Sunday July 25, 2010

Hey everyone I hope you’re all doing well! After such a long day yesterday, we all decided to take it easy today. Ann, the person in charge of my housing, held a “sausage sizzle” (aka a barbeque) today for all of the Semester in Australia students (SIA is the name of the company that helped to house me and other study abroad students for the semester). It started at 11, so my roommates and I all took the ferry down to the park where she was hosting it. She cooked up some burgers and hotdogs, which were delicious since we pretty much haven’t really eaten meat since we’ve been here (meat is very very expensive in Australia and we’ve been too lazy to really cook). One quirky thing about Australia is that they don’t have hotdog buns, so you have to eat hotdogs on a piece of bread – very strange and surprisingly difficult to maneuver since the hotdog keeps rolling around while you’re trying to put ketchup on it. That brings up another strange aspect of Australia, they don’t eat ketchup, they eat tomato sauce. If you ask for ketchup in a restaurant, they look at you like you have two heads. The same thing is true with napkins; they’re called serviettes here. At the barbeque I got to experience eating my first TimTam, a staple cookie for Australians. It’s basically the equivalent of our Oreo, except it tastes so much better. It’s two chocolate cookies with chocolate frosting in the middle all dipped in milk chocolate. They also have dark chocolate ones, white chocolate ones and ones that have caramel in the middle of the chocolate frosting – by far the best Australian food I have experienced so far. After the barbeque one of my roommates Katie and I took the ferry to Toowong (the local shopping mall) to get some produce and school stuff. You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to find a. a spiral bound notebook or b. paper with margins here – then trying to find a spiral bound notebook with margins…forget it. It’s absolutely unbelievable. We also got some stuff to help us get our rooms a little more organized, which made it interesting to say the least to get back home via the bus. On the bright side, we did end up being the entertainment for people standing near us on the bus. Later Katie and one of my other roommates Dani and I made dinner together and watched The Ugly Truth. When I say we made dinner, I mean we sautéed some garlic, chicken, peppers and onions and put that on pasta with some sauce – so we actually made a real dinner as opposed to what we’ve been making…cereal. We all decided to make tonight an early night since we have our first day of classes tomorrow. In case you’ve forgotten, yes I am in fact here for school, even if it doesn’t seem like it so far. That’s all for today, but I’ll talk to you soon.

Britt

p.s. I posted a bunch of pictures today if you’re interested