Catch-up. Big time.

I don't even know where to begin. Firstly, I'll apologize for my MIA status. I've been so busy down here and the internet reception was pretty awful in Hobart. Now I'm in Melbourne for two months, and will do my best to keep up (and catch up) with this blog.

In order to continue, I would like to recap the past month and a half that I've neglected. The last I wrote I was in Perth, Western Australia. We spent one more week there and these are the highlights of that week:

• The final project for the Media class was a photo narrative, a collection of 15-20 photos representing our time in Australia thus far. I chose to try to depict my homesickness (yes, I miss you all...). So I captured relationships that I saw in Australia that reminded me of the relationships I have at home. I presented it to the class and was pretty proud of my effort. 
• My last day of class I woke up early and borrowed a bike from the hotel. My friend Casey and I biked to class (which is normally a 45-minute train ride). It took us about the same amount of time and was a gorgeous ride along the water. It was hot, though!
• Our second to last night a group of us took blankets and boxed wine to the nearest beach, where we night swam and spent the night. Sleeping on the beach is one of those things you should experience when you're young. It was quite chilly and I woke up with sand EVERYWHERE. It was quite a funny train ride home. Everyone else was heading off to work and we were ragged and sandy heading home. 
• Our very last night, we had a group dinner and threw all of our leftover food together and made a feast. It was a great dinner and the perfect way to end our time in Perth. 

Then we flew out to Hobart, which is located in Tasmania, the little island below Australia. I loved Hobart. It's an older city, compared to Perth, nestled among tall mountains and sits right on the harbor. We stayed in 5-person apartments, which was quite interesting because there was one room for four and a single. Luckily, we were able to choose who we lived with so I roomed with 3 of my best girl friends on the trip and my friend Will had the single. It was a nice apartment, cozy for five, but provided us with everything we needed. The only complaint is that we had a mini-fridge, the kind a college student would have in their dorm room. To store food for five people in that sized fridge was a struggle; we managed though. 

Everyone else on the trip lived in the same vicinity so we would leave our doors open and visit each other. It was a pleasant little community. To get in the center of the city, we had to walk about 30 minutes. Our school, the University of Tasmania (UTas), was only a 10 minute walk. Here we took a course in Environmental Studies. Tasmania is a great place to study the environment because 40% of the island is comprised of national parks (many I visited). The class was every morning from 9-12 am and our professor was a young woman who was completing her PhD at UTas. So it was pretty relaxed and gave us plenty of free time. The highlights of which will come in next entry. 

So this will be like those TV shows that end in TO BE CONTINUED... (I know how everyone hates that...)