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