Happenings in Sydney

Sorry for all the technical posts from a few days ago; I tend to get carried away whenever I get a new toy! A few quick bullet point updates for now; more to come soon I promise!

• Luke is coming to visit next week! He’s driving out to Colorado and then flying Qantas to Sydney from Denver with a stopover in LAX.
• I’m buying a car here in Australia… Should have it by Thursday. Australia is a very big country, and I love to drive. I can’t wait to go on some very fun adventures! I have very grand plans, but my first trip is going to be a trip up north with Luke to Byron Bay to visit a friend that lives there. Now I just need to get driving on the left sorted
• I switched into a web production class and now have one class on Tuesday (It’s a lecture though, and lectures aren’t compulsory.. especially this one, which seems mostly useless.. I’ll still probably go though). I had my first one today, and it was.. interesting to say the least. It was a very politically charged discussion about web content, specifically web text. It is certainly useful if you were trying to write a search engine or otherwise group all of the content on the web into discrete bundles, though without implementation specifics it was mostly a lecture for show (I couldn’t help but feel like my professor was stroking his own feathers a bit, talking about his paper on the subject). Regardless, fascinating stuff!
• I went on a very nice bike tour of Sydney with my study abroad group on Sunday. We did quite an ambitious ride, and ended up going to some very neat spots, including over the harbour bridge into North Sydney. Our guide was full of knowledge and it was definitely worth doing!
• I took a long (free!) train ride out to the blue mountains yesterday. The train union was trying to negotiate better terms, and as such we all got a day of free train rides. I meant to get up early, but I didn’t end up leaving until 2PM or so. That got me there about 4:30PM, just in time for sunset. It was beautiful, but I really hope I make it back to spend a whole day there! I stopped at a small Chinese food place called “Three Sisters BBQ Chinese Restaurant”. It was’t much to look at, but the garlic chicken was on point!
• I’ve been meeting ts of fun people and having great time! I’ve officially got three “gym buddies” now, so I have absolutely no excuse to not work out almost every day.
• Pardon the lack of good pictures; I have a few that I’ll try and get up, but I’ve been taking what hopefully turn out to be pretty cool pictures for photography class (35mm B&W). My dad’s old SLR, an Olympus OM-2n has been doing very well so far; we’ll see how my first roll of film turns out tomorrow! I definitely need to get my hands on a tripod; propping the camera up for longer exposures doesn’t always lend to the best composition.
• My pottery skills have been improving. Not by much, but I’ve been getting better slowly but surely. I had an incredibly informative Skype video tutorial with Luke from halfway around the world this afternoon. My teacher was pretty amazed. Technology these days

That’s it for now; I’ll try and get more frequent updates up for you guys, but this blogging thing is hard!