Scary canary and mad hatters for Halloween

Last assignments handed in , last classes over. Only four exams to go and the academic part of this exchange is definitely over.


Exactly for this reason an end of semester drink was organised at the Scary Canary. Free food and a drink would be awaiting us. It was a typical backpackers bar and when we arrived there was hardly any one there yet (which meant we got a lot more than one free drinks). What they had was Thai buckets: a cocktail in a little plastic bucket which made me feel like finding myself a little shovel and going to the beach and built sandcastles. After we had enough to eat and we finished our drinks we quickly hurried on to World bar for the Indie night.


On Friday I went to uni for the graduation of a friend of mine. We sat in the grass outside and I painted faces in preparation for the Halloween/Dia de los Muertos party that nights. We continued to Manning for a fundraiser Karaoke for Indonesia. I ended up singing Teenage Dirtbay with Jess, while all our friends did interpretive dance behind us. In the end the two hosts sang Celine Dion's heart will go on because they promised to if we raised enough money.

At the party I painted my face and transformed into a dead little girl and danced the night away with spiderladies, Death himself and other ghouls.

The next day we had a Halloween BBQ at Coogee and for that afternoon we changed our costume idea quite a lot of times. First we were going to dress up as grapes and raspberry, but we couldn't find pink and purple balloons. Then we were going to dress up as two dead dolls, but it was too hot to put on all that facepaint. In the end we went as little miss rockstar, ant and our housemate Jenny went as a bee. We decided to cath some sun before the BBQ started. While we were there 'Marry Me' was written in the sky by an airplane. Just when the plane finished writing all attention was drawn to the see as the alarm went of to indicate that there had been a shark spotted in the water. Everybody rushed out and we stared and stared, but no sharkfin was to be spotted.

The BBQ was a lot of fun and people were giving us strange looks while we were dressed as bloody doctors, nerds, ghouls, She-devil, hippies and more. When all food was eaten we continued to a houseparty where people were playing flip-cup enthusiastically.

I had another party to go to, which was the Blue Door party where everybody had to wear crazy hats. Lieke and I took the bus and she kept on her bright red wig while I exchanged my Rockstar outfit for a gipsylook with a scarf in my hair. An entire range of crazy headwear was indeed on display.

Yesterday meant catching up with sleep, chilling in the park and Harm, Lieke and Lisianne created the biggest stack of pancakes you will ever see, since it needed to feed nine people of the house.

Halloween is over and I am sure some people will still have difficulty getting the fake blood stains of their skin. It was a wonderful weekend indeed.

Out of this world

After a single hour of class I went to Coogee beach last week with Lieke and Lisianne. I truly felt like I was on holiday while I was swimming in the clear blue sea and enjoying the sun on an almost deserted beach (it was a Thursday after all).

That evening we went to the Noodle markets in Hyde Park where an enormous crowd was enjoying food from different stands in the open air. While enjoying our Thai we watched the Chinese dragon dance and the lights in the trees sway. Afterwards we went for a stroll through the city.

On Friday I had to put in some effort towards finishing my last load of assignments (and mostly sat outside in the garden enjoying the sun). On Saturday I went to Tamarama beach with Lies and Frances. We took the inflatable crocodile they bought on springbreak for a swim.

In the afternoon it seemed as if doom rolled through the skies and we hid from the tropical storm in a café. Joost had to move his birthday inside and after some BBQing I went back to get changed for a Space Odyssey party at a friends house. Australians are definitely keen on dress up parties and the costumes were absolutely spaced out (and the girl on the left of me gives you a proper idea of Aussie girl's dress sense).

The next day was the defintion of a lazy Sunday, as I slept through my alarm and skipped my morning all together. In the evening we had a delicious vegetarion dinner with the house. Monday I had two group meetings. One of my teammates asked me if I had gotten a fake tan so I guess I have gotten a decent colour (although why she thought it was fake I don't know, I still associate a fake tan with oompaloompa's).

Yesterday I spend most day outside, but to my regret I could not join Lies and Lieke to the beach as I had to give a presentation later in the afternoon. That all went great and today I fininished the last group assignment after another day of class. Tomorrow I have my final hour of class. After that it is time to put together some creative Halloween outfits! Positively scary and legendary berry. Don't worry, picture evidence will follow soon.

