Shayla vs. The World

So it rained here all day yesterday, which means I did absolutely nothing. And so far it has rained all day today. I got on WeatherZone to see what the deal was and this is what I find... YAY for rain all week. At least there's not much. Just little bits here and there. But it is a little depressing to see high chances of rain almost every day. It's also extremely humid today. I think I'm just irritated from being cooped up in my room so much. Plus I'm running out of food but am not ambitious enough to go out in the rain and buy some. That is all for now (cue the remarks about all of the ice and coldness in Iowa)

Well it's been a while (at least compared to how much posting I did my first two weeks here). Not a lot has been going on. I got enrolled into some of my classes only to discover that I can't work the main one I wanted into my schedule. As a result I spent an entire day looking through the UNSW handbook trying to find a class that might manage to transfer back. That was frustrating. I still haven't found anything. If all else fails I will take some random easy Gen Ed that doesn't mean anything and I will have to make up a few credits another semester. It doesn't necessarily matter to me either way. I severely miss playing piano. I have some music with me, but it's a matter of finding an instrument to play on. The practice rooms for the school are limited to music students only (stupid). Finding a piano will have to be my project for this week. Well, on to Australia Day (The Australian equivalent of the 4th of July). It was great fun. I started off by attendi...

So this weekend I took a bus to Canberra. My step-Grandpa's cousin lives there with her husband and they were wonderful enough to invite me there to show me around. I arrived in Canberra a little after six and we went out to eat. We had Thai food, which was interesting to say the least. Very different than what I am used to, good, but very different. We then did a little bit of site seeing before it got dark. Yeah that's a city about the same population as the Quad-Cities. There's so much green you'd hardly even know it.  We then settled in for the night. I woke up in the morning to this view from my room. Again, that's all city. Saturday we decided to go to the Nature Reserve. It was really awesome to see the unique animals in their natural habitat instead of a zoo. (There's a few pictures here that were taken specially taken for Miss Alexa)  So many kangaroos. Apparently the kangaroo population here can be considered just as pes...

So I was just looking at my sister's blog which you can see here , and it made me laugh. Mainly because it's really weird how I went from this... Yes that's me standing there in probably 7 layers of clothing To this... Try not to be too jealous Well yeah. That's pretty much all. I just got a good laugh. To everyone back in Iowa, try not to be too jealous of me okay :)

So there's not going to be any pictures with this post, it's more just me documenting my life. I've been here a week. It's been fun so far, right up until yesterday (Monday) morning when I woke up sick. Nothing too awful. My throat is swollen so it hurts to swallow or yawn or pretty much do anything and I was exhausted and really sore everywhere. I stayed in bed all day, which sucked because it was beautiful out. Today my throat still hurts but I'm not as tired or sore so I'm taking that as a good sign. I'm going to go to the store and get soup and tea so I feel better :) Overall it's been pretty great here. I had one day last week where the jet lag caught up to me and I realized I was on the other side of the world away from my family and everything that was familiar, but I just slept a lot that night and was all better the next day. My mom has been pretty worried about me, which I feel the need to document because when I moved out after high school...

Yes, the name of this did have to be very cliche. Before I go into the beach there's something I would like to rant about quickly. Outside my room window is a courtyard... I believe I posted this picture on my first day here post. Now I grew up in a small town, which is quiet. Even worse is we live on the edge of town which is even more quiet. Then I went off to Iowa State. Ames, Iowa, being a college town, does have some more noise at night but where I was living it still really wasn't that bad. Mostly I'm enjoying the noise of this city. And honestly, once 10pm hits there's really not even that much noise. This courtyard echos like crazy. You don't have to be talking/making noise very loud for me to be able to hear what is going on like I was standing right next to you. This normally doesn't bother me at all. Unless, as you may see in the bottom right corner of the picture, someone is skateboarding or rolling something across that wooden walkway. Tha...

I had some of this typed up Wednesday evening, but right around 8 I hit a wall and was very suddenly very tired. I woke up Thursday morning feeling like I had been hit by a train. The initial excitement of being here had worn off and my jet lag had finally caught up. Because of that I didn't do much of anything all day and went to bed at like 6. I woke up this morning feeling LOADS better and since it's supposed to be in the 80s today I think I'll walk to the beach (and maybe catch a bus back since it's like an hour walk). But first I'm going to finish this post while I eat some. Wednesday wasn't too exciting. I got a little lazy, but I think I'm entitled to that right? I woke up and decided I would explore campus some. I think this campus is gorgeous. I wish I could take better pictures of it, but I'm not a camera guru like my sister and I don't have too nice of a camera. So this is what you get. This is the archway to get from my apartment t...

Just to warn you, this is a very long post. Also, I'm not sure if you see them (or if it's just me) But there's some formatting issues with this post. I'm sorry for that. I'm not quite sure how to fix it. Well I made it, and am in the process of settling in. Today was fun but rough. But before I get there maybe I should start with my plane ride. We took off about 8:25 pm LA time, and were schedule to land about 6:25 am Sydney time, totalling 14 hours in the air. I was dreading the actual flight. Mix that with all of the excitement of landing in Sydney and you can say I was very confused emotion wise while boarding the plane. As I pointed out in my first post my seat was in the second to last row window seat of the plane. This eventually proved to be a really great seat. Because of the position, I only had one person blocking me in instead of the standard two people. That made it a lot easier to get out if I needed to use the lavatory or stretch or what not. ...