2 Crazy Sheilas

Okay, so I didn’t go to Penguin Island to see Phillip, but I did go to Phillip Island to see the Penguins! I know I haven’t written in awhile but I really was just focusing on getting through my homework week!

 In the last entry I think that I said that I was going to go to a concert in St. Kilda, well lets just say that the time of it wasn’t very clear. We headed into the city (on SLOW public transportation) and then past it to the beach subard of St. Kilda to see a really good band play at a bar there. We all thought that they played at 8 o’clock, and when we got there we found that they actually didn’t play until 12:45 a.m., almost 45 minutes after the last tram heading back to campus was. Needless to say we didn’t get to see the band play…maybe next time? OF COURSE!

This last weekend was tons of fun, let me tell you! After I handed in my two huge papers on Friday, Miranda and I decided to go into the city and go out with a few European friends. We went to a bar called the Deck thats probably my favorite bar in the city. Its located on the top of a building thats in the middle of the city sky scrapers and it also had an amazing view of the Yarra River! Can’t wait to go another time, as every time I have gone thus far it has proved to be a blast! So after a fun Friday night out in the city with friends I had to get home and get ready for my day tour to Phillip Island!

Saturday we (Keesjan, Shoerd, Anne, Miranda, and I) booked a day trip to Phillip Island to see the penguins.  Before we could do that we made a few stops in Victoria.  We stopped at a place called Mauri Conservatory and got to see all kinds of Australian animals (such as Tasmanian Devils, Dingoes, Womabts, Wallabies, Koalas, Kangaroos, and even Alpacas and Emus!) and even got to feed a few. Amongst all of my animal encounters at the conservatory I did decide that I want to take a dingoe home with me, wombats are sleepy during the day, Aussie alpacas are crazy, and that kangaroos look great in shades! It was a really cool experience because we all got to see and pet most of the animals and get up close and personal My favorite part of the visit was feeding the wallabies and kangaroos, and even an albino kangaroo! It was really great to get so close to the kangaroos and pet, feed and accessorize them! After spending some quality time with some Australian animals we headed down the road and made a stop at a really beautiful beach.  The tour guide let us walk down the beach and he picked us up at the next stop, even though the Koolen 5 were a little late getting back (we had a little too much fun playing in the water and sand I guess).  You are all probably wondering who the Koolen 5 are, well obviously it represented the five of us that went on the trip! The tour guide gave us the nickname because the reservations for the trip were under Shoes’ (Sjoerd) last name, Koolen, and he suspected that we were going to be trouble, which was a valid suspicion ;), and gave us a name to be remembered by! It made for a good laugh! After the nice stroll on the beach we headed onto Phillip Island to watch the penguins come home from the ocean after a long day.

Once we got there the five of us walked down to the beach and parked ourselves in the front (with all the kids by the way ) to ensure we got the best view.  Apparently seeing penguins were a very big tourist attraction as there were hundreds of people there.  What it entails is watching the cute 33 cm (which I must add are WAY smaller that I had imagined) penguins come from the ocean just after sundown and waddle to thier burrows for the night.  It was really funny to see the penguins, which are only found in the southern hemisphere, come out of the water and weeble wabble their ways to their burrows.  The tour guide told us that they come out of the ocean and find thier burrows after dark because they are scared of predators and they head back to the ocean in the morning before sunrise. I also learned that the penguins burrows can be anywhere from a few meters from the ocean to kilometers away!  I couldnt imagine them waddling kilometers away from the ocean to get to their homes, it would take them forever! After watching the penguins head home for a little bit we decided it was time for us to do the same and make our way back to Melbourne!