All colours of the rainbow

The BBQ was amazing and it turned into an amusing houseparty which left me wondering whether the neighbours were deaf. The people at UNSW are an absolutely entertaining bunch and I'm glad Lies and I go to two different uni's as it results in twice as many people and social events to attend.

Our lazy Sunday was spend once again in Centennial Park armed with the paper and food. We listened to a concert of strange birds (including the one that has a seriously contagious laugh).

Monday morning was still like weekend and since Lisianne had some cancelled classes we enjoyed our 'garden' and ended up skyping instead of anything near productive. After making sure the people in Mexico were still alive and Tim is still the King of Kingston, we both had to head to uni. I have a meeting for my group project in which we have to present our communications strategy for our own creation of Fair Cups: Fairtrade café's (What mark is your coffee leaving?).

the On tuesday I had another massive gap and I decided to discover Newtown, the funky neighbourhood around Sydney uni. After discovering the cutest teashop and a whole arrangment of bodyart stores I headed back to class and then straight to the supermarket. Once again we would meet with a bunch of people in 'the house with the blue door' to celebrate Sarah's birthday. It was a rainbowparty, so everything from food to clothing had to be colourful. My pastasalad was positively green and wrapped in Brazilian fabric I went on my way. Effort had certainly been made and we had a colourful night with once again a table full of delicious foods and me wishing I had a bigger stomach. After dinner the guitar appeared and we spend the evening chatting and singing.

After another full day of class in the garden I came to realize that after one hour of class tomorrow I just have one more week left. A semester of classes have rushed past. I have so much more I want to do but I feel I'm running out of time. Tomorrow and the other days of the weekend can pretty much be summed up by the word beach and I am relieved that the pressure of deadlines is almost over. Somewhere in my head I have this little voice telling me though, that I am going to miss wondering around Eastern Avenue, passing by the Quad (whether it deserves the term Hogwartsbuidling is still being debated) and all the student activists.

Cupcakes and pubs

Now for what happened besides my cockroachhunting:

Wednesday after class I hung around at Manning to listen to a jazzband, which turned out to be pretty amazing and I danced a bit in my business outfit ( I finally had to present my Facebook campaign).

Thursday has been the hottest day up to date with 29 degrees (which is very hot considering the lack of ozone layer, which makes the sun a lot stronger). Unfortunately I only got to enjoy it during lunch as my ethics group decided that that day was a perfect time to finish our poster on chocolate slavery. Luckily we finished it now and I went straight to a friend's house after. We ate a delicious pastasalad with quite some people I hadn't seen in a while. We continued to Manning bar to the final of theatre sports. It was packed and some of the things happening were amasing and sometimes even funny, but somehow most of it we were watching with one eyebrow raised. It might be because we aren't Australians, but I think mostly because improvisation can be a very specific kind of humour, one we don't find funny to be more precise. When the winner was announced (the French army was beaten by a team whos name was lost on us) we strolled to the other uni bar to the 'Retrosexual party for guys and their friends'. The only thing retro were the hippy costumes worn by some of the more colourful figures, but the music was far from retro, every third song being from lady Gaga. After sitting outside for half an hour we decided to walk back home.

Friday we went to the Australian Museum and I was amazed by the beauty of all the minerals and got shivers when looking at all the insects walking around on Australian soil (some things should only be seen dead behind glass and never spotted in your tent). Another surprise was that many years back something that looks like a koala the size of an elephant stomped around. We made a skeleton bike and found out about all the things that could kill us while here and then decided it was time to go get dinner. In the evening I went on the revue pubcrawl where all revues from medicine to science and engineering met again to hop eight Sydney bars. After discussing the peace corps, scrubs(the actual thing, not the show), tea with a bloke called Paddy and sang karaoke I returned home.

Today Lisianne and I visited our favourite cupcakery and we are now preparing to go to a birthdayBBQ. After drinking Chai in our little garden we came to the conclusion: despite some tiny critters we are happy to have been able to call Sydney our home.

