catch up on week 4 and 5

So I realize I haven’t updated the blog in a while and I sincerely apologize for keeping you all in the dark, so here goes. 

            The only real exciting part of this past week was not that exciting, except we did try kangaroo on Friday.  I don’t know if it’s just because of the way we cooked it, but it kind of just tasted like beef and it was super lean but still very soft, definitely something you have to try once in your life.  As soon as we finished dinner our neighbor came over and asked if we wanted to donate our empty garage to help her throw a party for her friends, so we now have a ping-pong table because the adults didn’t want to take the full effort to empty our garage after their party.  We got a relatively early night because the past weekend was “open day” as well as the Cairns vs Townsville cup. 

            On Saturday Jen went to the first day of her archeological dig to recover a saltwater crocodile that the university buried about 10 years ago.  Chue and I went and watched the basketball and netball game, which just made me miss UPS basketball, even if the play level here was... not exactly college level.  Another fun fact about the CNS vs TSV competition is that three days before the competition, that had been months in the planning, the people from James Cook: Townsville decided that they weren’t going to show up; so every game was Cairns students against people that had showed up to represent Cairns in another event. 

So at the end of the day when my housemates and I showed up to played for the Cairns soccer team (who we have been practicing with for about 2 weeks) we ended up competing in the newspaper toss and playing against a team of 12 made up of the Australian Football players, sprinters, general athletic people and other folks that were just hanging around the event.  The final score was 5-4, with us losing, however, I scored 3 of the goals and the last was scored off a header on a ball that I crossed.  It was very fun to play finally play in a game that was at least a bit competitive and have a reason to go 100%. 

We met up with all of the athletes at a local club downtown for free drinks and pizza and I was presented with the MVP medal, so I at least have one pretty individual souvenir of my time here.  We made friends with a couple Australians that live several doors down with them and have had a pictionary night with them; and we now have a pictionary set at our house.  It’s hard to believe how fast the weekdays go but this week I learned how to identify scorpion species, how to use the basics in photoshop and that I really like surrealism photography. We went to the botanical gardens for a field trip for “Biodiversity of Tropical Australia”, where we saw a laughing kookaburra, and I have three more hours of class on Friday til our beach filled weekend.

Also, shout-out to my younger sister who will either read this right before leaving on a plane to college or when she’s already all the way across the country.

Walkabout club adventure 2

So this weekend my housemates and I went on another adventure with the walkabout club.  It started out with a drive up to Crystal Cascades, which is a progression of water holes up in the rainforest connected by a very small river, and it just so happens to be one of the only places with water where there has never been a crocodile spotting.  Our guide Tony taught us how to make “damper”, or bush bread.  It’s one cup of flower, three pinches of salt, three pinches of sugar and a third of a cup or water or beer, and then you can throw whatever else you want in it.  Then you wrap it in foil that has been sprayed on the inside with Pam and wrap it up with an “s-curve” and throw it on a barbeque or in an oven and turn it every couple minutes.  It was so delicious!  We put butter and jam on it and it’s definitely going to be a staple in our house now.  Then we drove up to Kurunda, where we had been before on the skyrail, but this time we made sure to wander off the main street.  We went to the old markets and the Heritage markets and stopped in the candy store to watch demonstrations for about 20 minutes.  Finally we stopped quickly at our favorite Coles to grab stuff for the BBQ and drive up to Ellis Beach.  We had about an hour of wandering around on the beach before we had to make dinner.  We made chicken thighs and put them in buns with a bunch of salad.  For the first time we got to experience the public barbeques in Australia.  They are great but at dinner it gets really crowded and everyone is a bit hungry and grumpy but somehow it all remained civil.  We ate out dinner out on the beach by moonlight.  We went to bed early to make sure we could get up early to see the sunrise.

We woke up the next morning after a rather uncomfortable night on the ground to see the sunrise.  It was extremely beautiful.  They drove us to Trinity Beach to spot dolphins and eat breakfast.  We didn’t see any until after a breakfast of eggs and bacon and bread and nutella.  We then packed up and drove to Port Douglas.  We wandered through the Sunday Markets and made our way to Four Mile Beach, picking up an ice cream along the way of course.  Four Mile Beach is an amazingly flat beach of white sand, and although it was very crowded we were able to find our own little area to lie out.  The water was wonderful and we ventured over some rocks and found some very cool tide pools.  We had about three hours of hanging around the beach before we jumped in the van for the drive back.  On the drive we saw wallabies in the wild, because their habitat has been taken away by housing complexes they now graze on grass in horse pastures, which is pretty cute.  Then, just as we thought it was going to be a rather uneventful weekend in the aviary category, we saw a kookaburra! It had bright blue wings and a rusty tail, which means it was a female.  And just when we thought it couldn’t get any more “wild kingdom” our guide George informed us that if it was low tide we may just see a crocodile.  Considering that this was the man that told me to stop eating nutella or I would become as dark as him, I didn’t exactly believe him, but as we drove over a bridge there they were! Three rather large “salties” were sunning themselves on the bank of the river.  It was a pretty exciting weekend, even thought it was a bit exhausting.  We got home in the late afternoon and made dinner and tried to comprehend that we had a full day of school the next day. 

 Yoga at sunrise, good way to try to fix your back after a night on the ground.

Bird Spotting

Today was the beginning of the third week.  It’s pretty amazing to think that I’ve already been here for more than a month while most people haven’t even left yet for studying abroad.

Anyway, what made today special, other than finding out how to effectively catch and preserve a spider, were the bird sightings.  In the morning I finally figured out that the bird my housemates and I had been seeing quite frequently was a “Bustard”.  It’s a large-ish bird that stands on these tiny skinny legs and we only see them after dark in pairs.  They look a bit like an over grown roadrunner and apparently it is easier to approach in a vehicle than on foot, or so the bird book says.  Another exciting bird find was the sighting of Figbird (the northern form).  It’s about the “size of an oriole” and has a bright yellow chest and a red mask.  It’s nice to see bright bizarre species like this remind me that I’m actually right next to the rainforest.  Right after class I rushed home to record it in the bird book, which has now become pretty much a scavenger hunt guide for my housemates and me.

I finished off the day by going to the first “training” for the Cairns vs. Townsville competition.  The two JCUs (James Cook Universities) in this region have a competition in a bunch of different activities and one of them is a co-ed soccer game. However, because JCU Cairns only has a men’s soccer team they are asking any girls at the university to join for this one game.  My housemate Jennifer and I went out and ran around for about an hour and a half and had a great time, and I learned I was very out of shape.  It was a pretty good way to start the week, although it was rather exhausting.

Weird Tropical Fruits

The second week of classes was rather uneventful, other than the ripening of the custard apple!  On Tuesday night, which also happens to be the night that the pizza places have cheap deals and there are 1$ movie rentals, we decided that the custard apple was ripe enough to try.  So we tore it open and began experience this weird tropical fruit.  It has a white-ish flesh that is segmented in such a way that it almost looks like fish.  Inside of each segment of fruit there is a large dark brown seed.  The fruit has the texture or a mongo without all the fibers, but it tastes like a mix of mango, pineapple and lychee.  It was a very odd fruit, and I ended up eating way more than my housemates, who didn’t seem to enjoy it too much.

That was pretty much the excitement of the week, other than having a huge meal of chicken and mashed potatoes and salad and dessert of ice cream with passion fruit and pomegranate seeds.  It was a pretty nice week and tomorrow we’re venturing out to see the ‘Direct Factory Outlets’ and to see Chue’s friends at Rusty’s market.