Time is Winding Down

Well, it’s October, and I only have until the very beginning of December left here. My time continues to be awesome, I had a very strange but amazing time last night, which I will tell you all about. It is kind of winding down now, though, less events to go to, less new clubs or bars to see. Mostly what I have left now is my trip to New Zealand and all my final papers, and then my dad comes to visit, and then I head home! Crazy.

I’m still sick, though way less than I was. I can sleep through the night without having to cough or get water or blow my nose, and during the day I just have to cough and blow my nose every so often. I’m still trying to just hang out and get rest and get over it though, so I haven’t been doing too much.

But, on Wednesday night, it was the last turn of the semester, and the last black tie formal dinner. Kind of a sad event, it was sort of in honor of the third years, since most people graduate in three years and leave on campus housing. Lots of the Third North-ers are third years, and it was really sad for them. One tradition they have is singing a song after the dinner that’s like a goodbye song, so they chose “Piano Man”, and everyone ended up crying. Even the guys! It was really bittersweet, because I could tell how much everyone loved each other, but now they felt it was the end of their time together. Olivia and I got up and sang “Piano Man” with them since we are technically leaving Queens too after this semester.

Me and Sarah J!!! Love this girl. :D

Had to dress up! These are a couple people from my corridor. :)

Matt, me, and Ray. I LOVE these guys. :) (it wasn't my idea to do this face, if that tells you anything about how cool these guys are.)

I didn’t cry or anything, because I really felt like it wasn’t over yet, I’m not going to let myself get sad yet. I still have a little over a month left! Sheesh.

So after the goodbye song, there was a turn, and I ended up staying for the entirety of it. It was the last turn I will probably ever go to, so I just went to that and stayed till the end, and ended up skipping my tutorial in the morning, because I was still sick and now very tired from dancing until one in the morning. It was a great turn, the best I have been to. Probably because everyone was there. At most turns, lots of people leave early or just don’t go because of work or class, but since this was the last one everyone was there.

Me and Akhila, on Third North, of course.

And this is Hannah, she's pretty mega awesome.

Hahahahaha, the boys! Matt, Malley, and Dan. :D

Awwww and me, Kat (LOVE HER) and Sarah W.

So that set me back a bit on my cold, I think, but I have been recuperating.

Last night, however, Olivia and I had to fulfill our plan of getting tacos at this one taco place that was the only one we have found in the whole city called Taco Bill’s. and we figured we should go all out with the Mexican experience and get margaritas, because I won’t have a chance to legally order a margarita again when we go back to the States until June, and Olivia won’t have a chance until the end of December (not that long of a time, but still, gotta get our margaritas!). And boy, did we order margaritas. We actually got the “share” margarita, which is really just a giant bowl filled with margarita with two straws in it. It was AMAZING. Though very daunting, and I didn’t want to be stumbling home, but luckily Olivia drank more than me and I wasn’t left too inebriated.

Yes, it was THAT big. *____*

One of the reasons we actually finished, however, was that the table next to us challenged us to a race, and said that they could order a two-person margarita and finish it before us even though Olivia and I had been working on it for an hour. Of course, we couldn’t let them win a race like that, when we only had about a quarter of the bowl left, so we accepted their race.

Which led to us chugging the rest of it, because one of them could seriously drink it down, I’m talking championship drinking contest style, but the other one drank it about as fast as I did, a.k.a. slowly. So we won! We didn’t actually bet anything since we didn’t really have anything to bet, but it was funny.
They were just two guys who, we found out, worked on computer software, designing things like iPhone apps and stuff like that. They were really fun and nice. Only one of them was at all attractive, though, so it wasn’t like Olivia and I could pair off with them or anything.

Then, as we were all leaving, we ended up leaving at the same time, and a girl came up to my table and offered an extra cake that she had for her friend’s birthday that they didn’t need, so of course I took that cake off her hands!!! Hahaha. Who am I to refuse a free, perfectly delicious looking cake? Not exactly my kind of cake, which would have been smothered in chocolate and served with ice cream. It was a layer of whipped cream and raspberry jelly between two cakes. With powdered sugar on top. Not so interesting. If I was was the girl having the birthday, I would have been very offended if my friends bought me a cake like that, but you know, that’s just me.