Creepy Critters

I can't properly explain why, but somehow something that is about 1/1000th my size can make me jump on my chair wielding a cup and a coathanger as weapons. In the last two days I've had a family of cockroaches crawling on my walls since they apparently decided to move into my room. This wouldn't be so bad if they wouldn't suddenly vanish when I start to chase them, knowing that they are still around somewhere when I go to bed.





A visit to the Australian Museum taught me these filthy things have been on this earth for 400 million years and I think its very plausible that when we get into total nuclear warfare, cockraches will rule the world as the only survivors. The last couple of days it has been hot and humid weather and as a result we have seen a record number of roaches run around the streets and those things are fast. When sitting outside a bar a girl decided to jump on one, catapulting half of it towards our table. Proof of their almost indestructable nature became visible when that half started moving again. When I got home at night I skyped with my mum and made her deaf when I was caught off-guard when one of them decided to target my feet. A larger one decided to practice its wallclimbing skills and when Lisianne came back from her October fest we spend an hour trying to find out where they were and decided there had to be two serpate ones crawling around my curtains and desk because they were different sizes. We caught the smaller one and threw it in the trashcan (we don't step on them in the fear of spreading eggs). Yesterday night when I got back from a pubcrawl I found another two that ran for it as soon as I switched on the light and decided that I had had enough. I stuffed the cracks full of cardboard and paper, but preventing them from getting in also meant I had two in my room that couldn't get out. Once again I caught the smaller one.... Today we got little black boxes that will hopefully solve the problem. By now I like to think I stopped screaming but still, those damn crawlies look a lot cuter in wall-e.

Beaches and procrastination

Every student knows that tendency, when they are supposed to do something academic, they find tons of other things to do. Since springbreak was a blissful holiday away from all things coming with a deadline, I now have a load of groupwork, presentations, articles to read etc. so naturally I am now writing this blog.

After being away it was nice again to have dinner with all the people in the house and I realize that once I'm back I will miss coming back to such a full house. On Tuesday we celebrated Ruben' s 24th birthday picknickstyle on the floor, because there was not enough space on the couches. When he went off with his friends to go out, we stayed chatting with the remaining housemates. On wednesday I took of in my businessdress, but since our team didn't get a turn to present I will have to dress up again coming Wednesday.

Thursday after class Lisianne and I decided to check out the big shopping centre in Bondi Junction, which is known to be so huge you get lost (since the both of us seem to lack the intuition to find the right direction this is not too hard though). In the evening we went to the Worldbar in Kings Cross where they have Indie night. I fell in love with the place where dentistlamps light up the dozens of teapots on the walls in which they serve cocktails and the jeans on the wall. Not to mention hearing Kings of Leon and Franz Ferdinand while going out.




On Friday we had another birthday from Justine and we had been given the task to all bring food. Therefore we went to the house of some other friends to bake pancakes because we lack proper pans while they were making quiche, salad and other jummy things we weren't allowed to eat yet. With rumbling stomachs we hurried to our house and spend the night eating delicousness in her garden. In the end there were chocholate muffings, apple pie and cranberry crumble all made by Justine and it was a pitty we all had to stop eating because our bellies were practically exploding from our foodbabies. We played hilarious games involving the imitations of whales and the most hilarious bunny I have ever seen thanks to Nano. We ended up literally running home in the middle of the night.

The next morning we woke up early so we could go to Manly, but it was cloudier than expected so instead another day of procrastination began. Luckily yesterday the weather was amazing and we took the beautiful ferry trip to the beach up North. The strong current and big number of surfers prevented us from taking a dip in the water, but nonetheless we enjoyed the sun on our skin and picknicked on the beach.


Now all my postcards have been written, this blog updated and I'm running out of excuses and my communications presentation is giving me an evil eye...
Lets look up snorkling trips at the great barrier reef!

Back to reality

And here I am ten days later back at uni, trying to get myself to work on my PR campaign for Facebook (instead I am 'doing research' on Facebook).


