Surfing

So obviously it would have been stupid to come to coastal Australia and not try to surf, so today, I went surfing for the first time! I wasn't expecting to be able to do very much, since the last time I tried to skate board I couldn't go for five metres before falling off, but I think I did pretty well for a first timer!

My mate Jake offered to take me out and give me some tips, and since he's been surfing since he was about six, I would have been stupid to turn him down! He lent me a board and a wetsuit, and when we got down to the beach he drew a board in the sand and made me practice on that for a bit... I did feel like a bit of an idiot but I knew it would be beneficial to try and get some sort of technique down. After a couple of minutes of leaping up from the sand, we went out into the sea.

I reckon conditions were pretty good for an amateur (not that I'm any kind of expert), and the waves were probably about the right size. After a bit of practice paddling around and ducking under waves, Jake pushed me onto my first wave. I could feel it breaking underneath me, and it was now or never so I tried to stand up, and obviously I failed, but it still felt great!

I went on like this for a while, and after about twenty minutes I'd managed to get up onto my knees, and about half an hour later I was on my feet (even if it was only for about half a second)! I was pretty chuffed with myself, but by that point, looming uni deadlines meant we had to come in.

Massive thank you to Jake though for giving up some of his time to teach me, hopefully, by the end of the year, I'll be as good as, if not better than this guy :p

The Party Bus!

The party bus is a special bus which takes everyone in Uni of Wollongong accommodation to and from nightclubs on a Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday for free! Loud music plays, bright coloured lights set the mood, and there are poles for dancing on. If you know me well enough, then you'll probably have guessed how much I love it!

Usually heaps of people are dancing and people get up to whatever they want, but last night it was a little quieter so when my Norwegian friend Karina and I decided it would be a great idea to hang upside down from the railings - the driver saw us, and he was NOT impressed. We had to move from the back of the bus to the front... we walked slowly with our heads hanging low and everyone staring at us. It was like we were naughty school children again haha!

When the bus got to our stop, we were about to get off but the driver told us to sit back down. Once everyone else had got off he REALLY told us off! He was making some pretty good points though about how he is responsible for our well being, and how he couldn't be bothered to clean up the mess if we fell and broke our necks (fair play, neither would I!), so we just sat there staring at our shoes, agreeing with everything he said, and saying "sorry!" over and over again. Once he was finished, we scurried off the bus and giggled like a little child that knows they've got away with something (or grown-up drunken students that know they got away with something) :p

Until next time, Party bus (I promise not to be upside down next time).

A little blue pill and a mini mountain adventure

So most of this week, for me, has revolved around a little known treatment for male impotence called Viagra. Don't worry, I haven't had to take it, I've just had to write about it. I've not blogged a lot this week because I've spent all my time trying to find information about Viagra and haven't been able to do anything else! I'm not doing this for fun, in case you were wondering... I had to write my first literature review on any one of a list of given drugs for my medicinal chemistry module, and since it was the only one I'd heard of, I chose Viagra!

It wasn't all doom and gloom though this week, in fact I quite enjoyed writing it at times, so I'll share some facts about it with you...

-It was originally developed as a vasodilator to cure hypertension and angina, but during clinical trials, the research team noticed that many of the men who took the pill got erections
-This was due to the fact that it inhibited an enzyme in the smooth muscle of the penis, instead of the smooth muscle in arterial walls that it was supposed to act on
-The drug was developed by Pfizer, and was first prescribed in 1998
-It was initially prescribed at a rate of 10,000 pills per day in the USA
-Annual sales of the drug peaked in 2008 when worldwide sales gave a profit of about £1,100 million, which is pretty good, when Pfizer is a company that spends billions on advertising every year

And now you know a little bit about Viagra. Apart from looking at online journals, I went out a couple of times, saw a turtle/tortoise in the middle of Kooloobong, discovered the eels in the ponds on campus, went to the gym a few times, and played tennis with Charlie. Nothing interesting at all - so today I decided to climb a mountain.

Mount Keira, which is just behind Kooloobong, stands at about 460m above sea level (according to Wikipedia), and the route to the top is meant to be fairly logical and simple, but of course, because it's me, I got lost!

While I was climbing, the path I was on suddenly stopped and I was presented with a steep, rocky hill. I knew I'd gone the wrong way, but decided to climb up it anyway. It properly tired me out, so I sat down when I got to the top, but then I realised that I couldn't have gone any further if I wanted to because of the massive (and I'm talking huge) rocks that were now in my way! So after about half an hour of trying to see if there was a way to get around these rocks I decided that I should probably go back and try to find the path I was supposed to be on, but getting down was a lot harder than getting up, and I was genuinely terrified that I would slip and break my ankle or something. After slipping, scrambling and sliding my way down the hill I found a path, it wasn't the one I came up on, but it was better than nothing! I followed it for a while until I came to a road, and decided to try again another day and managed to find my way back.

