HEY EVERYONE. I'm itching for stories from the US lately...if you've got some good ones I'd love to hear 'em. Uncle Mike and I even managed to Skype last night - I'm getting better at it! My computer is not...it still freaks out whenever anyone calls, but we usually get it sorted eventually.
So a fairly normal week, whatever that means in Australia...took awhile to recover from a birthday party last weekend, but I finally found some motivation to get a LOT of work done...I've been lacking that necessary element since we got back from the Northwest Trip. Classes are going pretty well though; just started a week-long ecology project today (we have this week off of classes, it's our second "study break"), and it looks like it's going to be fun...at least I get to spend some time outside in the sun (sampling plants and ants!) rather than in a lecture hall. I shall not complain. Today we took a lot of plant samples, measured abundance of plant species, and caught ants! Here's a tip, if you ever want to catch a lot of ants in a relatively short amount of time: get some ethanol and a paint brush, put the ethanol on the paint brush, gently tap the ant with the paint brush, and voila, you have a stunned ant. Much easier to put into a vial and take back to the lab for identification. We had to put ours in vials that also contained ethanol, so the ants died...my soul needs some repair after that. But we spent a really really long time trying to identify them, and I learned a lot from that...so perhaps they did not perish in vain. MAN does it take a long time to ID ants. You put them under a magnifying glass and it's so, so cool to see all the hairs (setae) and body parts that are way too tiny to observe when they're just running around in the sand, and what's really, really awesome is how different each species actually looks. They're extremely diverse, but the naked human eye can't do them justice. Anyway, I give EO Wilson mad props for what he's done - ants are really difficult to study, but a lot of fun in the end.
Anyway now that everyone realizes just how nerdy I am...last week! Volunteered at the hospital on Wednesday and had a great time, got to talk to a lot of new people - actually maybe I've never mentioned this before, come to think of it. So on Wednesday mornings I go to the Fremantle Hospital and work for a few hours with this lovely woman named Jeanne (she's French), pushing the library cart to patients' rooms in case they want some magazines or books. She had been doing it by herself, and she totally could continue to do so, but I really wanted to do some volunteer work while I was down here and I think Jeanne just wanted someone to talk to, so they let me do a few hours a week. She reminds me a lot of Great Grandma (or what I imagine Great Grandma was like when she was 72). Anyway I get to talk to patients, hopefully cheer them up a bit...it's just nice. And I get Jeanne's life story, as well as the stories of her four children and her husband's mother and her daughter's ex-husband...she's got an unending arsenal of stories. After leaving the hospital I usually hang out in Freo for awhile, then stop at a market on the way home (the CHEAPEST produce I've ever seen - a huge bag of carrots for a mere 79 cents...), and meet some more interesting people while I wait for the bus. Wednesdays are good days. They are also VOLLEYBALL days. Hooray. I'm going to miss volleyball when I get back to the states; I don't play it nearly as much at home as I do here. Gotta fix that.
Thursday Keith got a paid gig on campus, right in our courtyard...he played for an hour (I sang a bit with him too, which was cool) while people looked at the stalls of books and movies, etc...then that night we watched Glee (Lauren, Jennifer and I are obsessed, along with many other Americans) and I went to see Keith play another open mic.
Friday: Bogan Bingo. What a night. So "bogan" is slang for "hick," or "white trash" basically...as in "Britney Spears is such a cashed-out bogan." Not a very nice stereotype, but apparently a pretty common one down here. Every Friday night there's a bar in Canning Bridge that hosts Bogan Bingo. You are to dress up like a bogan (people actually asked to borrow my clothes...flannel shirts are IN at this thing), show up at 8:00, play bingo, and don't ask questions. There are two rounds of bingo, complete with a lot of yelling when certain numbers come up, an air-guitar contest, a best-dressed contest...and at the end they just turn the music up and everyone dances for a few hours before beginning the long trek home. We had SUCH a good time. Most of the crowd is older than us, so we college kids were a big hit - we'd only brought two guys with us and they got a lot of invitations to dance. I almost won once, too. In which case, I think my prize would have been a free beer. Ah well. Anyway if we go again this Friday there will be news crews there...not sure why exactly, but they're filming a night of Bogan Bingo, and we're all supposed to work really hard this week on our bogan costumes.
Saturday morning I was whisked away to Earthdance - a music festival on a nature reserve in the middle of NOWHERE...the town does have a name, it's Bencubbin, but its town center doesn't even have a petrol station. Just a bar that sells bags of ice. Anyway Earthdance is a three-day festival out in the boonies, you bring camping gear and set up wherever you like, and go listen to music and meditation sessions and "laughter yoga" sessions and dancing and whatever you want. I went with about ten other people (mostly Australians, but Lauren, Jess and Heather were there) and I had a GREAT time...we were a little out of our league, to say the least...it's definitely something to research ahead of time if you plan on attending, it's a pretty intense cultural immersion. But a worthwhile one, in the end. I hear they have them in the US - I gotta look into that for next year. Anyway it was a relaxing weekend, but it's nice to return to a really, really busy week this week. Whenever I get out of ecology early enough (it runs 9-5 each day but today we were done identifying our poor ants around 4pm) I have to go to rehearsal...my director is really not happy with me about missing so many this week, but I care more about the grade I get on this project, so, yeah.
That's about it for now. Oh yeah - I have the best flatmates ever. Really. I wish everyone could meet them...I may try to stuff them all in my carry-on luggage on the way home. They're all small, it should work.
Mucho amore.
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