So we headed out the restaurant with a free cake AND a free sombrero that you get when you order a super giant big gulp bowl of margarita! Yes! It was great. :)

And then the guys (Neil and Jared) told us they lived like a block away, and Olivia just kept walking with them as they walked to their apartment. I was kind of like, … Olivia, we are not going home with these guys, not sure why you would want to go to their apartment… but then it ended up being kind of normal, they just showed us their apartment and their really great view from their balcony and then we left again. They decided to go to the bar downstairs of their apartment building, and they invited us along.

I guess Olivia and I just didn’t really want to go home, we wanted something to do, which is what led us to go to their apartment and the bar with them, but it was just such a surreal night.

The bar we went to was strange. Not happenin’ at all, kind of older crowds, like 30-year-olds, and very few people. And we got there at like ten, so maybe it gets more exciting later, but still. The guys bought Olivia and I a beers. There was also this room in the back that was like a restaurant, though it think it’s for catered events, because all the tables were round with like eight chairs. But it was very strange, it had fake grass on the floor and a fountain and fold out white fences with fake flowers. It looked like there was going to be a wedding reception there. Why you would want Astroturf there, I have no idea.

But Olivia and I finished our beers and decided to head out. The guys left the bar when we did and we just parted ways. I’m not sure the guys expected anything else, they didn’t seem the type to expect anything, being nerdy software designers, but it seemed like they were just simply enjoying our company like we were enjoying theirs.

And Olivia and I headed back to Queens on a tram, and I brought my cake up to Third North so it would be eaten, and then I stayed up late with a couple people watching funny youtube clips.

It was a great night. In a really strange way.

I think it will make me miss Queens and Australia more, though. I keep getting reminded when I go up to Third North that I will be leaving, and that makes me pretty sad. Everyone’s always asking me when I’m leaving and stuff, so I end up think about it a lot.

But I am also weirdly excited to go home. I just miss the familiarity and comfort I have back home. And I miss my family and friends and dog and fish.

OH! And, I can’t remember if I blogged this or not yet, but I am going salsa dancing tomorrow night! I’m going with Lucy, my friend from Queens, and hopefully Hannah from Third North and maybe Matt… heh heh heh. I hope he comes. I think I’ll go up there today and see if he or anyone else is around. See if they want to come salsa dancing. I’m SO EXCITED!!!! I have been preparing myself by listening to Spanish or Mexican- inspired music today, like Yerba Buena and Gotan Project. Geeeeheeheehee.

I may even go buy a cute dress to wear tomorrow night. Though I am extremely content to continue to sit in bed and watch tv and kind of work on papers-ish, I would like something really pretty to wear tomorrow night.

Alright! Time to get my butt moving. I hope you enjoyed this post! Hit me up in the comments section and I may get you a souvenir!! Heehee. Lots and lots of love!!! Xoxoxo

(p.s. okay, so now the picture thing is working. I will see about putting up Bentley Day pictures!)

A Much-Needed Update from My Sick Bed

Soooooo it’s been a while, dear readers. But I thought you deserved a real update. I postdated it, because I wrote it a couple days ago, but I haven't been able to add photos because blogger is keeping me from finishing my Cairns pictures upload (ARGGHHH) and I will post a real update again soooon! :)

Just wanted to put this up because IT'S MY MOM'S BIRTHDAY (In the states, it already was here, technically...)!!!!!! Happy Birthday, Mom! I love youuuu! Wish I could celebrate with you. Have lots of cake and sweets for me!

I’m sorry I’ve been so terrible at posting, I think I got out of the habit when my mom was here, and it’s taking me a while to get back into the swing of things.

Not much has been happening lately, but I will go over what I’ve been doing these past… three-ish weeks.

So the last week of springbreak was my big fat lazy week of nothing. All I did was watch tv and get my contemporary art paper done. It got done on time on Saturday, so I wouldn’t have to work on it at all on Sunday or Monday.

The reason I couldn’t work on it at all on Sunday, a usually full work-on-paper day, was that it was … Bentley Day. BUM BUM BUUUUUUM.

Bentley Day

A beautiful day in the life of a college student.

We all paid $25 beforehand, and for that entire day, we got food and drinks continuously aaaaaalllllllllll daaaaaaaaaay looooong.

Ahhhh, a magical day. It started with a champagne breakfast at 8:30 am, with cereal, fruit, hash browns, eggs, bacon, and champagne.

