Events, plans, and fun times.

So now it has been almost a week since I moved into the new apartment. I am so glad that I moved, I am enjoying living here a lot more than I was in my old place. All of my housemates are really cool and a lot of fun. It's nice having other people around just to hang out with, and whats even better is that they are into a lot of the same stuff that I am. Julie is obsessed with family guy and everyone else likes it too, we also all like a lot of the same movies, and Julie brought a bunch of movies from home, so that's pretty awesome. On Saturday Lindsay, Lauren, Julie, some girls from next door and myself all went down to the Mardi Gras (and if you were wondering...yes, I did feel like a pimp being with all those girls, haha).

So Mardi Gras was a lot of fun, it was actually the gay and lesbian Mardi Gras, so it was very interesting and quite amusing. I may not do it justice, so check out the pictures on my facebook. Although my camera did die about half way through the parade...grrr. The parade was very colorful, obviously, and some people had very elaborate costumes, while other had nothing but a thong and nipple stars (unfortunately, this of course was the case with the people that you would hope would have the most clothes on!) Moving on...haha. So there were all types of groups in the parade, from the "big bears" club, to the "leather lovers" club...there should have been an age minimum to attend this parade! Haha. But, overall the parade was very entertaining and we all had lots of fun. After the parade we went to this awesome, 4-story bar, which was a lot of fun.

So staying on the housemate oriented path...we just planned out our spring break trip. So here is our plan:

Day 1: Flight from Sydeny to Gold Coast, and depending on what time we get there we will figure out what we do that day
Day 2: Dreamworld (it's a really cool theme park with tons of roller coasters and rides
Day 3: White Water World (water park)
Day 4-5: Beach time, basically do whatever we want
Day 6: Bus from the Gold Coast to Brisbane
Day 7: Crocodile Zoo
Day 8: Flight from Brisbane to Cairns
Day 9: Rain forest
Day 10: Reef (snorkeling, scuba diving)
Day 11: White Water Rafting
Day 12: Skydiving
Day 13: Flight back to Sydney

So these are the events that we have planned, and obviously something like "flight from Brisbane to Cairns" doesn't take all day, so we will be checking out the local areas and find cool stuff to do.

We went to the travel agency on campus and they help us set up the whole trip. They helped us plan out what events we wanted to do, found us housing, arranged all travel, and also gave tips on cool places to go. So we are all very excited about the trip; it should be awesome. So it is going to be Lauren, Lindsay, Julie, and myself on the trip. Ali apparently doesn't really like Australia (I know, ridiculous!), so I'm not sure what he is doing for spring break. Some girls two houses down were talking about going maybe, but I don't think they will. But, either way I will be the only guy again, haha. I have no problem with it, haha. I have an awesome time with them and it's cool being in that situation...more attention, haha.

So anyways...I actually also planned another skydiving trip for this weekend (the 14th). I didn't know we were going to be doing skydiving on the spring break trip, so I guess I'll be able to do something awesome twice on the same trip.

So school here is very different than in the US. Grades are made up of only a handful of grades, whereas in the US grades are made up of many different types of assessment. For example: in the US, we will have several small tests, papers, projects, a mid-term, and a final exam, whereas here there is maybe only one test, two papers, and one project. I don't have any exams this semester, but I do have a few papers that are worth 40 or 50% or my overall grade for that course. Another large difference is that there is a lot more reading here. For my Intro to World History course I just had to read about 100 pages for homework, in addition to the other 40-70 pages for each other class. So yeah, I have to read a lot. I guess it's a good thing that the courses I enrolled in are very interesting to me.

Two of my courses are especially interesting: during the lectures all we do is watch videos on music/dance/art, and then during the tutorials all we do is talk about the demonstration we watched; it's pretty awesome. Last week during my lecture for Contemporary Australian Arts we actually had a performer come in and talk about how he gets his ideas for music and then he performed two songs. He was really good, and many people agreed that his music had a striking resemblance to Jack Johnson (who, if you don't know, is a very popular rock/alternative musician in the US), so that was really cool.

I am having a lot of fun here and I like it a lot. I am very happy about my housing situation now and I will be taking a video of my apartment soon. I would love to hear from you...or get a package :-)

Thanks for reading!