopped at the Blue Mountains for about thirty minutes and got to see the Three Sisters which was neat. The Blue Mountains was also gorgeous which has just made me decide that Australia is the most beautiful place I have ever been. Australia is officially always going to have my heart.

Everybody's surfin, Surfin AUS!

Here in Australia during Easter time the “uni students” (university students) get two weeks off in a row. The first week is called Project Week and it is supposed to be a time for the students to catch up on homework and complete semester projects. The second week is their break week after Easter which is like the American Spring Break. Since the American students go on a group trip during break week, a lot of us planned fun trips to explore Australia during project week (maybe not the best idea but I’m only here once!). So a lot of people from the ASC program ended up taking off and going somewhere else in Australia for the week. Several people flew up to Cairns where the Great Barrier Reef is, but I decided not to because it was really expensive and I’ve snorkeled before so I decided to be adventurous and find somewhere else to go. After some intense online searching for a location and a plane ticket my roommate Emily and I decided to fly to the Gold Coast and stay at Coolangatta for the week. We got round trip plane tickets for $90 and stayed at the YHA Coolangatta hostel for $25 a night so I was pretty excited for this trip.

Our flight was at 7:10am on Sunday morning but the buses don’t start running until 6am. Since we wouldn’t be able to get to their airport early enough to check in if we took the 6am bus, we had the brilliant idea to take the last bus into Sydney at midnight Saturday night and literally just pull an all nighter at Circular Quay. It was definitely a long night and we were exhausted by the time we got to the airport. We slept on the plane (which was only about an hour and a half flight) and when we got to the hostel we found breakfast at a little dive diner called the Eat N’ Run and then went across the street and fell asleep at the beach for five hours straight. I’m going to blame my poor sunscreen application on my lack of sleep because I definitely got a little (or a lot) fried the first day. I woke up and I had twisted on my side like a pretzel so only one half of my body got all the sun but at least I was rested!

Our hostel was right across the street from a beach and if we took the free shuttle from the YHA to the actual city of Coolangatta we could go to the bigger beaches, shops, and restaurants. Our favorite beach quickly became Snapper’s Rocks where there was a beach area called Rainbow Bay. In the morning water came all the way up to the beach but by midday the tide at gone back out and it created a lagoon area and there was a sandbar between the bay and the rest of the ocean. It was pretty neat. Rainbow Bay is where we took our surfing lesson too. We got a great deal and two hours of surfing instructions with a retired professional surfer who coaches for the Quicksilver competitions. I was amazingly not awful and stood up and rode the waves all the way into the beach several times! I feel like surfing is like sledding though. You work so hard to get to the top of the hill (or out to the waves) and then the ride down (or in) is quick and then you have to do the work all over again. My arms the next day were killer sore and I couldn’t lift them very far over my head! It was definitely a work out!

Emily and I were beach bums the majority of the week but some of our friends from Wesley and some of the other American students drove up to Coolangatta to hang out with us and we drove about twenty minutes to Surfer’s Paradise which is another section of the Gold Coast. Surfer’s Paradise is mainly like the party zone with tons of clubs at night and tons of surfers and people on holiday during the day. We just walked around Surfer’s Paradise so we could see what all was there but it was just like a Miami Beach back home in the states. I didn’t like the beaches at Surfer’s Paradise nearly as much as the ones in Coolangatta. The Coolangatta beaches reminded me of Hawaii. They were quiet and there were neat rocks and cliffs all around.

Throughout the week we met several people from all over the World at our hostel and some of the days we all went to the beach together and hung out. I met Cedric and Quentin from France, Sabrina and Shanen from Austria, Pedro from Portugal, Kaji from Japan, Christopher from Denmark, Luke from Poland, and Ryan and Mark from the UK. The hostel was such an interesting place to be! There was a hostel BBQ one night and several other nights everyone just hung outside at the hostel. It made me want to travel so much more and see all those parts of the World that they were from or that they had seen on their journeys. There were a couple other Americans at the hostel but not many and some of the people said that when they met Americans who were travelling they had a much better impression of them. They said if we were travelling it must mean that we had an open mind about other countries and cultures and weren’t the stereotypical ethnocentric American. Some students had experiences that the second someone found out they were American and not Canadian they stopped talking to them and left. It’s quite interesting and sometimes a bit rough being an American here but fortunately I have not had any experiences like some of the other Americans have had.

