Busy few days

Friday was a long day. In the morning I had my interview for my internship downtown, I had to be on a bus by like 8:45 to make sure I got there in time. I ended up being a little early so I looked around in the souvenir shop that was across the road. My interview went great and I got the job! The internship is for credit so it’s basically working 10 hours a week for the semester rather than taking a class. I’m really glad I got it because I walked out of my Accounting class 30 min after it started so I’ll be dropping that tomorrow. The internship’s with the Australian Institute of Export and I’m not really positive what work I’ll be doing yet, it’s a smaller office and they have a few different projects going on at the same time. I could be working on their e-newsletter, website, research, event planning, or just common office work. I’m pretty excited about it, she also said I might have the opportunity to do some weekend conferences with them or make a trip down to Canberra with the president or something. More than likely I’m also going to get to go to the Export awards which is one of the events I might help plan. Anyways after my interview I came back to the apartment and decided to join two of my roomates who were going to Coogee beach. Josh and John are here with “GSE” and they have a bunch of day trips, but this time they said anyone could go along so I did. We had a barbecue, pretty much sausage but they call them hot dogs and some crazy chips. We laid out on the beach most of the day, well the guys and a few girls played a little cricket but I was too lazy. I went in the water for a while but gave up on that after I was completely under, my suit was falling off and I got a mouth full of saltwater. Their guide Dave took us on a walk along the beach, much longer than I thought it was going to be but pretty cool. We had some great views of the ocean and back to the beach, it wrapped around to two more beaches, and this area that was like a tide pool because the rocks held in some of the water. It was pretty cool. The only problem with the beach is that is was two bus rides and over an hour to get there. By the time we got back we were al way to tired to do much of anything other than shower eat and go to bed.

Saturday morning I got up early because I signed up to go on a bushwalk. The day turned out to be very interesting. We left early and had to take like 3 train rides and a bus to get to this place called Mt. Colah. It was pretty much a hike through the bush of Australia. The beginning was kind of boring, the most exciting thing we really saw were some nasty spiders, which we almost walked directly into a few webs. After an hour or two we got to Kuring-Kai Chase National park where we took a nature walk, kind of reminded me of the where nature center at home except we saw a wallaby, kookaburras, and some other crazy birds instead of Wisconsin wildlife. We also saw a 3D slide show which just about put me to sleep after the long morning. We took a short break for lunch before our long afternoon. We walked down to Bobbin Head where we took another short break before heading out for the longest part of the day. We thought we were headed to the bus, but little did we know that was over 5km away. The Guide was definitely a character and I don’t think he enjoyed/understood my sarcasm of the afternoon. We knew there was somewhat of a climb at the end of the walk, but he definitely under exaggerated this. Jackie and I ended up leading half of the group of the cliffs while he waited behind for the rest. We weren’t really sure where we were going but he just told us to follow the white dots on the trees/rocks. We finally got to the top and were waiting for a while, until someone decided to go see where they were. Come to find out our guide was sitting/resting a ways back because apparently he thought he had food poisoning. We waited until almost 5:30 but then half the group decided to leave because we knew we were supposed to catch the bus, who knows where, at 6pm. After a winding trail and asking some hikers which way to go we found a nice neighborhood and spotted some hippy boy standing at a bus stop. He told us the bus would be there in 2 minutes and went to the train station, the only problem is that was the last bus for the day. Only half of our group was there and we had no idea what was going on with our guide. Jackie and I didn’t see the point in staying there with no plan on how to get home although the rest of the group felt bad leaving the other half behind along with our guide. They decided they would try to get help from the neighbors and ultimately called an ambulance, Jackie and I missed this excitement though because we put ourselves before them (selfish maybe) but I did not want to be stuck over 2 hours away from the Uni with no plan on how to get home. I found out later they called the school which sent taxis for them. Saturday night I was way to tired to go out so I just hung out with my roommate Sam and the girls across the hall.

Sunday I got up and decided to go get my travel pass because I knew I would need it for work on Monday. I texted Noel and we decided to go into Sydney and explore, we started at Paddy’s market which was really cool. We’re gonna go back sometime to buy tons of stuff, if anyone has idea for what they want for a souvenir let me know. We left there and walked through China town and then over to the Chinese gardens. It was a beautiful day so we decided to walk around Darling Harbor and spoted a few nice restaurants overlooking the Harbor that we want to go back to. We ended up back at the Queen Victoria Building which is in the center of the CBD and looked around at the shops before catching a bus back to campus. The stores there are a little out of my price range, Coach, D&G, Versace, and tons of others but it was cool to look around.

Today I started my internship, I had to get up at like 7:30 to catch the bus by 8:20. The main lady that I’ll be working with is out of the office on a conference in Melbourne today and tomorrow so she left some work behind for me to do. It was kind of boring data entry stuff but I didn’t really mind, nothing too hard. I got an hour for lunch which was awesome because I work less than a block from the Harbor so I went down bought a sandwich and sat on a bench that overlooked the Harbor Bridge and Sydney Harbor, it was awesome.

Tomorrow I work again and then I have class at night and on Wednesday and Thursday. I’m not sure when I’ll get to update again, I’ll probably wait until after the weekend.

Love you all and miss you!