Apparently I don’t know how to give a “brief description”…

Please be patient with me though…this is a full month’s worth of stuff I’m trying to catch you up on…

- the rocks/opera house/botanical gardens: The Rocks is an area of Sydney (one of the oldest). This was one of the tours our RA’s took us on in the first days. On the weekends it has a really cool outdoor market. Dad – one booth had these very cool metal sculpture things, I took a pic of a motorcycle one. Susan/Mom – there was another with interesting wooden bowls, pretty sure you both would’ve loved them, there’s pics of them somewhere. I plan on going back one weekend to buy some gifts for everyone J there’s tons of different stuff for everyone. From there, I walked with a few of my new friends to the Opera House and then the Botanical Gardens (see pics) because they were so close. Both were obviously very cool and beautiful. Mom, I took a couple pics of birds of paradise and I thought of you…and cassie and that time we were in Florida when we made fun of you because we thought they didn’t exist/weren’t a real flower…(anyone actually remember that besides me?)

- RUGBY GAME x2 :) much love: Thanks to Cassie’s and my friend Connor for starting my love of rugby. The sport is so important here and going to a game is something I obviously wanted to do, but wasn’t sure I would be able to because it was pretty much the end of the season when we got here. LUCKILY my friend Carla (a girl from the program) has family in Manly (northern part of Syd) who have season tickets to the Manly Sea Eagles (one of the at least 9 teams in the Sydney area). We were able to go to the last 2 games of the season. The first time we sat with her cousins in the stands/season ticket holders but the game was pretty boring, but Manly won in the last 2 minutes ,which was exciting. The next weekend Carla and I brought 4-5 more of our friends and we sat on the other side of the stadium/general admission seats. It’s amazing how many people crammed onto that lawn. Honestly it probably doesn’t matter where you sit though because the stadium was pretty small. There are definitely bigger stadiums for Texas high school football (think kimbrogh?) haha o yea, speaking of HS football….these teams, like America, have dancers/cheerleaders. My HS drill team was definitely better than theirs, it was sad and kinda reminded me of the Texas Aggie dance team during the basketball games haha. Again, there are a couple pictures from the games, but I don’t even know if I’ve uploaded them yet...i’ve been having complications…. Which brings me to another thing…

- pictures/crappy internet: as of today (Oct 7^th ) I have taken over 1300 pictures. I maybe have 100-200 up on the internet, and only 750 on my computer. The reason they’re not posted is because it takes about 30-45 minutes to upload around 20 pics, and usually longer when Facebook is being lame (which happens often here) The internet in Australia is flat out no where near what it is in America. And it’s really expensive… Anyways, the reason they’re not even on the computer yet is because I have so many, there isn’t enough room on the hard-drive, and there’s something funky with my camera/the files so I can’t figure out how to move them directly to my external hard drive which should have plenty of room. I even asked one of our advisor-ish people who’s really good w/macs and cameras and he had no idea…I’m working on it thought, obviously I’ve got a lot more to show everyone.