This morning I had made plans to have a relaxing sleep-in and day with a little homework in between movies.  Lets just say I didn’t exactly get what I wanted, although in the end I would much prefer the day that I had. I was awoken at 9 am by my phone with a call from a friend (who is also the inter-college sport coordinator) asking me if I could play footy for the Chisholm girls team.  At first I was thinking no way, I’m just a spectator and would NEVER play, well needless to say she convinced me.  I have played sport for Chisholm already this semester against the other colleges (dorms as we call them) on campus and lets just say that Chisholm has the reputation for losing, which today was no exception as the girls lost 125 points to zero, sad huh! Anyway footy is a sport that is completely new to me and I was not looking forward to the tackling part, death was ringing in my ears, especially when I saw our competition, which consisted of the biggest and bulkiest girls (if you could call them girls) from the other college. I swear I thought I was going to die!  But in the end I learned that getting tackled was actually fun, and tackling other girls was even more fun!  I actually didn’t do so bad, for an international, as my Aussie teammates pointed out! I’ve got a few bumps and scrapes now and WOW am I sore, but we have another game next Sunday and I’m looking forward to it with all my tackling might!  I hate to say it but Australian Rules Football is really growing on me, almost to the point that its overcoming my love for American Football! I have probably made a few of you hate me now huh…well I’ll tell you, just watch a few games,  its very addicting and fun! Although you may need an Aussie to explain the rules, because at first it just looks like a mess!  Well I need to go ice some joints and cover a few wounds (just kidding) oh yeah, and send a few sorry letters to the girls of the other college for tackling them like no other! Haha, just kidding on that one too!

Will write more once I have more news, and I am sure I will because there is a huge Australian holiday on Friday, Anzac Day, and I dont have classes, so you know what that means….

Oh yeah I almost forgot, I heard from a little bird that its getting pretty nice over there in the US? Getting colder here….so enjoy your beautiful Spring days as it is Fall/Winter here now!

~Claire

Yesterday Claire and I, along with our friends Keesjan, Anne, and Sjoerd, went on a day trip to Phillip Island to watch the Penguin Parade.  At our first stop along the way we got to get up close with some other awesome animals.  The first animal we saw was a baby wombat named Wilma.  Because wombats are nocturnal, Wilma just snoozed in our tour guide’s lap while we all got to pet her.  After feeding a koala and checking out a crocodile and tasmanian devil, we entered the best part of our tour.  Each of us grabbed a small container of food (okay so I grabbed two) and went into a pen where we got to feed wallabies, a sheep, a goat, alpaca, a mule, a miniature horse, and kangaroos!  We also got to get close to some koalas and emus and even pet a dingo.  The sheep, alpaca, and miniature horse were  pretty aggressive in trying to get food and the goat even got his head and horns stuck in the fence, but the best part was feeding the wallabies and kangaroos.  They would grasp our containers of food or our hands that they were eating from.  While feeding them we were allowed to pet them and check out their tails which are extremely muscular.  There was even an albino kangaroo!  All of this was a lot of fun, but the funniest part of our little experience was when our friend Keesjon (we call him K) started putting sunglasses of the kangaroos and wallabies.  The animals were so focused on eating they really didn’t seem to care.  Our entire tour group was laughing as we took pictures with animals wearing shades.

The first part of our trip was so much fun I probably could have been happy to end there but we went on to a beautiful beach.  We took a walk on the soft sand and dipped our feet in the cool water.  We goofed around, taking pictures and writing messages in the sand before heading back to our bus.  Next we went to The Nobbies where fur seals sometimes come.  We didn’t see any seals but we saw the beautiful black rocks around the water as the sun was heading down.

Our final stop was to the Penguin Parade.  We made our way down to the beach where a huge crowd of people gathered, waiting and watching to see the Little Penguins make their way from the water to their homes.  We sat front row and waited under the moon for the sun to go down completely behind us.  Soon there were little tiny penguins coming out of the water, getting nervous and running back, then coming out again..  Groups of them would come out together and begin their journey towards their little burrows.  We weren’t allowed to take pictures because the flash is said to blind them but on our way back to our bus we did get to see them up close under some of the walkway lights.  The day was sunny and warm.  I’d say it was one of my favorite trips that I’ve went on here.