Sandstorms, Surfing, & Soda

Time for another update ladies and gentlemen. As I’m certain you are all more interested in me than anything else you can be doing (including saving swimmers, running cities, teaching classes, working at the Big E, studying for tests, eating cookies, etc.), here is an account of my fourth week in the wonderful world of Australia.

First of all, Ma, you might be interested to know that we watched “Australia” in my Australian Pop Culture class. That accounts for 14 hours of my life I will never get back. It was so long. Everyone left halfway through it. But I watched it, and that’s about it.

Back to real things. Last week Gold Coast endured one of the first sandstorms in a long time. A sandstorm essentially is brown, dry, dusty fog. There are pictures of the storm in my Facebook albums. It was pretty neat, actually. And as many of you know, I am rarely opposed to a day without sun. The news said that the sand had blown up all the way from Sydney, which is over 850km (about 530 miles) to the Gold Coast. Mother Nature is quite the mystery here in Australia. I left for class in the morning to clear skies and a light breeze, and left from class to a panoramic cloud of brown dust. Naturally, I took the opportunity to get some swimming in because the sun was blocked… Carpe diem! When I found out that it was a sandstorm, for some reason all I could think of was little old Matt Brown dancing to the song… because he would.

As I mentioned in my previous entry, a few of us attended the 2nd Annual “Secret Location Party.” In that last year’s “undisclosed location” was Australia’s Big Brother house, I was pretty jazzed for this event. All 500 of us piled into seven buses with paper covering the windows to keep the location a secret. Luckily for Bond University, no one on any of the seven buses knew how to rip paper, so the secret was kept safe (sarcasm). I was thoroughly convinced we were going to an amusement park or SeaWorld. We didn’t go to either of those places. We went to Griffith University. Really? Really. As we got off the bus, one of the student leaders told us we were at our rival school. This didn’t sound like much of a party to many of us. It’s like if someone from BU went to BC for a night. Riveting. There was a Monopoly theme to the night; we were all given six “Bondopoly” bills with which to get drinks. The highlight of my night was probably when the band announced that anyone with the initials “BS” could go get another free drink. So myself, Britney Spears, Blessed Sacrament, and Bull you know what went up and got another drink. Way to anticipate the 2009 Bond University Secret Location Party when naming me, mom and dad. Cheers!

In other news, Wednesday by the Water is something I highly recommend all American schools to adopt. Every Wednesday afternoon, the school grills out by Lake Orr for all of the students to enjoy an Australian sizzle, if you will. There’s live music in the middle of campus, tons of food, and even beer. It’s really a special time, like dodgeball time.

Another aspect of campus life that Bond Uni boasts that, as far as I know, Bridgewater is lacking too, is an on-campus travel office. It’s called Student Flights and they are on campus solely to book travel arrangements for student who attend Bond. Myself, Iain, Zach, and Brandon (all friends from my AustraLearn group) went there a few times last weekend and finally booked a flight and plans to go to New Zealand at the end of October. I’m stoked. The broad who handles our trip from Student Flights is my soon-to-be fiancée. I’m smitten by her. We’re going for five days, leaving on October 28th. I’ll give you more details about what we’re doing after we get there. I’ll just say I have never done anything that is in our itinerary.

The next item to discuss is this most recent weekend’s surf trip. By far, one of the best weekends ever, and certainly the best weekend so far in Australia. At 9:00 on Friday night, about 40 of us hopped onto a bus and headed south to Spot-X on Arrawarra Beach. We pulled into the camp around 1am. The same three aforementioned people, including myself chose a cabin, dropped our stuff, and three of us went down to the beach. I have never seen so many stars in my entire life. Between the three of us, we saw easily eight shooting stars in a matter of twenty minutes. We were in bed by about 2:30 and we were awake by 8:00 eating breakfast before our first surf session. I suck at surfing. Like I suck. But it is so fun. Catching one wave is like a drug, it’s so addicting. After we finished our first session and grabbed some lunch, about seven of us went on an adventure to find a rope swing that hung over the creek that flowed right around our camp. We asked probably the dumbest surf instructor in the world where the swing was and he said it was a five minute walk up the creek. We never found it. We did, however, find out that it is like a 20 minute walk down the river and a five minute drive. Where we walked was for real like an episode of Survivor. I felt like Tribal Council was right around the corner. We headed back by around 3:00 and got suited up for our second surf lesson of the day. Another sandstorm had encroached upon us. It made visibility a little weaker but the wind made the waves way bigger.

After our second surf session of Saturday, we headed back to camp and showered up. They then took us to the store to get some “popcorn and soda.” This is when I got to experience my first drive-thru liquor store. It was pretty neat. We headed back to camp, ate some dinner, and then it was party time. The people who work at this MojoSurf camp seriously live the life. It is a surf camp that is literally a 30 second walk to the ocean where about 10 or 12 friends live and work together, surf all day, meet new people every week, and party every night. The camp itself is a laid-back, surfed out area with Bob Marley and Jack Johnson tunes all day and all night. That night I learned some awesome games from some German folk. I’ll bring them home with me. The games, not the Germans. As luck would have it, we had the 6am wake-up for Sunday morning after a late night with way too much soda. My bed was soaked when I woke up too… it must have been condensation from the air conditioning, right Coop? Our group was about half the size as the day before, and only about half of Sunday’s crew actually surfed. Most of us paddled out and then just fell asleep on our boards. After that session, we went exploring on the rock peninsula that formed the Spot-X bay. I got some awesome pictures, and by some I mean I got like 400 awesome pictures of the same thing. Deal with it. We left camp around 1:00 and stopped at Byron Bay on the way home. We were only there for about an hour but it seemed like it was a pretty cool place and it is definitely worth looking into visiting again. We got back around 8:00 on Sunday night and pretty much were all passed out pretty early. Long, but awesome weekend.

As in previous entries, here are some recap facts:
-I found The Office and Survivor. Don’t worry.
-For classes, we have to switch our Microsoft Word settings to the British English version. So flavor becomes flavour, center becomes centre, and anything that ends in “-ize” becomes “-ise.”
-Sharing a lane in swimming is more complicated than Sudoku. Since these guys drive on the left side of the road, they swim on the left side of the lane. It’s stressful.
-Queen Nancy would have a field day with Australian phonetics. There is an upward inflection at the end of every sentence. Like “I’m Ron Burgundy?”
-The best ice cream bar sold in Australia is called a “Golden Gaytime…” Dead serious.

Thanks for reading guys!!! It’s already been a month here! I hope to talk to you all at some point. Don’t forget to get Skype if you want to talk. My name is Sully1300. Otherwise, don’t forget to comment and don’t forget to vote, Holyoke!!! Miss you all!!!

Upward inflection:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CO431S52cP0