A while now...

It has been way too long since my last post! Sorry 'bout that.

Things keep going well down here. I've been slightly more pre-occupied with class, but still managing to have some fun on top of that. Well, as much as Toowoomba allows for. I have been here for over 6 weeks, and that is hard for me to imagine. Time has been flying by and I think that's really going to bother me come the end of June.

We didn't do too much this past weekend. Some of us went down into Toowoomba for dinner at the Hog's Breath Cafe. It's a chain restaurant much like Chili's or Applebee's and our friend Stephanie recently got a job there... so we thought it would be nice to surprise her. We were clearly her coolest customers that night. After dinner we went to a few bars and hung out for a while. It's weird... we went to one bar called Cube, and it was very modern, chic, and had a great dance floor. It would be a great bar... if it wasn't in Toowoomba. Now Toowoomba is a nice, cute little town... but it's pretty boring. Especially without a car. Regardless, we made our own fun. As we do every night.

Let me tell you all a little about USQ.
USQ is a pretty laid back university. Classes start, on average, 5-10 minutes late (which is perfect for me), we call all of our professors by their first name, and the way classes are set up is weird. Here I have 1 lecture for each class and then either a lab or a tutorial. (Have I talked about this before? I think I have... oh well.) The tutorial usually goes over the material learned in lecture, but sometimes has it's own new material. USQ itself is much like VTC, for those of you from Bethel. It is a smaller school, and most of the students commute from as far as an hour or two outside of Toowoomba. As a result, campus is usually dead on the weekends. 30% of the students here are international, and most of them live in The Village. In our classes we only have some mini assignments throughout the semester, and then we have a large exam at the end which counts for almost all of our grade. So I am taking this time now to have fun, before I have to buy a plot of land in the library for 2 weeks. I guess that's all I have to say about USQ... when I wrote this post in my head a few days ago while walking to class I swear I had more to say...

This weekend Lauren, Trina, Casey, Michelle, and myself are all going to Brisbane for a night. We're renting a car, driving to the city Friday morning, hanging out until Saturday night, coming back, and running some errands with the car Sunday morning before we have to return it. It should be interesting to drive on the left for the first time. Sadly, I cannot drive... as I'm not 21 yet. So Casey will be behind the wheel. Now this could provide for some serious entertainment, or some very empty wallets. You see, Casey is maybe the MOST "type-A" person I've ever met. He might also have a touch of OCD thrown in there as well. So watching him getting flustered behind the wheel could be slightly amusing. Providing, there are no semi-trucks coming our way.

This will be my last weekend in Australia for nearly 3 weeks. Next Thursday is when we leave for NZ for 18 days!!! Can't wait! The original plan was to go on this bus tour called Kiwi Experience, which basically drives college kids around for a few weeks. But it's pretty costly, and we decided that renting a car for 18 days would be cheaper, fun, and I'm sure... much more interesting. I'm currently in the works of finding car companies that will rent to under 21YOs. But from what I've seen so far, it should cut our costs in half. Now, the downside of this plan is that we won't meet all of the other kids on the kiwi experience, nor get the pre-planned route. However, there is a solution to everything, and for this, it's simple: follow the bus. So that is our intention, follow the bus, stay at the same hostels, and meet everyone :).
(Whitney Taylor, you will be glad to know we're not taking the KiwiEx.)

That's pretty much all for now. I have more photos from Toowoomba to add, but for some reason they're not uploading onto the blog site. I think you can still access them, though. Just click on the Sydney Album on the blog page and it will bring you to Picasa... somewhere, there should be a link to all of my photos. This should take you to all of my albums. Hope all is well on the homefront!

Miss you all!