Second Week Down Under

Thursday is one of my favorite days of the week this semester because I have no classes, no obligations, I'm completely free to explore. This week me and a few others went to a place called Paddy's Market. It is a HUGE market that has all kinds of stuff, lots of souveniry type stuff for pretty cheap. After that we went to Bondi Beach. I actually went swimming in the ocean this time! It was so much fun, the ocean here is so different from back home. I can't wait to go again! After the beach we went to movie night at Wesley and watched an Australian movie called The Dish. It was about the satellite that was used to aide in Neil Armstrong's mission to the moon and something I didn't know, the pictures that were shown on tv of the first walk on the moon came from this satellite in Australia, not the American one.


Friday I had my ASC class again and this time we had three lecturers from the college come and talk to us about Australian culture, what they think of Americans, how they view American politics, etc. It was a very interesting discussion. One point that was brought up that I found especially ineteresting was that sometimes Americans have a way of offended Australians by the way we end our sentences. Americans usually end sentences with a downward intonation, while Australians end their sentences with an upward intonation. So when an American does that, Australians may take it as authoritative, or final and they don't like that. Another thing that I've found interesting, not just from this discussion, but something I've noticed about Australians, a lot of them know quite a bit about American politics, often more than I know. Also, Obama is very popular here, Bush is not. Friday night, I went over to another host families house and hung out with a few of the other ASC students. We watched Bridget Jones Diary.

Saturday I started my service project with Hillsong. We met at Hillsong church, the city campus in Waterloo, and were split up into teams. I was on a team with 4 other people and we went to what they called The Towers. It was an apartement complex type thing. We started on the 16th floor and went door to door knocking and asking if the people needed help with anything, if they were okay. There were a lot of doors where no one answered, but we did get several responses. The first door we knocked at was answered by an elderly women who let us in. Her husband had just got back from the hospital the day before from having a hip replacement. He had also had both his knees replaced within the last couple of years. Neither one of them could get around very well, so we are coming back next week to help clean up their place a bit. They were a very nice couple. We got one door slammed in our face, but for the most part, even if the person wasn't interested or didn't need anything, they were fairly polite about it. There was also quite a few that didn't speak any English. After that I went with a couple other ASCers to the Sydney Aquarium. I didn't expect too much going into it, but the place was huge! We spent like 3-4 hours there. There were all kind of exhibits and several places where you could walk through under water tunnels.



On the way to the Aquarium, we had stopped in the park to eat lunch and we looked near the bench next to us and there was this lizard!