Overall my trip to the Gold Coast was fantastic and I want to go back already! The people at the hostel were so incredible and when I was leaving they kept trying to get me to sign up to work and live there and just stay! It was so tempting but unfortunately classes were demanding that I return to Sydney! Coolangatta, or “Cooly” as they all call it, was a really laid back place where people surfed all day long and worked just enough to be able to stay and keep surfing. It was gorgeous there and there were families everywhere taking walks together or playing cricket on the beach. It was really different from the crazy go-go-go attitude of Sydney. It was a nice break from the hectic public buses and people constantly in a hurry to get somewhere. The nice slow pace made for the perfect break week but now I must go get all my homework done that I didn’t do ;)

Ozzie Rules Football

We American students got the opportunity to go see a Sydney Swans game at the Olympic Stadium against the St. Kilda Saints and I thought it was pretty interesting. I’ve decided that to my American eyes, AFL (Australian Football League) looks like a combination of football, soccer, volleyball, basketball, and either wrestling or hockey. Now keep in mind, this is the perspective of a girl who is still working on figuring out all the little (silly) rules of American football so don’t read too much into this sports people!


It makes me think of American football because it is a form of football (obviously) and there are two sets of posts at the end of the field that remind me of field goals and if you get the ball (that looks like an oversized football) in the center set of poles its 6 points. If the ball goes through the outer posts or hits the pole its 1 point. It’s also like football because they do tend to jump on each other in a huddle on the ground… Very manly man “I am man hear me roar” football-ish. It reminds me of soccer because there is a lot more kicking in AFL games than there is in American football or “gridiron”. You don’t run with the ball you pass it or kick it so it remind me of soccer a bit in that way and also because you don’t score touchdowns, you get goals. It also reminds me of volleyball because the players do this weird sort of fist bump thing with the ball where it almost looks like they’re doing a volleyball serve. It’s like basketball because you don’t catch the ball and run. The players bounce the ball on the ground every couple paces as they go. It took me a while before I could keep all the rules of the game straight and I am beyond aware that I probably didn’t get half of them! The score board had three numbers, for example it would say 2-4-16 which would be 2 six pointers and 4 one pointers which would be a total of 16 points.

Finally, I say it reminded me of hockey because they would all be playing and all of a sudden they would be on the ground ripping each other’s shirts in a crazy pile and the referees never stopped it. It was amusing. The fans were pretty amusing too. There was a man in a skin tight red power ranger’s suit with a leotard skirt and a wig on and everyone had giant pom poms and flags. Whenever we walked by one group of fans they would yell “USA! USA! USA!” They apparently really liked Americans. No sporting event is ever complete without a trip to the concession stand of course so I was all jazzed and ready for a corndog or a chilidog forgetting that they probably serve different foods. Instead of good ole’ American hotdogs they served meat pies…sad day. So I settled for some delicious chips (aka French fries) and a diet coke so all was well.

It was also spiffy to be walking around the Olympic stadium and see the signs pointing out where the pools were and such. I’d like to go back sometime and walk around and see more. The place was absolutely massive. The field that the AFL game was on was beyond ginormous. The seats just kept going up and up and up. Luckily we had good seats so I didn’t have to get an unexpected cardio workout.

Unfortunately, the Swans lost to the Saints so it was a sad night in Sydney but I liked getting to see both an AFL game and the Olympic stadium in one go! According to the Australian students a rugby league game is the way to go, but AFL is uniquely Australian and it was a fun game to watch.

Canberra, The Capital

Wow, what a busy busy past couple of weeks! Time is absolutely FLYING by. I cannot believe that I have been here in Australia for over six weeks! It seems so unreal to me that time is going by so fast. There are so many more places I want to go and so many things that I want to see. It would definitely take more than one semester to really explore everything that this gorgeous country has to offer. It’s been a while since I’ve blogged so here’s what I’ve been up to…..


A few weekends ago we were all piled onto a bus at 6am and we headed off four hours to Canberra the capital of Australia. Most of the Wesley students either visibly shuddered when we told them where we were going or straight up laughed and told us to have fun. So I was a little apprehensive about this trip especially when the program directors said multiple times, “Remember guys, Canberra is as fun as YOU make it”. Yes, this combination made me a bit unsure of how “fun” this weekend was going to be BUT I’ve never been to Canberra obviously and so was excited to add it to the list of things/places I’ve been to and seen here in Australia!

