Yesterday me, Rick and Joel had kind of a big one. We were at home watching Dazed and Confused (great movie!) and then we went down to a place called Calypso in Coolangatta. Turned out that Calypso is mostly (only probably) pumpin’ on Fridays, so our move on a Saturday wasn’t the best decision we’ve taken.. however, there’s always taxis and this thing they call the Casino. Nice night, we’ll definately have to go to Calypso on a Friday though, just because of what we’ve heard about it.
Party
Back on the Goldie
Yesterday I came back to the Gold Coast from our trip. It felt really good to be back, but then again, it’s always fun to be travelling and experience new things. I guess we started it off with quite the shocker when we went all-in for a couple of days in Melbourne, we were real tourists during both day and night time. Among other things we made was, seeing the Telstra Dome and the arenas for the Australian Open, as well as hitting the impressionists artgallery and the harbour – diversifiction overload! Of course we also spent a lot of time in the actual city, especially since we lived really central which was good as there was a lot of walking involved. The nights were spent at either guidebook clubs such as Cookie or backalley “knock two times to get in” kind of places, the coolest was probably when we found a jazz/60-70th club in one of the backalleys, didn’t look like much when we passed it, but then suddenly it was pumpin’ like never before! Good times.
When we left Melbourne for the Great Ocean Road I didn’t really know what to expect. The first stop we made was at the Cape Otway lighthouse which had great views and looked really awesome – to say the least it was in the middle of nowhere, or more specific in the Cape Otway Nationalpark. We also stopped at Erskine Falls which is a really cool waterfall, Reiser wasn’t really excited with this stopped and ended the walk with a “appearently they call anything a fall these days” haha, good stuff. After that we did the Otway Treetop walk which is exactly what it sounds like, a walk in the trees high above ground. That tower takes you up to around 50 meters, and you’re already on around 20-28 throughout the walk.
Everywhere throughout the road there are great pictures to be taken, the views are pretty much unbelievable from all the scientic lookouts you go to but there are of course some highlights! Twelve Apostles, The blowout, The blowout cave that I can’t remember the name of, and of course the Grotto where we could actually climb down are images that hopefully will stick with me for the rest of my life. But I mean, as I said – everywhere there are views that remind you of the twelve apostles, and some are even cooler and greater than the twelve apostles.
After we left the Great Ocean Road there was still quite some milage left to cover before getting to Adelaide, around 300 km’s or so. When we got into Adelaide I guess everyone was quite surprised what it looked like. I think we were expecting quite the massive city, not Melbourne or Sydney massive maybe, but at least a city. In it best places it looked kind of like a European city with some shopping streets, but the shopping wasn’t great either, so we decided that one night was enough and that we would go to the Barossa Valley instead. The Barossa Valley is one of the biggest wine valleys in South Australia (.. in the country?) with 40-50 wineries around small hills. We went on our own little winetour which covered the 5 closest wineries. We decided to leave the car behind as the night before had been quite dry on the alcohol :) We started up with Richmond Groove which was a really cool place and it sure had some fine wines. We decided that after some quick tasting it was time to take a bottle and hit the park in the beautiful surroundings of the actual winery. After this little detour, we hit Peter Lehmann were we also had a booming platter of cheese and other goodies. I bought two bottles with me back home from this place, which of course I can’t remember the name of right now. It’s on the bottles anyhow! At this place we tried very expensive wines, I decided to go for one of the cheaper versions though when it came to buying home the actual stuff, their “Three Gardens” Shiraz was really good!
Anyway, a really nice trip with a lot of good memories! On monday it’s uni time, I can’t believe it. I want to travel more in this country! Mia is flying down again on wednesday, so that will be fun! We are thinking about catching a weekend in Sydney or at least something. Seeya!
