The King of Parks

I woke up Sunday feeling pretty crudy. My sore throat remained from Saturday, and I was stuffy. Not a good start for a day when I was supposed to go to the park. I sucked it up however and took the bus to the Murdoch train station, and took the train into Perth. It was my first time in the city. I didn't spend much time in the city at at, and didn't see much, but it's pretty damn small. West Australia, three times the size of Texas, has a whopping 2.2 million people. Perth, the state's capital, has 1.65 million of those residents, so you wouldn't expect that much of Perth.

I spent the day in Kings Park, the biggest city park in the world, on the edge of the city. I didn't see much and would like to go back and explore but I liked what I saw. I had a long picnic with my local friend Angela and her friends Sam, Kally & Jarryd. It was a pretty fun visit but a little weird since I only kinda knew Angela, but I was glad I got off campus and explored a bit. We stayed for about 3 hours. The highlight was seeing Jarryd jam on his Guitar Hero-like guitar, which you can see here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6R_T3aWKD4 (it's worth seeing). Oh, and the view from where we were (just down a few paces from our picnic site) was pretty nice:

Angela drove me home in the beautifully sunny late afternoon, only for me to leave campus again about 20 minutes after I got back to go to a independent film festival with Jesse in Freo. I wasn't sure if it was going to be something I would enjoy, especially since I was feeling worse at this point, but I went anyway. We saw 16 short films and they were pretty good overall. There are 5 that I really liked, but there was as a 30 minute intermission at the midway point. The festival ended just before 10pm, and because of the 30 minute intermission, we missed the last bus back to campus by 1 minute (we saw the bus leave the station even). Silly Jesse and I didn't check to see when the last bus left the station on a Sunday, but to us 10:01 seemed kinda early. We almost walked the roughly 5 miles back to campus (we even started walking back) but took a cab a few blocks in, because the fare ended up being only $18 AUD, and split between the two of us, it wasn't bad.

I woke up today (Monday) feeling pretty crappy at an early 8 am (considering my only class started at 11:30) with the hopes of studying before class. The only thing I succeeded in doing was making tasty scrambled eggs (with some cheese in them; absolutely fantastic) and talking to my Clark friend Alicia for a few hours online. Even though I set my alarm on my cell phone, I still lost track of time and left for class a little later than I would have liked. Apparently that classroom's clock is 6-7 minutes fast, because when I got there 5 minutes before the scheduled start of class, my professor was already talking which greatly annoyed me.

Class was okay, but it's going to be a hard class to study for since I can't really take notes: he has a lot of stuff on the power point but skips a lot of it (this is also true for the reading). I'm going to try to write down the subjects we talk about in class and any notes I can spare, and then go over the reading in the library after and take notes from there too. I have to do a 4-5k word paper (with a partner) on something toxic in our society, and it looks like my partner and I are going to be investigating Red Bull (specifically the caffeine load). The highlight of class was my professor (who is very eccentric and funny) talking about children being more susceptible to toxins, because they lick and suck the floor. Good times.

After lecture I ate lunch and got ready for the beach, which I ended up going with just Jesse. We got there around 3:30, 4 which is the latest I've gotten there. I um, yeah, I wore a speedo for the first time and it was really interesting. It felt kinda cool actually, to tell the truth, but I was already getting a slight tan line from my board shorts. My arms are really tan but that's about it. I guess I'll have to work on my tan now while it's still hot. I was looking at the average temperatures for June, when it gets down to about 67°F.

We took the bus back to campus, but had to wait about 15 minutes between buses which prevented us from going to Kmart and Coles, because by the time we got to the mall, it was already 5:52pm or so, and both stores close at 6. It didn't help that our bus lost power or whatever twice en route. I'll go in tomorrow afternoon though, no worries, and get what I need.

I'm going to go make dinner now then run off to the library for a few hours to prepare for my first Pollutants (the class I had today) tutorial and do some other studying. I'll most likely spend my free time tomorrow studying so I can spend most of Thursday (when I'm done by 10:30 in the morning; Jesse has Thursday off) at the beach. Pity I have lab all afternoon on Wednesday, because it's going to be sunny and 96°F (36°C; my roommate said she heard 41°C). However, it's going to be partly cloudy and 95°F on Thursday.

Sunday: 7
Monday: 7