New Zealand

We landed perfectly in New Zealand. Sadly, it was dark when we landed so we couldn't see any of the beauty. However, when we wake up bright and early in the morning at our terrific accommodation... the arcade in the international terminal, we will go pick up the car and start our adventure. We have all of our bags stashed away, we have makeshift beds, we had a splendid dinner from the vending machine, and the last incoming flight came about an hour ago, so it has quieted down some. We bought some "supplies" at the duty free and will probably make use of them to enjoy the night more.
Here are some pictures of our set up.

The Toowoomba Show and Brisbane

The Toowoomba Show... Oh boy. Now I'm sure you've all been to a state fair, the Tunbridge Fair being a good example of one of those... so take the greasy food, the rides, the games, the animals, and the "less than clean" people and multiply it all by 3. That is the Toowoomba Show. Lauren and I hopped into a cab and went to the Toowoommba Show for the night last week. It was a fun night filled with lots of tasty, yet artery clogging food, walking through animal barns, people watching, and sitting and watching "The Biggest Fireworks Show Toowoomba has ever seen." This fireworks, or sparkler, show clearly didn't surprise me that it was the biggest Toowoomba had ever seen. It was weird how they did it... there were 3 rounds of fireworks, each lasting roughly ten minutes. Each one slightly better than the first. By the third round they were some decent fireworks... but they were definitely on the "Toowoomba Level." The one really interesting thing about the Toowoomba Show is that it is a town Holiday. So on Thursday (the day the show starts) practically everyone in town has the day off. This of course means that the bus doesn't run. Obviously. All in all... it was a really fun night. I'm glad I went. There will be some pictures coming.

Brisbane was really fun! The excitement started off Friday morning when Casey and Michelle came back from downtown Toowoomba with our RENTAL CARRRR! I was like a kid in a candy shop. Finally we had a car that was our own. No schedules of when the bus left, no Toowoomba Transit, and no taxi. It was perfect! Casey let me take a spin in our compact car around the student village. While pulling out of our driveway onto the street I turned the wipers on while trying to use the turn signal, and I pulled into the right side of the road... WHOOPS! The wiper and turn signal/headlights are are on the opposite sides of the steering wheel. After we finished packing our clothes and our food for the next two days we climbed in, selected a good radio station and proceeded on our way to Brisbane. Obviously we got lost in Toowoomba on the way out... you can't leave! But eventually we got on the highway heading east. We had the windows down, the music blaring, and we were free! Casey did a BEAUTIFUL job driving. Never once was he on the wrong side of the road or anything like that. Although I think the wiper instead of blinker tally was up to 6 by the time we got back to The Village.

In Brisbane we did a lot of walking around, some shopping, we went out to dinner, and then to some clubs. Lauren and I went on a massive ferris wheel that provided great views of the city... much like the London Eye in London. It was a great way to see the sights! We called it an early night though, because we wanted to get up early to make the most out of Saturday. On Saturday morning we remembered that there was a concert in downtown Brisbane promoting safe decisions for teenage youth. The host of VideoHits (Australian MTV) was there as well as the personalities from the local radio station. There were three bands that performed (we saw the last two) and they were pretty good. The first was a singer named Bob Evans, he was very good! The second was a band called The Butterfly Effect. They're apparently a famous band in Australia? The fame of all of these people was lost on us.

After the concerts we decided to cross the river and go to the man made beach that Brisbane has. Thankfully, this beach is not on the river... as it is a gross shade of brown. Instead, there are 2 man made pools with chlorinated water surrounded with beautiful white sand. It was so fun... we sat there for the afternoon until a MASSIVE rain shower came out of nowhere and soaked us. We hid out in the bathrooms until the rain passed. Once the sun came back out we remembered that there was a market (regarded highly in our travel books) right behind the beaches... so we did some looking and walking until it was time to leave. Like always, getting back into that car to head back to Toowoomba wasn't high on our list of things to do. But it had to be done.

Once back in Toowoomba we basically drove around all night. We loved our car so much that we didn't want to do anything without it. Sunday morning we took the car to a HUGE farmer's market downtown with INSANELY cheap fruits and vegetables. Yes, I even bought some. After that it was a rush to bring the car back and continue our slow lives in the Village.

Pictures from Brisbane will be coming soon.
New Zealand is coming right up - THURSDAY! I can't wait at all! I'm glad I was able to be the passenger in the car in Brisbane with a good driver, because I think it will be good practice for my driving in New Zealand.

Hope all is well at home!
Miss you all!