Roadtrippin’
Nu har vi nat Adelaide, det verkar faktiskt vara en riktig skitstad. Coolaste hitills pa resan ar nog Melbourne som var ett jakligt coolt stalle, paminde lite om Stockholm fast var lite mer chill och lite skonare folk eftersom aussiesarna inte ar sa mycket inne i sina egna varldar som svenskarna. Efter att vi spenderat ett par natter i Melbourne (dagarna agnade vi at mycket kulturella saker sasom att titta pa diverse art galleries och sevardigheter) sa begav vi oss mot Adelaide via Great Ocean Road. Det ar pa Great Ocean Road som man b.la. kan se de tolv apostlarna, det var riktigt maktigt och vissa av stallena vi har sett ar sa grymma att det absolut inte gar att forklara i ord. Det fanns utsiktsplatser langs vagen var 5:e minut ungefar, och da fick man se helt sinnessjuka vyer over klippor, havet och omgivningen – verkligen som taget ur en film eller en photoshoppad bild :)
Har i Adelaide sa ska vi formodligen som det ser ut just nu skippa hela staden, den verkar inte ha sa mycket att erbjuda anda, inte om man tanker pa vad vi sag igar vilket var – ingenting. Sa vi tankte dra till de 2-3 storsta vindistrikten som finns har precis utanfor staden. Idag gar festen av stapeln vid 12 snaret da vi kommer att dra pa en vintour, det finns tydligen runt 100 vingardar som man kan “prova” bara pa de tva forsta stoppen, sa risken att det kommer bli ett par liter ar val inte alltfor vagad…
Dexter the kitten
Yesterday we received the kitten! After having a few beers at Don’s yesterday me and Joel decided to fight to name it either “Dog” or “Computer Cat”, but we soon realised that Melissa wouldn’t approve. She was pretty eager to name him before Rick came home too as she knew that he’d definately go for Computer Cat without blinking. This morning we woke up to find some “remember to feed the kitten” notes followed by a name suggestion. It’s so girly to realize that we’ve started watching Dexter, so of course Melissa suggested Dexter and she just knew we’d go for it! Smart girl. Smart strategy. The fight ended and we still believe we won, but it’s her suggestion that won, argh. But Dexter is alright, actually he’s quite the Dexter so I’m definately alright with it, he’s beginning to bite and scratch now too! Today we had to remove him from behind the fridge where he had found a REALLY GOOD place to hide, totally stuck and hidden he found a hole IN/behind the fridge where he could hide, good stuff.
It’s me, Joel and Dexter until Sunday when Rick comes back from his surftrip and Melissa from Brizzy. Today I’m stuck at uni studying (well) for the finals on Monday and Tuesday. This Behaviour in Organizations exam is giving me mad headaches, we are going to have a case and two short essay questions. That means two hours of constant writing, constant bullshitting and constant pain. It’s going to be hard to find the context and really answer the questions since he just wants us to write as much as possible.
Oh, appearently our professor made a huge mistake on the SPSS exam, since the whole class basically failed that’s a good thing. On every question he had 1-5 scale followed by a 6th option, he said to use F-tests (and not crosstabs) since it was numbers. However he calculated the means for it, not thinking that the 6 would go as a raise for it all. The 6th option was namely the “no opinion”, totally mixing it up which increases the mean and suddenly makes the question a category vs. category and not numerical vs. numerical (crosstabs, which we all did vs. f-tests, which the professor said was right) – so now it seems we were all right, I knew it. We’ll see what happends, if he doesn’t fix it and acknowledge that he did a mistake, Stephan – a german guy that found the error will take it to Kuldeep Kumar, another professor here at Bond that just happends to be the chairman of the Australian Statistical Society. Props to Stephan.
Just one more …
Last night was the first big night out for Jessica and John since coming to Australia. Me and the germans first went to Pink Poodle to this “socializing” thingy which turned out to be a complete flop. We should and could have seen it coming miles away since it was organized by the only russian that exists on the Gold Coast. Anyway, after PP we were off to Don’s for the normal thursday chill, however since the JJ’s talked me into coming to Surfers it wasn’t the chill. We went to basically all the major places (all of them being dead which sucked) and had a beer at every place, the most important win of all being when me and John beat Joel and Jessica at pool in Beergarden, completely called for.
I’ll have to take the blame myself since I knew I was getting up at 9 to go to Uni today, but here I am. It’s almost 11 and all I’ve done all morning is hang around Facebook and do nothing, the normal morning chill. Now I’m hungry as never before and just want to go home! Hopefully there are better things to come since I have to stay around until at least eight tonight, gotta finish the theory for our Seaworld assignment, Consumer decision behavior, shit.