Even if I was scared for my life (or at least me ankle) at some points and it was a massive fail (something that is starting to happen more and more!), I still had a crackin' time and probably made it to about 400m so didn't do too badly! It was just nice to be able to be on the mountain by myself surrounded by nature! I was hoping to bump into one of the lyrebirds or wallabies that apparently live up there, but I think the closest I came to either of them was seeing a large pile of animal poo on the path. I did think I could hear a lyrebird at one point, but it was probably something else that just made a cool noise...

Next time I try to climb it, I'll get to the top, the view is meant to be amazing, but since I didn't quite get there today, here are a few snaps of what I did manage to see :)

The steep, rocky hill I was on about

The tale of the nasty dragon lady

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, there was a small laboratory full of blossoming chemistry students in the quaint city of Wollongong. Life was good for the students, until one day a dragon came along and started to terrorise them all.

I'm bored of this metaphor now, but the dragon is the lab tech, and I'm pretty sure that if she wanted to, she COULD breathe fire. She has a voice that resembles that of a speaking crow, the posture of Quasimodo, and walks like she has a conical flask stuck up her rear end. She stomps around the lab like she's trying to break the floor! It's like the world's longest pms.

Every week she shouts at us for "incorrect lab etiquette" when we are only doing what we've been told to do for the last two years of our degrees, and every week she withholds solvents and reagents meaning that we get out from labs late.

This week, my group was the first to finish the experiment, and when we got back from the UV-vis sampler ten minutes before the end of class, she decided that she couldn't just be happy that we finished early for once, and declared to us that because we had one thing on our bench that we would have to do everyone else's cleaning in next week's lab! There was no use trying to argue back at her. She didn't care that we had finished cleaning within a minute of getting back. She didn't care about the fact that we still got out of class early. She just had to be angry at something.

I think someone needs to take one for the team and show her a good time.

Shotgun not.

The most unlucky two hours of my life

The time here is 9.50, which means I have been awake now for two and a bit hours.Within that tiny time frame, I have managed to fail so epically at life it's untrue!!

I went out last night, so didn't get much sleep. When I got up I decided to have a fried egg sandwich for breakfast (admittedly, an odd choice - you can blame Jon, Charli and Flic for that one), but I let the pan get too hot, and half of the egg stuck to it. When I was walking to class, I discovered that I'd left my iPod playing all night (which I didn't realise.. I thought that I was going crazy when I turned my laptop off and I could still hear the likes of Daft Punk and the Pokemon theme tune) so it was completely dead this morning...

When I got to class at 8.30 (I know I complain a lot about this class, but seriously, teenagers aren't supposed to be awake that early!) I realised that I didn't even have to be there because it was all stuff that I'd covered last year in Sheffield. After the lecture, I went to the library to print off my lab report, but then realised I didn't have my student card with me, so couldn't access the printers, then I went to find a book (which I wouldn't have been able to withdraw without student card anyway...) but all the copies had been taken out...

Adding insult to injury, I then went to the bank to try and deposit my travellers cheques, but couldn't because I didn't have my bank card or my passport on me. So now I am back in bed, about to have a nap and try again later. Here's hoping I don't blow anything up in labs later? Knowing my luck I'll end up with some sort of chemical burn :p

On a slightly different note, it doesn't feel great to be British at the moment what with all that's been going on with the riots. Please stay safe, I'd quite like to have some friends when I get back! I don't know if anyone reading this helped out with it, but I am so proud of everyone who volunteered to helped clean up after the riots - that's what Britain is all about: pulling together in times of need, keeping calm, and carrying on.

Slip n slide Sundays

What do you get when you mix a long strip of tarpaulin, heaps of soapy water, a hill, and some bored teenagers? Slip and slide, that's what! Apparently when it gets a little hotter (because to the Aussies it's freezing right now) the slip n slide comes out every couple of weeks. They're even thinking of getting a wider, thicker strip of tarp so that we can go down a bigger hill! For now though, since this was my first outdoor slip n slide experience, my need to have fun and get outdoors was fulfilled shortly after I donned a pair of my signature short shorts.

