ok, i am lazy so i haven't updated in a while

the title says it all. if it weren't for the efforts of Dennis Apker, this post may not have made it, so i thank him exclusively.

so, i left off at the famous (or famoose) mardi gras festival. since then, my life has been a combination of beach, school, skating, going out at nights, and cooking food. You can put them in any order and I'm sure at some point you will have correctly described an actual day in the life of me.

some of the highlights include Beachball party at Manning Bar, St. Patrick's Day, and my trip to Manly Beach. Beachball was a huge party thrown by the university of sydney at Manning Bar (the bar in the student union on campus). They had local bands from sydney, good specials, but more importantly 3,000 other people to celebrate. I got the chance to meet some cool people, but i later found out that 50% of the people i was talking to were tripping on ecstacy. At least they were nice, haha.

This by far was the best saint patrick's day ever. I got back from class around two, went to the gym, and was out to the bar by three with my roommate, Sean. We went to an irish bar up the street called 'cock and bull'. This place was pretty small, but they somehow managed to squeeze about 500 people, an irish band, and a whole lot of Guinness in the Cock and Bull. We were only planning on staying for one beer and going to another irish bar, but we ended up staying for about 3 hours listening to the music and having a few more beers. We finally left the best bar in australia to meet up with people and have a much less fun time at other places. Eventually, we ended up at the Argyle (one of my favorites) only to find that it was practically empty. We accepted defeat and went to an american pancake house called "Pancakes on the Rocks". I ate the Devil's Delight, which is chocolate pancakes with strawberries and chocolate syrup. I'll just say that it was worth leaving the bars.

Yesterday, me and a few other study australia folks decided to dedicate a day to Manly Beach. Manly is a suburb of sydney, but it is most easily accessed by taking a ferry across the Sydney harbor. At first, i was kinda bummed that i had to pay $12 bucks to take the ferry, but the ride in itself was worth it. we got phenomenal views of the city from the water and enjoyed a nice 20 minute boat ride to the beach. once we got there, everything got even better. manly is a nice, quaint little beach town with a great atmosphere. The water and coast line was beautiful, and it wasn't quite as crowded as Coogee or Bondi beach.

In other news, I have my first paper due on tuesday. I don't feel like a student anymore, so this might be a pretty difficult task to handle. And it's really sad because the paper is about bob dylan and a cover of Highway 61 revisited.

I think the most exciting news i have to offer is the news of a trip that me and some friends are planning. In june, me and 3 other guys are flying to the northern most part of Australia called Darwin. From there, we will be helping the airlines in taking a van back to adelaide (southern most part of Australia) where it needs to be. They charge us $1/day, give us $200 in gas, and a 3300 km driving limit. Although we will slightly exceed this limit, we will be doing a 7-day cross-continental road trip through the outback. We will stop as Ayers Rock in Uluru (if you don't know what this is, google it...it's pretty epic), along with a few other national parks. for those of you that don't really know anything about the australian outback, it is quite possibly one of the most difficult dangerous expanses of land on the planet. On our driving directions, we start in darwin, go .3 km on elbert rd, then continue 2791 km on stuart highway. In this stretch close to 2100 miles, there are no cities, a handful of towns (population 100 and below), and a whole lot of desert and kangaroos. I really can't express how excited I am for this trip. I have said it a million times, but i am so blessed to have all these experiences and opportunities.

That's all for now. Again, thanks to dennis for inspiring me to write about the past two weeks. I will hopefully get better about keeping up with the blog.

- Charlie