Kimberly and Melanie (directors) jam packed our two days in Canberra with more museums, galleries, and embassies than I would have thought possible to visit in only forty-eight hours. It was so busy in fact that on the bottom of our schedules they put the number of three taxi services because if we weren’t on the bus when we were told to be we got left! They meant business. On Friday we stopped at Parliament House and looked around outside then we went to the Indonesian Embassy, New Zealand High Commission, and the Aboriginal Tent Embassy. I never realized how interesting and neat New Zealand was! We had the best speaker meet with us and they had afternoon tea set up for us. From that visit I realized that New Zealand may be small but what they lack in strength of size they make up for in brain power. I really enjoyed that visit. On Saturday we visited the Nation Portrait Gallery, the National Museum, the National Gallery of Australia, and the Australian War Memorial. The Australian War Memorial was amazing too. There was a tomb of an unknown soldier there as well and a wall similar to the United States Vietnam War memorial with the names of those who gave their lives for Australia. The one I really want to focus on however, is the Aboriginal Tent Embassy.

The Aboriginal Tent Embassy is not really an embassy, but rather it is an ongoing protest that started back in the 1970’s. The Aboriginal peoples of Australia have had a pretty brutal history especially the Stolen Generation (if you don’t know what I’m talking about watch the movie Australia or even better rent Rabbit Proof Fence). The Stolen Generation is literally when the government went in and took Aboriginal children away from their families and put them in missions and group homes because it was “better for them”. Rabbit Proof Fence left me with my mouth hanging open in disbelief. Children were taken and the excuse was given that the Aboriginal parents couldn’t care for them and that their lives would be better with white families. Some of the children did have good lives, but most of them didn’t. It’s a really sad reality that Australia is still dealing with because this didn’t stop happening until the 1970s!! We heard from one Aboriginal lady named Bettina that her mother was drugged in the hospital and when she woke up her baby was gone and they told her she had signed adoption papers and that her daughter was gone. The Tent Embassy is protesting the mistreatment of Aboriginals and there are people camped there in tents with signs everywhere saying things like, “Sorry is okay, Sovereignty is better”. We were welcomed so warmly by a lady named Aunt Jodie and she told us her story about being stolen from her family and being placed with a white family and her journey back to her Aboriginal family and her roots. I felt so blessed because she was willing to be so open with her story. After she told us her story she allowed us to take part in putting eucalyptus leaves onto the fire that they keep burning at all times. The Tent Embassy was really humbling. When we left she asked us to please tell people about the embassy and their fight for rights and for us to please tell our embassies and ask our president to come. Right across the street from the embassy is the Parliament house and not once have they come over to the embassy. The grass at the Parliament house is mowed once a week, the embassies once every six weeks. Aunt Jodie said that all she wants is some money so that she can have a piece of land to grow her food on and to live in peace and as she wants to live.

Even after watching the movie Australia I didn’t realize that effects of the Stolen Generation were still being felt. This didn’t just happen a long time ago in World War II and a heroic drover like Hugh Jackman didn’t come and get all the children and take care of them. We had a panel of Aboriginal Australians come talk to our class and the older gentlemen who came in was so hurt and so bitter that it broke my heart. His father fought in the both of the World Wars and when he came back his children were gone. All his children had been taken and split up into different homes and even when he went to get them after fighting for his country he couldn’t have them. Listening to Cecil talk, the pain in his voice and on his face was still so strong even after so many years. Bettina was more hopeful, and she now is a lawyer who works with Aboriginal foster children and helps make laws in order to make sure their adoptions are legal and necessary. Australia is a beautiful and amazing country and yet like every country they are still dealing with issues of injustice. When I left all I could think of was, “What can I do?!” It’s a bit overwhelming to be honest. In all of our group discussions of foreign policy, land and environment, social-justice, and learning about the Aboriginal culture here and comparing it to the Native Americans back in the states it makes my head spin because I feel like I should be doing something. I have to remind myself that God puts passions in our hearts for causes and that prayer cannot be underestimated. If I open myself up to the possibility God will give me opportunities to do something. I just have to be quiet enough and pay attention so that I can see and hear them.

Canberra was not anywhere close to be boring for me. It was an eye opening experience. It was indeed a lot of education packed into a short time span, but for the most part it was incredible and opened my mind a little more.