Adventures in Life

So really I should be reading, but I feel as if it’s time for another update on life. It’s not been the best week. There is a lot of explanation that is not going to be provided on here as to the reasoning. Anyway, not good. I actually broke down on Thursday and called a friend from home just to freely talk and make sense of my thoughts. There have been numerous times the last couple of weeks that I have felt cramped in my own mind. I have these struggles and thoughts that I’m just not allowed to put words to, because we are all expected to put on our happy faces in the name of love. Since when does love not stand for free expression? So I called this friend and we talked for quit a while, but I still was feeling very emotionally scattered, until yesterday. On Friday, Shane and I embarked on our independent study adventure. We’ve decided that we like the pattern on spending one week in the city and the next week away from the city center. We’ve honestly have been able to see so much that way in just two weeks.

We started out Friday around 10am, heading towards the State Library. I could probably spend everyday in the stacks upon stacks of books and free wireless internet. Side note: for those of you who have not been informed, we are all struggling with the lack of communication from Kingsley to the outside world. The college only allots you so many megabytes of internet usage per semester and there are only two-four internet ports that we can actually used during certain points in the day to access anything other then our Kingsley email. Its been frustrating. Add to that the consideration that even when you get on the internet, aim and msn messenger will not work and you feel sort of isolated and dependent upon email, which at times feels as slow as snail mail. Maybe we’re just spoiled. Or maybe we are nervous because we are so dependent on the internet to connect us to obligations and relationships back home. Either way, very unnerving at times. So we went to the State Library where there is more freedom to be online without being concerned if you are going to exceed your internet allotment.

While in the library I was still feeling very tense. In fact I actually ended up crying in the library a little after reading something a friend wrote on his online journal. Thankfully, no one was around me to notice. Then I started to chat with Jesse and our conversation resulted in me laughing so loud that Shane had to tell me to be quiet. For those of you know Shane relish in that sentence. Haha. But the laughter was all I really needed to switch everything around. My mood was noticeably lighter after I left the library and Shane and I ended up having an amazing 14 hour day.

Following our time in the library we headed out to St. Kilda. For those of you who have been keeping up with my travels, this is where we went for lunch after our first church service here. When we went the first time we really only walked down one street and missed some of the attractions that Shane and I are more interested in, like the Botanical Gardens, Beach, and Outdoor market. We never made it to the market on this trip, because it is only held on Sundays, but we did go to the beach. The last couple of days it has been amazing here, 70-80 degree F. I’ve been running around campus without shoes and in capris and t-shirts. Yesterday, it plummeted to about 40-50 degrees F. Freezing cold and the wind off of the water was ripping through my body, even with my sweatshirt on. So our time at the beach was cut short. I think my exact words were “You know its cold when all the animals run and hide” and “There isn’t going to be any unchapped skin left on my face after this.” We then meandered up to the Botanical Gardens for our independent study. While it wasn’t as impressive or breathtaking as the King’s Botanical Gardens that we were at last week, it was still amazing. This garden had two very distinct features: greenhouses set up to resemble conservatories and a large outdoor chess game (like the one I saw in Austria on our second tour through Europe).

Our study concluded four-ish hours later and we headed out to find a place to eat. I’ve found that I really only eat a light breakfast and a huge dinner here usually, but when I do that the dinner is definitely worth waiting for. Shane exercised his skills at being decisive and found us this restaurant that specialized in pastas, fish, and meat dishes. I ended up with Seafood Tortellini in White wine sauce. Wow. That’s all I have to say about that. It was more or less overstuffed cheese Tortellini amongst five to six different types of seafood. Fantastic. Shane had a traditional pasta with shrimp and some type of chili sauce. Only it wasn’t red. He really enjoyed his food as well. We were discussing this on our way to our next course – dessert – a lot of people here are concerned at eating as cheap as they can and eating American foods that they are familiar with. I probably have the most dietary issues out of everyone here, but that just means being careful, not necessarily sticking with the familiar. I did not travel half way around the world to have McDonalds or KFC. Sorry. The result is us feeling like no one else enjoys fine dining experiences. This leaves us very excited for break, but I’ll get to that in a minute. I think my parents have taught me better then most people, to enjoy quality food not cheap food, especially when you travel. I actually got giddy yesterday when we were looking at restaurants to go to during break and found a place that had multiple forks and spoons at each place setting. I miss fine dining at tables and look forward to our IS day every week so I know that I won’t have to eat take-away food from a bag that everyone else is content with.

