Newtown and the Blue Mountains

August 13th, 2018

Hello friends!!! I think I am going to try and blog once a week, since I have found the perfect two-hour window of free time that is consistent every week. Every Monday from 4-6pm I have an American Literature lecture. It is the most boring two hours of my life, so I would much rather use this time in a productive way and write to you all! (sorry mom and dad, I promise I will get a good grade in this class)

So here is the breakdown of last week…

Last weekend, a bunch of my friends and I went to Newtown which is a 40-minute bus ride North-West from Sydney. Here we got brunch at a local Israeli style restaurant. I got the fanciest waffles I have ever seen for a whopping $19 (I may come back to the states with $2 in my bank account), but they were very good. After brunch, we walked around the town and went thrift shopping. These stores had everything from every decade you could think of. Some of the clothing was a little too funky for me. We came across this fancy gelato place, and decided to make a pit stop because who could say no to gelato? I of course had a scoop of mint and a scoop of chocolate, and it was muy delicioso (pics below). It was cool to see the differences between Sydney and Newtown (because they couldn’t be any more different), but I probably wouldn’t go back to Newtown. It just wasn’t my kind of place.

I didn’t really do much throughout the week because I have to attend class and actually do homework. I found out that I am not on pass/fail, which means the grades I get here get factored into my GPA when I get home. This means I now have to actually take my classes serious and do the best I can. Don’t worry, I will pull through with good grades!

On Friday, I spent part of my day setting up for floor crawl. This was our event of the week, where each floor picked a theme and came up with a drink and game to play that went along with the theme. My floor picked the Olympics as our theme, and the room I helped plan was golf. We set up a mini golf course in the study room. We then chose goon (Australian boxed wine) as our drink. We got a metal bucket to mix our goon, pineapple juice, and orange juice in. I went to bed before the crawl started, and thank goodness I did because apparently the night went from really fun to a mess in .05 seconds. I never realized how much Australian’s drank on a daily basis until I got here. It doesn’t matter what day of the week, someone is always keen to go out. It makes me wonder when they get their work done…

Saturday morning, I woke up at 6am to get ready for a day at the Blue Mountains National Park. The Blue Mountains are a big touristy thing to see right outside of Australia. We took the bus for about 1.5 hours West of Sydney. Along the way, we stopped to visit some wild kangaroos who were very friendly. There were three full-grown kangaroos, and one had a baby joey in her pouch. We were able to get very close to them, until one of the girls on the trip accidently stepped on a massive stick (which made a loud noise) and scared them off. When we arrived at the mountains, we started our tour. Everything was downhill at first and all I could think was, how am I going to get back up?? The views were breathtaking. We walked through the jungle to multiple lookouts, and by two different waterfalls. We even got to do the Charles Darwin walk. Fun fact: Charles Darwin lived outside the Blue Mountains for three months in 1836, so a part of this national park is dedicated to him. After our first hike, we went to lunch at a cute little café in the town next to the national park. I had a roast beef and horseradish panini with hot chips, which was very good. After everyone was stuffed, we went to one more must see sights in the park…the three sisters. This was a rock formation with three massive rocks all standing next to one another.

Here is the legend of the three sisters…

The Aboriginal dream-time legend has it that three sisters, 'Meehni', 'Wimlah' and Gunnedoo' lived in the Jamison Valley as members of the Katoomba tribe.

These beautiful young ladies had fallen in love with three brothers from the Nepean tribe, yet tribal law forbade them to marry.

The brothers were not happy to accept this law and so decided to use force to capture the three sisters causing a major tribal battle.

As the lives of the three sisters were seriously in danger, a witchdoctor from the Katoomba tribe took it upon himself to turn the three sisters into stone to protect them from any harm. While he had intended to reverse the spell when the battle was over, the witchdoctor himself was killed. As only he could reverse the spell to return the ladies to their former beauty, the sisters remain in their magnificent rock formation as a reminder of this battle for generations to come.

I don’t know that I necessarily believe this, but many Australians do. I was surprised to see that these mountains actually look blue on a nice day. The majority of the trees that live on the mountains are eucalyptus trees. The leaves of these trees produce oils which bounce off the leaves, mix with dust and water in the air, and give off a blue color. When you look out at the mountains, the ones further out actually look blue, which was amazing to see.

Overall, this past week was great. We are currently entering week four of classes (how did that even happen??) Time is flying, and before you know it I will be at home eating a nice big Thanksgiving feast.

I hope everyone has the best week!

-Jor