Done (!!!)

Right now I stand on the brink of what will hopefully be two of the most relaxing weeks I've had here.  Here's how I got here:

Last week, Monday-Thursday:

Pretty much all I did was write papers, almost exclusively.  Some interesting parts of the week:

-A mission with my friend to try to get ten ridiculous vocab words into our first paper due (for me, Asia: Culture, Environment and Development).  When I had gotten 8 of them into my paper and he had stopped trying at 2, it turned into a bet.  So when I finally got all 10 of them in, he had to buy me a drink at the Halloween party later in the week...score.  Here were the words: Coagulate, bequeath, advent, nexus, amalgamate, entrenched, voracity, palpable, divisive, and decrepit.  I think coagulate was the hardest one to get in there.  Or maybe decrepit...anyway

-Halloween shopping for the double birthday party/Halloween party that 2 of the Port Lodge kids had on Thursday night.  Costumes explained later in the post :)

-My very first all-nighter.  Maybe not so much a highlight as a lowlight, but it was still definitely notable.  This was Tuesday night, after I had spent all day Tuesday writing and had finished a third of my Christology paper only to have some sort of computer glitch delete all my work.  Yeah.  I got so mad that I decided to stay up until I got my last 2 papers completely done.  It didn't exactly work out that way, as I slept from 6-7:30 Wednesday morning and then from 2-6 Wednesday night.  Regardless, I got very, VERY little sleep last week.

-The comical state of my trashcan by Thursday morning.  Photo evidence of my dependency on Diet Coke (PS they're 1.5 litre bottles...):

-Researching for and writing a total of 25 pages worth of papers within the span of about 5 days (not including the 2 papers from the week before).  Turning in that last paper on Thursday was an awesome feeling, especially since it was the last piece of work I had to do before finals in November.

Thursday:

After getting all my stuff turned in on Thursday, I still had to go to macro and community dinner.  But after we had to start getting ready for the birthday/Halloween party that night!  A couple of the girls from Perth (including Katie!) came for the party, which was held in the back room of the bar that's right down the street from Port Lodge called The Orient.  I was in a group doing The Price is Right:  we had a guy as Bob Barker, his girlfriend as one of the Barker Beauties, and then me, Katie (Freo Katie, not Perth Katie)and Andria were contestants with outrageous homemade shirts.  My shirt said "Remember me, Bob?"  And then over my very pregnant belly: "IT'S YOURS"  It definitely got a lot of comments at the party, haha.

Friday:

Friday morning was Australian History class and tutorial, then I finally made pizookie for the girls here in Freo (and proceeded to feel sick for the rest of the day lol).  That stuff is amazing but it's definitely something you can only do once in a while.  I'm glad I was able to pass it on to other people though; it's too good not to.  We were originally scheduled to leave for our weekend at Rottnest Island at 3:30 on Friday, but some of us got our tickets changed to leave Saturday morning at 9:30 instead.  It wasn't that warm outside, was supposed to rain, and I was exhausted from the week.  I proceeded to go back to Port Lodge and sleep for most of the rest of the day, and when I heard the rain pouring down and the thunder crashing I was so glad I was in my bed instead of a tent.

Saturday:

Saturday morning we left for Rotto, and 40 of us got to ride the speedboat ferry there instead of the regular ferry, which was an awesome decision!  The waves were pretty rough, so it was sort of like riding a roller coaster.  It actually ended up being the best part of the weekend...go figure.

I guess I should explain about Rotto a little first.  It's an island about 19 km off the coast of Freo, and it's actually a nature reserve so a lot of it (all of it?) is protected.  It's tiny though, at 11 km long and 4.5 km wide, and there's just one little shopping area with a couple of fast food places, a general store, a souvenir shop, etc.  Bikes are basically the only form of transportation besides the tourist buses that go around the island.  It's a popular tourist spot and is supposed to be one of the "must-do's" when visiting Perth or Freo.  It has a resort (I think), a hostel, villas/bungalows to rent, and campsites.  We were at a campsite because we didn't book early enough to get a villa.

So after we got to there, we rented bikes and took our stuff to the campground, and Betsy and I set up our tent that our Australian History lecturer had lent us on Friday.  Then a bunch of us set out to try to find the nice beach we had heard about.  We took off on our bikes for what turned out to be a really hilly ride.  Apparently none of us realised that Rotto is not flat. At all.  It had been threatening rain all day, and when we finally got there the skies opened up so we went back to the campsite.

After waiting out the rain, me and 4 others decided to go bike around the island to check it out, and we set out for what ended up being a 2+ hour ride.  I'm not sure if we did the whole ride around the island, but it sure felt like it.  The scenery was beautiful (still really hilly though) and we saw some gorgeous beaches.  It wasn't warm enough to actually go for a swim though.  The only downsides to the bike ride were the rain that started falling towards the end of the ride, and the crappy loose chain on my bike that made me have to stop way too many times to fix it.  But all in all I'm glad we rode around because otherwise all I would've seen of the island basically would have been the campsite and Subway.

Later in the afternoon, we all (a lot of the ND students plus a good number of the other study abroad students) just hung around the campsite until it was time for dinner.  Dinner for me was Subway, and dessert was the Nutella that me, Katie and Andria shared over girl talk in the tent.  Then Betsy joined girl talk, followed later by Kevin, Erin, Jackie and Kim.  By that point the tent was pretty much full, and we all went down to the beach where some people had already built a fire in a pit.

We sat around the fire for a while, and Erin, Jackie, Andria and I played a game where you make up a ghost story by each person adding on a couple of sentences to the story.  It involved a beach, a big group of kids, an abandoned barber shop, and a lighthouse, and alternated between being hysterically funny and actually kind of creepy.

Sunday:

No one slept very well that night because some of the people were being super loud and obnoxious and also because it was fairly cold.  I also didn't bring a pillow and just had my thin airplane blanket.  So by the time morning rolled around, everyone was ready to get on the 10:30 ferry back to Freo instead of the 4:30 one, and luckily there was enough room for us all.  I'm sort of disappointed the trip wasn't better, because other abroad groups have raved that going to Rotto is the one thing you have to do while you're here, but I think a lot of it had to do with the subpar weather which no one can really do anything about.  Oh well.

Oh yeah, here's a picture of the little kangaroo-type animals that live on the island.  They're really cute, but there's a ton of them and they're everywhere on the island.  They're called quokkas.

So anyway, the rest of today was awesome and lazy and involved lots of lounging and TV and movie watching.  This week of classes is our last one and is just a review week, so we're all looking forward to a break.  Then after that is study week, then 2 weeks of exams, then we're leaving Freo for good.  It's sort of hard to believe it's so close to being over.  But there's still more good times to be had before that gets here!

Aaaand now it's time to go sleep some more :)

<3