Then we headed over to one of our regular pubs, Dan O’Connell’s, where we could buy more drinks if we wanted (the only drinks we would have to pay for all day), and they had this one tradition where they pick one fresher (a first year at Queens) guess the outcome of each of the inter-corridor volleyball games played this year, and if he got any wrong, he would have to chug a beer. This is a role I would not want.

After the pub, we walked back to Queens to find a delicious spit roast lunch, with a ton of spit roasted meat, potatoes, pasta salad, and cole slaw, along with the drinks that would be served all day, which included alcoholic punch, which was some weird mix of cheap wine, orange juice, and pineapple juice I think; beer, or I think they called it dry and dry, but I don’t know what that means; and my favorite, slushie. The slushie had two flavors, berry and grape, and of course it had some alcohol in it, but I have no idea what kind. But it was DELICIOUS.

So we continued to drink throughout the rest of the day. There were various activities, we had the final inter-corridor volleyball game, during which most of third-north and I just started a massage line on the grass.

Then we had a band come and play some AWESOME songs. (It’s possible I thought they were more awesome because of the liquidated state I was in, but I had a great time nevertheless.) They played songs like “Dani California” and “By the Way” by Red Hot Chili Peppers, and songs by The Fratellis, and some of those old songs from the nineties that everyone still totally loves, like “I’ll Never Let You Go” by Third Eye Blind and “Better Days” by the Goo Goo Dolls. I only danced to a couple, because it was really warm out and I was drinking and kind of just wanting to fall asleep on the grass. There was also just music played after the band left, like popular songs right now.

There was also a mechanical bull. *__* I didn’t go on it. I didn’t feel like possibly embarrassing myself, and it also looked really hard to ride. But a LOT of people went on. It was very popular.

There was also a big tug of war between the old GC and the new GC, which stands for General Committee, which is the elected body of students who pretty much run the school and plan events and stuff, like student council. I missed this though, because I went to wake up Olivia from a nap that she wanted to take after the volleyball game, and I promised her I would wake her up. I ended up getting there ten minutes before she wanted to get up, so I just crawled in bed and dozed off for ten minutes, haha. It was pretty nice, the day can be kind of wearing on you.

Let’s see.

Then after the band left, they served us deeeee-LICIOUS dinner!!! Mom, if you remember that Greek place we went to, Stalactites, it was like that. Not quite the same type of oh so meaty and delicious, but still very good.

And then we had a dance (a turn!) that started at 6:30 pm haha. The earliest dance I’ve ever been to! But seriously, the day was sooooooo long by then, so the dance started at 6:30 and ended at 8:30, so we had a twelve hour day. The dance was pretty fun, but, as usual when serving booze next to a dance floor, the floor got soooo wet with spilled beer or punch or you name it. It gets like that at every dance, but it seemed more pronounced at this one.

And then we all left at about 8:45 to go to our rooms, I of course went up to third north for a bit to hang out with my homies and then went to my room, watched some tv probably, and went to bed. Huh, that’s funny, the only thing I can’t really remember about that day is what I watched that night, and I must have watched something.

So that was last last Sunday.

I haven’t done much since then. Last weekend, I went with Monika to Pug’s to catch up, I wanted to ask her about her trip to New Zealand and I told her about my trip to Cairns. At the time, I was thinking I would end up going to NZ alone, because, after a long, drawn-out, exasperated period of trip to plan with Olivia when to go, Olivia tells me she can only go in October, leaving on the 17^th (two days from now!!! Two weeks from when we were planning this!!! Geez.) which would make plane tickets soooo expensive, and she also only wanted to do a pre-planned tour that would cost more than a thousand dollars, and she wouldn’t budge from these plans, so if I wanted to go with some to NZ, I would have to go by her plan. I was like, what the eff, no. Be considerate of what I want to do, please. That’s kind of what you do when you’re planning a trip with someone. But then she completely backed out, saying it was too stressful to try to fit this in before she leaves, so she’s just not going to NZ at all. She was too set on leaving November 18^th.

BUT I have some awesome news involving New Zealand…

MY SISTER ANNA IS COMING WITH ME AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!