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!

Indian Culture

Now, I'm no expert on Indian culture... but the student village is made up almost entirely of students from India, so I think I have learned some things. I will share these with you.

Today is our roommate, Dev's, Birthday. He is in his final year here at USQ and has been living in Toowoomba and "the village" for almost 3 years now. On our first day he asked us how were liking Toowoomba, we said it was nice... he replied: "Give it a month." haha. Now last night at midnight (the start of Dev's Birthday) almost 20 of Dev's friends came with two cakes. Now this excited us greatly, because we all wanted some cake. But little did we know that all of this cake would be cut into nice pieces and then each would take one of these nice pieces, and "feed" them to Dev. I say feed loosely because they basically crammed them into his face, his hair, and unavoidably onto the floor! A very fun tradition, I think!

The other thing I've noticed is that Indians like to share things! Including houses. haha. I've said to Lauren that when we go back to the US it's going to be weird to not have a random Indian guy walk through my living room. Sometimes they come in to go see Dev in his room, other times they come grab a pot or a pan, sometimes they just walk through to go from their townhouses behind ours, to the townhouses on the other side. So needless to say, they keep it interesting.

I haven't noticed too many other fun Indian facts... but if I find any more, I'll let you know.

Other than that, things are good. We may try to go to Brisbane for a night or two this weekend... we need to get out of Toowoomba for a while. haha.
I have a quiz today in my Psych class, so I'm heading to the library to study for that!

Hope all is well at home!
Miss you all!

Lazy Day

Today ended up being a very lazy day. We woke up late, had some breakfast on the porch, then proceeded to play cards for the better portion of the day. I introduced everyone to a Luttrell favorite - multiple person solitaire. It was an instant hit. We must have played close to 50 games today.

We paused the card playing to have a "family" dinner. Everyone brought something to contribute and we all had a really tasty dinner together. There was pasta with meat sauce, a roasted chicken, bean salad, and some nice appetizers. After dinner the solitaire continued, until all of the power in the student village went out for no apparent reason. We decided it was much more fun outside, so we pulled the couches out into the driveway and sat and watched the stars and the moon rise. After an hour or so we decided we should do a drive-in movie... so I brought my laptop out and we started a movie. Only for the power to come on 10 minutes later. But we kept the movie going anyway.

All in all, it was a good day.
Tomorrow I am going to the library to get my work done for this week. I am telling you this because the more I say it, the more likely this is to actually happen.
Hope all is well!
Miss you all!

And god said "Let there be photos!"

And there were photos...

Over to the right of this post is the first photo album!!! Now that I know how to do it I can start uploading more... but it does take some time.

It's a long process involving pressing buttons, downloading, uploading, downloading again, pulling levers, throwing a shotput at least 100yds, pulling more levers, milking a cow and selling the milk at a farmer's market, painting an exact replica of the mona lisa, more downloading, pulling a few more levers, and finally, some uploading.

It's not for the faint of heart.
But enjoy the photos... if you click on the little photo on the right it will open the slideshow in a larger form. :)

Miss you all!

Toowoomba for the weekend

I'll be having a relaxing weekend in Toowoomba this weekend. I think it's needed.
Today was 25% productive for me. I say this because I had 4 things on my to-do list for today... and one of them was accomplished: grocery shopping. Now, this was a very involved chore. There were bus rides, lots of walking, and stumbling about town to find a bus because we left our timetable at home. Whoops. However, after about 4 hours we were back to the student village with our much needed groceries. I actually stuck pretty close to my budget too :).

Tonight we're having friends over and I'm teaching them a Jandreau Favorite - Pay Me!
I am very excited... we have the cards, and I've instructed everyone to come with their 65 cents. There is a chance we'll go to the UniClub tonight, but probably not. However, we may head down to the clubs in Toowoomba tomorrow night. We'll see.

We've also talked about doing a movie marathon day this weekend. All of the movies that were in theaters when we left the states are playing here now, so we can catch up on the ones we wanted to see.

Aside from that, it should be a nice relaxing weekend. I do have a little bit of homework to do, but that shouldn't take too long. I will most likely push that off until Monday. I do like 4 day weekends!!

Alrighty... that's about it for now. If anything new and eventful occurs here in Toowoomba (doubtful) I'll be sure to let everyone know. Oh, and I'm still working on uploading photos to the blog in the form of albums. I think I finally know how to do it... I just have to get to the internet cafe and to faster internet so I can actually upload them.

Hope everyone is well!
Miss you all!