Spring Break! (part 1)

On the 23rd September 2011, one of our crazy plans actually came to life, and we left The Gong to get the train up to Sydney and collect our camper vans from Wicked Camping. We handed over the rest of the money and suddenly it was real - we were actually setting off on a road trip! So we left the depot, armed with five Norwegians, four Brits, three camper vans, two maps and a satnav - surely a recipe for success? We thought nothing could possibly go wrong, but we were sorely mistaken!

Everything was going great. I was leading the vans through Sydney towards the Harbour Bridge with a map hoping that we'd hit a petrol station on the way since they were all over the city and the vans had been given to us with pretty much empty tanks, but then Matt's car (who had the satnav) suddenly overtook. I didn't mind so much until they turned a corner at a traffic light which turned red before Amanda and I had a chance to follow him, but he didn't wait for us, and just sped off into the distance. Everyone started panicking, Everyone was calling everyone else and we tried to meet up again. I hate to use clichés, but Sydney is so huge and there are so many one-way roads that it was literally like trying to find a needle in a haystack. We decided that it would be best if mine and Amanda's cars pulled into a side road off one of the main streets in Sydney and wait for Matt to come and find us. Given that he had the GPS, we thought it would be easy and take no time at all, but more than an hour passed and they still hadn't managed to get to us. By this point the sun had set, people were getting angry, annoyed, bored and stressed, and tempers became frayed, so we just called them, told them to get onto the highway and meet us at the first service station that they see.

So Amanda and I drove around Sydney looking for a petrol station, and when we'd filled up we could finally hit the road and get onto the highway. We drove over the Harbour Bridge which was pretty cool, and after a good three hours of having our vans, we made it out of the city. We got in touch with the others and found out where they were, and aimed to get there, but first we stopped off at Woolworths (for the English reading, no it's not the confectionery emporium that went bankrupt a few years back, much to our disappointment, but one of the leading Australian supermarkets) to get some food and alcohol.

Soon after we'd stocked up on some essentials, we managed to reunite with the other van in a Baywatch-esque (but on a pavement instead of a beach, and outside a subway instead of a beach hut) slow motion run towards each other ending in hugs all around. We were massively behind schedule, so we just decided to drive as far north as possible and try to sleep in the vans at a rest stop. It got to about midnight and I just couldn't drive any more after only getting three hours sleep the night before (silly me leaving assignments until the last minute) so we got to the nearest rest stop, had a cup of tea and went to sleep!

What an eventful first day! We didn't take many pictures as we were too stressed but here's some snaps of us with two of the vans (click on them to expand) :)

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.