My holiday with the promising tag springbreak ended up not completely as expected, but I still had a blast. With Lisa and Karina I took a train to Brisbane, where we arrived at 6.30 in the morning. After dropping our bags at the hostel we decided to explore the city. Queensland calls itself the sunshine state, but ironically it was very warm, but most certainly cloudy there while I am pretty sure we left sunshine in Sydney. The city was still asleep but even later in the afternoon there were not that many people around. I concluded Brisbane, despite its pretty parks and buildings, felt like a city without a soul. We walked around the Brisbane river, saw the story bridge, went to the museum (to discover that every Australian artist went to Paris at some point in their lives), walked some more along the river and Brisbane's CBD. As someone who lists ' sleeping in' as a hobby I all of a sudden discovered that a day had a lot of hours and in one day we walked through the entire of Brisbane. After a quick bite at the hostel we went for a drink at the groove train in Brisbane's squire and discovered that Brisbane is a lot prettier by night. On the squire stood the festival terrain where the last events of the Brisbane festival were taking place. We were almost falling asleep after such a long day but we waited for the Dj event to start and I'm glad we did. The DJ was amazing but more astonishing was the inside of the festival tent which felt like I walked into a circus.


The next day we went to the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary and to my delight it was actually sunny. Iguanas and bush turkeys randomly rand around in the park I saw countless of koalas, although my favourite was the kindergarten with mummies and their joey's (koalababies). In another part of the park we could feed kangaroos in the large open area where they just hopped around. I also fed an emu, but these big birds are quite scary to feed in comparions to the sweet skippies. After a Sunday Roast at the pub we went to stroll next to the river again with some ice cream and decided that the story bridge did look nice lit up at night and maybe wasn't just a cheap knock off of the Harbour Bridge.


The next morning my alarm went at 4.45 because we thought the only bus to Surfer's Paradise was at 7. This turned out not to be true, but it did mean we were already enjoying the beach and clear blue skies at eight in the morning. Don't let the name fool you, Sufer's paradise is a beach that seems under continuous construction with skyscrapers looming over you. Still, sandy beaches and a nice swim in the sea are hard to spoil (even though I managed to burn my eyelids (!) and looked as if wearing pink eyeshadow for the rest of the week. That night we went out to Vanity, which meant waitresses in lingerie, but also the coolest bathroom I have ever seen. Lollies, perfume bottles, gold and chandeliers everywhere. I also surprisingly met some friends who I thought wouldn't arrive till later and met the brother in law of a friend of mine back in Rotterdam. Something about the world is small?

After just a day in Surfer's we moved on to Byron Bay which can best be described as hippy town. May Karma be with you, peace out and safe the environment can be read everywhere and apparently they forced out MacDonalds out of their town.The beach is amazing, but we were only able to enjoy it the second day we were there. At the beach I spotted a whale in the distance and at that moment I felt truly on holiday.In the afternoon I went surfing for the first time and I surprisingly turned out to be a decent surfer. I was able to stand up most of the time and there was even a dolphin swimming close to us. Byron Bay's nightlife is not the greatest with just a few bars, most of them the wet t-shirt competition kind (I swear, you'd think some of those blokes have never seen boobs before). The third day it sadly was cloudy again so we just strolled around the shop, met some other friends in the supermarket and had dinner together. We ended up building our own party in an almost deserted bar with quite some people we met in the hostel. We went surfing a second time with some higher waves this time. I had a blast once more and felt I found a sport a quite enjoyed, with a typical instructor with long blonde hair yelling 'Feel the wave Holland!'. In the afternoon we walked to the famous lighthouse and stood at the most easterly point of Australia and saw a lot of whales. With the wind in my hair staring over the enormous ocean with grey fins bobbing up and down I felt genuinly on top of the world.

Unfortunately that was about it as we ended with a massive anti-climax. The day and a half we were to spend in Coffs Harbour I can only say I saw my first James Bond. We only had rain and the only thing I saw of the banana worshipping town is the big banana when we rode by it in the bus and the cafe we ate chocolate cake to cheer ourselves up.

In the end it was not the sunshine filled break I had hoped for but I still enjoyed my first trip outside of Sydney. I still can't wait for the day I can go to Bondi in bikini, which should come soon. Of course there are a lot of good days but the weather behaves a bit like a moody teenager. Sometimes you feel as if you are in the Bahamas while the next day I feel as if I'm back in the Netherlands. Three months have passed in a blur and Springbreak is oficially over. Four weeks of class left and still so much to discover!