There was of course the unlucky side effect of being able to feel soap suds in all kind of unfortunate places, getting covered in cuts, bruises and scrapes and finding mud and blades of grass just about everywhere... oh, and slip n sliding too hard and hitting the trees at the bottom... twice. But that all adds to the fun of it! Can't wait until this is more of a regular occurrence!

Charli's birthday

So Charli, one of the English girls who came over from Lancaster uni, recently turned nineteen, so she decided that the English lot and Flic and Tim (her Aussie house mates) should take the train a few stops north to a little village called Austinmer. The only things in Austinmer are a few houses, a beautiful beach, and fish and chip shop.

First things first though, I'm going to talk about the trains. It was a double decker (blah, blah, seen them before they're all over continental Europe), but then we also got told that you can flip the seats around to be either forward or backward facing! Needless to say, all of the English were dumbfounded, and every Australian in the vicinity looked at us funny. When we got to Austinmer we went to the chippy and found out that the standard "fish" in fish and chips is shark! So of course I had to have it. Once it had been battered and fried though it didn't taste any different to standard cod - bit of a let down really! Despite the shark/cod/shod, the portion sizes were huge given that we only paid $10, which is refreshing in Australia!

After letting our food digest for a bit, we went to the beach. At one end there were rocks with rock pools etc, and at the other end there was something which is apparently pretty common on Aussie beaches (probably worldwide, but I live under a rock), which was a pool that gets filled by the sea water. It was a pretty good beach - no one was there because it is, of course, the middle of winter here, so we had the whole beach to ourselves! We splashed around a little, played football (or "soccer" ...) and buried our feet to our hearts' contents until it started to go dark and we headed home.

The following Wednesday night, Charli had an opp shop (charity shop) party - something I'll definitely be bringing back to Sheffield. Everyone looked amazing, and for $10, I managed to get some technicolour boxer shorts that I just wore as normal shorts and a pruple Hawaiian shirt. Unfortunately I don't think anybody got any pictures of me! But I'm sure the outfit will be reused so you will get to see it one day!

Instead of getting the usual 8.30 party bus (which I'll tell you more about another time), we decided to get the 9.30 bus because Flic said so. I was very, very drunk, so I would have done anything anyone told me to do. To our devastation though, getting the later bus meant we missed the free pizza at the Grand! Never making that mistake again! Because I was so drunk and there was no pizza to sober me up, I was pretty much chucked out at 10.30 and decided it would be a great idea to walk home instead of getting a taxi. It must have taken about an hour, and should have just waited to get the free party bus home at midnight! I guess it's just another lesson learnt: Never listen to Flic.

Lost in translation - and on campus

So the Australians have a great way of putting things. Half of the time I don't really understand them, and thank god they don't seem to have regional accents! Here are some of their linguistic tendencies that I've really taken a liking to...

Saying "hey" at the end of a sentence instead of "doesn't it" "wouldn't I" "isn't she" "haven't they" etc... Saying "heaps" instead of "loads" or "well." One I only noticed recently was that some of them say "but" at the end of a sentence, whereas we would say it at the start, and my personal favourite is the use of the word "froth" instead of "like" or "love" !

I heaps froth speaking like an Aussie, it takes some getting used to but, hey.

If you have a chance, look up this guy. Search for "Trent from Punchy" on Youtube and watch the videos. I guess he's the Australian equivalent of our MC Devo, and while we have chavs, the Aussies have bogans.

In terms of getting lost on campus, they don't seem to make campus maps and the buildings are not numbered in any logical order. During most of my first week I was late to the lectures because I had to try and navigate by using the signs on campus which aren't massively clear, but I got there in the end. If I ever have to try and find a different room though I'm screwed.

At least while I was lost, it was a stunning campus to be lost on. The pictures don't really capture it very well so I'll try to get some better ones up soon-ish!

O week and the Blue Mountains

So, O week (or orientation week) is the Australian equivalent of freshers' week back home I suppose, but because I came half way through their academic year, this O week wasn't very big (much like the "re-freshers weeks" that we have in January). There was still plenty to do though! The drinking continued, as well as a few excursions...

One of the trips was a visit to the Royal National Park, which is apparently the oldest national park in the world! We went down a trail which took us through bushland, forest, and rainforest. We started at quite a high altitude and the scenery and the plant life were beautiful. There was a small red flower that grew in marshy areas that was carnivorous and ate things like flies by getting them stuck on its sticky nectar. A little further along we started to see prints on the sandy trail, but unfortunately we didn't spot any animals apart from some bees (and I'm sure those who know me can predict how I reacted to them). When we got down to the rainforest part of the trail there was a stream that I drank from. I was expecting it to taste exotic and different, but it just tasted of water. Go figure.