For our dessert we went to a cake shop, which St. Kilda is actually famous for. I had a Tropical Cake which is essentially a harder croissant with a vanilla custard cream and real fruit on top. I’ve missed fruit too. My flat seems to only like to buy apples which I’m sick of by now. I want strawberries, raspberries, cherries, peaches, kiwis, all of which were on this cake, hence its attraction. The dessert reminded me a lot fruit pizza, only it was considerably better. Shane had some type of chocolate layer upon chocolate layer thing. He was elated. All with tea, yummy.

Funny story from the day - Shane is very good about giving money to those who are struggling in the city. I give a lot of my change away, but he will take money out of his wallet. Both cause some of the people we are traveling with to get a little nervous. Anyway, as we were trying to find a restaurant for dinner, a man came up to Shane and asked if he could sell him some cigarettes for money for a train ride home. Neither of us smoke, so Shane said that he would just give him money and handed him a 5. An hour and a half later when we came out of the restaurants and were going into the cake shop, the same guy came up to Shane with the same story. What should be stated at this point is that bus tickets are uber cheap. Less then 3 dollars so 5 would have been plenty. So he came up to Shane with the same story and Shane started to talk to him and about half way through his thought he stopped and asked our cigarette friend if he remembered him, he didn’t. Shane pretty much had just paid for his habit. But that’s the cost you have to pay at some points, as you reach out to those who are in need.

When we arrived back in the city center from St. Kilda, we decided to attempt to work out our vacation plans and book some things. For those of you who aren’t aware, our original plan was to fly to the north island of New Zealand and stay with a missionary from Shane’s church and work for NZ youth for Christ. We were both ecstatic. Especially when friends of ours who were on the HDU program before had told us that we could spend an entire vacation there for less then 1000 US dollars. Yeah, that is no longer the case. The airfare alone to get to NZ and home was 925 US dollars. So we had to kiss our plan to go to NZ goodbye. After a little bit of discussion and pouring over theater ticket books we decided to spend a little over a week in both Melbourne and Sydney. We booked almost all of our pre-tickets yesterday. We are going to:
The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra – Concerto for Orchestra
The Australian Ballet School – Graduation Exhibition
An Abby Choir Concert
And The Government Inspector (Play) – where we are actually getting to go to the preview show! How cool is that!
The poor woman who took our ticket order was so confused and frazzled as we just kept going through what we wanted tickets for. When you travel overseas as a student you get an ISIC cards which is like gold. You get the cheapest tickets for just about everything. So we ended up with some of the most amazing seats, at the cheapest prices. The only thing we didn’t get tickets for was the play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf?” which we both really wanted to see. All of the shows are sold out minus these crappy seats that are never sold, which each have an enormous price tag attached to them. When the lady at the ticket counter tells you it isn’t worth it, you listen.
We also booked our train ticket to Sydney for about 100 American dollars. You could fly for a little more, but we are both so sick of traveling in airplanes; its time for a new experience.
We are also planning on booking one more thing for the week we are in Melbourne next week – a day trip to Philips Island, where penguins and fur seals live. I was so excited when Shane walked into Lit class on Thursday with the brochure for me. (( Caite – this means watch the mail haha )) So next week we’ll be booking that and some of our accommodations and tickets for Sydney. The rest of the museums, historical, and cultural sites you don’t have to pre-book.
Everyone else has been talking about having to skimp out on a lot with vacation and after vacation budget money because of the amount they are spending on travel, but we are happy with how much we are doing with spending so little money.

Another funny story – Shane has this tendency to get into a lot of things when he’s exploring that he just shouldn’t. As we were looking for the box office he tried to open up this door and a security guy came rushing towards him to stop him. As Shane was apologizing we found out that the door lead directly onto the stage of the national ballet that was showing. But as Shane was apologizing, the security guy noticed our “accents” and asked where we were from. When we explained our various locations in the US he got the biggest grin on his face and ended up taking us on a tour of part of the theater with little facts. All mistakes are redeemable.

After that adventure of booking everything, we went down to this cute part of the city that had amazing post-modern art on display as well as architecture. We were going to go and find a place to sit down for a while, but actually ended up walking through this massive casino complex. While we obviously didn’t gamble, it was really interesting to see the whole culture of the complex.

14 hours later at midnight we ended up back at Kinglsey college, after walking somewhere between 8-9 miles in a day (shane is in hiking walking and jogging so he has to keep track).