Yes, I know you’re all jealous because we are going to be two sisters, lolloping around New Zealand having awesome adventures and re-enacting Lord of the Rings scenes, but not to worry, I will write all of it down here so you can live through me. :)

I am SO STOKED. You guys don’t even know. I’ve been wanted to go on a trip with my sister for soooo long. Even just a road trip, and we never have. And now we’re going to NEW ZEALAND together!

And I am so thankful for her being so on board for this. I know it was a HUGE chunk of change for those plane tickets, but luckily Anna has a bunch of money saved up. And I know it’s short notice and stuff, but the trip itself is just going to be so awesome, time will probably fly by and we will be waaay busy doing awesome things the whole time.

I’m so excited. We both just booked our tickets, and now I need to go to the STA student travel office to book those and figure out if I need to book Anna’s or if she should, etc, etc. also make sure we have accommodation every night. But I’ve done it all before! Easy peezy Japanese-y! :D

Alas, I have to end this post with my current state of being: sick. There is this terrible cold going around Queens, and I caught it!! Ugghhh. It really is nasty. I just got it a couple days ago, and I was thinking, oh, this isn’t so bad, I won’t let it get to me, it’s just a cough and lots of nose-blowing. Boy, was I wrong. This is the cold Olivia was complaining about a couple days ago when I was like dear lord, woman, we have the same cold and I’m not complaining! Get over it! But then she got a fever last night, and I have been hacking out some pretty gross stuff. Like last night, I would wake up to cough out some grossness from the back of my throat. And this morning I coughed up some things you would not believe. It was like snot on steroids.

But luckily it’s Friday, and I have no class and I can just sit in bed and blog and watch Harry Potter movies and drink seventeen glasses of water. Oh, and it’s raining outside, so there is officially no reason for me to go out other than to get food. Huzzah!

So that’s what I’m doing today! Updating this poor neglected blog and putting up pictures on facebook and watching movies and tv! The vacuuming lady is about to come in, and I hate always being still in my jim jams, just sitting in bed when she comes in, but today I have an excuse! I’m sick! Of course I shouldn’t put on real clothes and get out of bed. It’s like, law.

So that’s what I’ll leave you with. Enjoy the pictures! It’s gonna take me a loooong time to put them up. I will post more often, I promise!

Lots of love! Can’t wait to see everyone again soon, even though I love it here. Xoxo!

Didgeridoo!

Another MASSIVE CAIRNS PICTURE POST!!!

Well here ya go, you guys! This is the beginning half of my Cairns trip. :) Above is my daily breakfast of bread with nutella, nom nom.

This was my room at the hostel.

View of the hostel

My room was on the second story, furthest door to the left in this photo below.

Hey look! A mall right across the street!

The bar with the Blues Brothers just hangin' out.

Pretty much what the weather was like the whole time, half rainy, half beautiful

This is The Lagoon, the big free public pool right by the dock. Except the drought means very little water just offshore, so there was a weird contrast between the pool and the "beach."

This is my "ugghhhh so hot and sticky, oh and how's my hair?" face.

The dock.

Seeeeeea plaaaaane!

This is started torrential-downpour-ing.

Lots of planes went over. I think this was a big takeoff point for flights to Asia.

They had a ton of weird birds.

LOST trees ooooooooh!!!!

This picture shows it a little better.

And they had a playground/kiddie water park along the esplanade.

YUM. WANT.

The night markets. I thought it would have cool artsy craftsy stuff, but nope, more tourist grossness.

kangaroo jerky... :(

Ok, this is the bar I thought Lurker Norm invited me to. I'm not sure you can see (you should click on the picture) but there are big signs for Pole Idol all over the place.

Next day, taking the boat to the reef! These are just some big cruise boats.

Um. Lady with the bikini shirt? How very American of you.

My snorkeling gear!!!! hee heeh eeeee ITWASSOFUN

(I will put in the underwater pics next post. We sailed the way back.)

BWAAAAA GOT A PIC OF LURKER NORM!!!!! CLICK TO ENLARGE!!!!

Mmmm my studly scuba instructor/magician future hubby is next to the blonde haired buy, shaking hands with the guy in the blue shirt.

Next Day! Skyrail to Kuranda! Here is takeoff! Wheeeeee

Alright, it goes a little high...

It stopped at two places to walk through the forest and see the falls from afar.

Very pretty. :)

Well now, there's the falls!

This is what it's like it wet season *__* :