As well as this, a few of us international students went on a trip to the Blue Mountains, which are just to the west of Sydney. After leaving on the Friday of O week and a two hour bus ride, we arrived at the hostel and had pizza galore! We got out our goon sacks and sat around drinking and getting to know each other (can you see a theme forming here?). I can't help but think that I got to know some of the English guys a little too well after a long game of I have never though! The next day we woke up bright and early to go abseiling! I'd never done it before on a proper rock face (in year 6 I did a mini abseil on a climbing wall) so I was really looking forward to it.

They started us off on a small wall of about 5m which was at an angle of about 75 degrees from the ground just to get the hang of it, shortly before moving on to a 15m cliff. This was good, and had a 5m free fall section at the bottom, so you could kind of dangle there and take in the views. After everyone had had a couple of go's on the 15m cliffs, they took us to a 30m cliff, which had about 3m of cliff to abseil, and then 27m of free fall. I managed to go down twice, and the first time I went down I went slowly and took in the absolutely stunning scenery of the mountains. It really put things into perspective, and was very humbling. The second time I went down I decided to go as fast as I could until I had to slow down, and wow, my heart sure was pounding after that!

That afternoon, after getting some lunch, we went on a sightseeing tour of the mountains. We went to see the three sisters formation. There is a pretty cool story behind them, in that years ago there was an aboriginal tribe with a witch doctor who had three daughters. The daughters had seen a boy from another tribe and had taken a liking to him, much to their father's dismay, so to make sure that they never got to the boy in the rival tribe he turned them into stone. If you go to visit the three sisters, then apparently you will have eternal good luck if you touch the first sister. We went back to the hostel, got drunk and got to know each other a little more!

The next day, we went to a different section of the mountains to go on the steepest incline railway in the world. We climbed down the mountain to the bottom of the railway and got on, and strewth it really was steep. It felt like it was almost vertical! In the afternoon we visited a zoo which had all kinds of farmyard animals, and animals native to Australia. Being the idiot that I am, I decided to stick my hand into all the enclosures and let the animals nibble on me, but I put my hand into one of the koala exhibits and he decided to cling on using his VERY SHARP nails, and he wouldn't let go until I shook him off! He left my left hand in tatters, but it was pretty funny. It didn't teach me any lessons though, and after that I let a kangaroo, wallaby, penguin and a wombat nibble on me.

 

After the zoo our tour guide Reece left and we all pretty much slept straight through the coach ride back to our accommodation. If this O week was this good, then I can't wait until the one in February!

My first post (better late than never)

Okay, so I appreciate that I am a month late with this, but as the title says: better late than never!

My first impressions of Australia as I got out of the airport in Sydney on Friday 8th were "wow, surely this is not winter weather" and "fuck me, I'm so tired." A group of international students who arrived at the the same time all piled our cases into the back of a minibus provided to us by the university and we were officially on the road to Wollongong! I arrived two hours later to an empty shell of a room. This would be my home until November.

After trying to make it my own, there was really nothing left to do apart from have an epic nap. Twenty five hours of plane travel really takes it out of you. Over the next few days, I didn't really know anyone apart from Matt - another English international student who came from Sheffield Uni. I spent some time chilling at his place, and kept myself busy by going on little walks around the area. One evening on a walk I found a field of horses next to Mount Keira with the sun setting behind the mountain. I thought it was gorgeous and I must have spent the best part of an hour taking it all in.

Over my first week, the international students from England who'd all connected over Facebook started arriving and by my first Wednesday we'd got our first sacks of goon and were drinking together! Goon is boxed wine in case you didn't know, and it's the only alcohol I can afford over here! The cheapest bottle of vodka works out to be about £20, and a cheap crate of beer would be about £25 !! So over the next year I'm going to have to adjust to being someone who once chundered at the smell of wine, to someone who drinks wine like water. Wish me luck?

The next few days were spent drinking, exploring and just getting to know each other. We'd taken to hanging out in one of the units downstairs from me which had one of the English international students and some Aussies in there for good measure too. There's another international student in there from Sri Lanka, but he needs a whole new blog post. Anyway, so as well as drinking, we took the time to venture into the town centre, up the beach, and took a day trip to Sydney. Unfortunately, when we went to Sydney it rained all day - and because flip flops have no grip whatsoever, I ended up walking around bare foot! That'll teach me not to check the weather forecast...

Well that's the end of my first blog... Hope you enjoyed it? That's only my first couple of weeks, I'll write about the second half of my time here after class. Miss you all! x