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.