Bungy Jumping in New Zealand

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FJ1yntZen0

New Zealand

smashed into a tiny car with all of our luggage

at the pancake rocks

at Fox glacier

at an ice bar

White water rafting!

Tasmania

Our camper vans

Spider we found in Federico's tent

Some unknown animals that snuck into the campsite 

washed up shark fish

Melbourne

Some of the group outside of the Great Ocean Road

We rented bicycles for a day

Laying in the Botanical Gardens

There were a lot of cute alleys with musicians.

A wild koala

Playing with the parrots again

Home

So I made the long flight again and made it home safely! It was a little bit weird leaving 5 months ago for a foreign country where I have no friends, no phone, and nowhere to live, starting a new life there, and then returning to the place where everything has always been. I'm very happy to be home with my family and friends, and especially after 3 weeks of living out of a van and traveling from Melbourne to Tasmania to New Zealand, having a bed and a shower whenever I want is pretty too. Nonetheless, the  trip was a great experience and I learned a lot about the different cultures of the people I was with (Spain, France, Germany, Denmark, Chile). Here are some photos from each different place.

Leaving Sydney

The last week has pretty much just been packing and finals. It's been raining the last three days, so I couldn't even spend my last couple of days on the beach like I'd planned. But I have a flight at 7:00 am tomorrow morning to Melbourne. I will just be traveling for the next month and am so excited. We are staying in Melbourne for a couple of days, then moving on to Tasmania, and finally New Zealand. We will be living out of camper vans in Tasmania and New Zealand, so I'm not sure how much internet access I am going to get, but I can still try and post some photos in the rare case that I do find wifi. I'm also a little bit concerned about where we are going to find showers and toilets, but that is a problem I will have to solve later. For now I just have to figure out how to fit everything into my suitcases and get past the evil land lady tonight without her charging us $300 for accidentally putting a piece of garbage into the recycling bin (an actual threat). But once that is taken care of, I'm off and ready for a month of adventure where my only responsibility is keeping myself alive. Then I come home to see all my friends, family, and Busha for Christmas! I guess you could say that I'm in a pretty good place right now. Wish me luck on my travels!

Finals

I had my first official final the other day. It took place in the horse racing building because it's huge and there are time clocks everywhere. It was so much more intense than exams at U of I. You aren't allowed to bring back packs in, so you have to put all of your valuables in a clear plastic bag. Then they assign you a seat with a card so that you cannot sit near people you know. You also have to fill out this long sheet with information about yourself and get your identity verified. Once they passed out the exams and said begin, I started to write on the test and a man came up to me and told me that it was just for reading and took it away and gave me a new one. I assumed that he meant that I was just not allowed to write on that section of the test, so after I refilled in all of the name and information bubbles, I started to fill out my scatron. Then another man came up and angrily took that one away from me too. So then I had to fill out a completely new scantron as well, and was then told I couldn't even fill my name in on that either. They do something called "reading time" where you are just supposed to stare at the test and not touch anything, and I clearly did not get this message. They also took everyone's calculators away. You could tell who all of the exchange students were because we were all so confused. Apparently you have to go into a certain building at the university to get your calculator inspected to receive a sticker that confirms that it passes the standards. Even though I can't think of any way that anyone could cheat with the most basic scientific calculator available on the market, we all had to do the problems by hand and then pick up our calculators after the exam in this huge pile of calculators of other kids who didn't know either. I can't even imagine what the process for actually important exams are here.