australia – my personal timeline

we’re almost there

well, we are in airlie beach, aka the area of whitsundays islands. can’t wait for our trip tomorrow, everything looks gorgeous.

we have safely made our way up the coast, with a large haul over 600~ kms from rockhampton to airlie beach yesterday. today, we’re just chilling in airlie – found wireless internet and so i bring you lots-a-photos!
sydney to brisbane (KOALA HOLDING IS HERE)
brisbane to fraser
fraser to day before yesterday (eurimbola national park or something like that)

australia is definitely looking more australian – we still haven’t seen any “real” big kangoroos, although hope is not yet lost. lots of wallabies by this point, which is really nice. on the drive to bunya mountains (it was on the drive that the above photograph was taken), we saw wallabies crossing the road, and when we woke up there was one right outside our door, munching on grass. snapshots are available on the first link.

queensland is supposedly famous for the red sand, which is also getting more common. i even got to hold a koala at this point! (as you might have read).

we tanned, i swam (in a lake, swimming in the ocean is too dangerous, there are small nuances like sharks and killer tides), and tomorrow more swimming shall be done at the reef!

highlights of the trip so far are:

our incredible obsession with beef jerky

an enroumous choice of amazing wines that all cost less than $9CAD

hangovers after consuming those enourmous choices ;)

wallabie roadkill. so weird!

our campervan is kick ass. we can live off the grid for 2 days, providing an external water supply for washing dishes.

on a particularly bumpy road, after wishing to take photographs of the passing views, my microdrive burping and deciding all my photos (400 images .. fraser island, and the park where we just spent 2 days) are not there anymore. thankfully, it was all restored by tim and checkdisk. why did i not copy, you ask? because my laptop battery without electricity only lasts ~30 minutes, and it takes about 30 minutes to copy a full card. we get electricity when we stay at campervan parks, so i do my copying, editing and charging up there. i also could charge on the road from the adaptor, but i usually only copy music to and from my mp3 player on the road.

we both got hooked on rumpole series. fun, awesome writing, very funny, and we managed to score all the books but one from another 2nd hand book shop for $5 plus exchange of our silly, have read, cheapass books. we saved like $12 there. the math is a bit fuzzy, but basically, we have a tonn of good read, (and even mediocre reading, i bought some junk reading ala king + grisham only scifi-ish, don’t remember the name), for cheap, or even profitable, and we are both getting a kick reading in the morning, evenings, beach, tanning, etc.

my mp3 player + tape deck adaptor + laptop every 3 hours to supply more music == fresh music so far! i’m afraid we’re starting to push the limits of my music collection though. i don’t think tim is a big fan of russian pop dance, which i ashamedly posses in large quantities, or the instrumental collections i got off my mom’s disks.

switching to rising at like 8-9am naturally after having spent 3 days in fraser rising at 6am daily

now, fraser is a seperate story. we have shared a 4×4 car with 9 other people, and spent 2 nights and 1 whole day (and half another day in start and half another day in the end) on this huge beach dune which has awesome fresh water lakes (freezing, but gorgeous), and generally a very awesome natural landscape. the downside of it being a sanddune and sharing one car with 11 people is that SAND. GETS. EVERYWHERE. those of you who know how picky i am about my camera’s cleanliness, will know that traces of sand inside my LENSCAP mean it literally was everywhere. i didn’t even switch lenses (shot sigma12-24 and mini canon) the entire time.
on that note i should have more photos off the canon tomorrow.
we have bought food together, bought meat from the butcher offered by the place (koala adventures), and bought cheap liquer. oh. my. god. we have not eaten worse meat and drank worse alcohol in AGES. it was so disgusting! and it was such a joy to get back to normal, great-wine, great-food, no-sand world afterwards! but even despite that, fraser was pretty fun. pretty, at least :D

hi mom!

out into the wild

im in the process of trying to upload photographs. cant remember my ftp password! grr

we are in brisbane, which is the last real large city before the “end” of our trip, in cairns, which is about 3 weeks away. isn’t that crazy?

we left on sunday afternoon, almost evening, and spent our first night at a rest stop on the side of the road. it is surprinsigly awesome, squatting. the van has a sink, a stove, a microwave (that operates only if we’re connected to a power supply), a fridge, and 2 benches + a table that fold into a bed. plus 2 shelves for storage, and storage underneath each bench. all in all, pretty damn spacious for 2 people. we still have to shuffle stuff around, but its not really all that painful.

we’ve bought around 11 or 12 books at a salvation army shop, each for around $2, $1 or $0.50. (total: $16). some of them turned out to be total garbage (same author as “i know what you did last summer” … finished it in about 4 hours, blergh), and some are totally sweet (“no, we don’t have neutrons”, about failures of science to be proper science). each evening we spend reading books and drinking wine until we fall asleep.

sleep is incredibly comfortable, especially given how i haven’t slept on a properly wide bed in like … AGES. i packed my pillows with us (will just throw them out in cairns before our flights), so we’re super comfy.

tonight we’re staying in a campervan park site, which is essentially is a huge parking lot, with plug points where we can get power (that way we’ve got electricity for laptops, and microwave power), and water points for refilling our water tank. there is no sewage system as its only a sink that we have, meaning that whenever we use the sink there’s a tiny puddle that forms underneath the van. everyone seems to be pretty used to that thought!

our initial plan today was to go to brisbane downtown, but i felt incredibly tired and weary after sleeping poorly last night (shows me to not think of water supply in advance… i got thirsty and all we had was coke, so i slept terribly due to all the sugar and such in my system). good go too, it started raining 10 minutes after we parked.

the campvervan site has internet, unfortunately as it turns out only one computer can log in, and once you’re logged in another computer can’t log in, even if you are logged out. since tim logged in first, he has internet, and i’m stuck with copying pictures over usb key.

regardless of that inconvinience, life is awesometastic. australia turns out to be an incredibly pretty place, and people are ridiculously nice to us. i’m not all upons it as i’ve heard some first hand accounts of racism in this country.

some memorable highlights so far include:
-> FINALLY LEARNING TO LIKE MUSSELS. mom, dad, i hope you’re happy. it only took 10 years after i first tried them :D
-> seeing some magnificent skies over the ocean
-> catching some whales at a few different points (no pictures, they were too far away anyway, still… so cool!)
-> not getting a tan :( yet. i hope.
-> HOLDING A KOALA (see pictures!). they are as soft and fuzzy and warm and adorable as they look. seriously. i officially want to be a koala when i’m reborn. they are loved by all; all they do is sleep and eat. too awesome.
-> feeding kangoroos!
-> seeing surfers’ paradise – what an adorable town! touristy, yeah, but ohmygosh its all so cute
-> buying some awesometastic strawberries at a road market
-> one of the most awesome parts so far was the awesomeness of tim who has cooked breakfast (eggs, bacon and toast and coffee!) each morning. i wash the dishes afterwards, but there were occurances where his cooking was … leaving me speechless. example: we wake up at 10am in some campersite lot somewhere between here and sydney. i’m sleepy, hungover, tired, and more like a stone than a person. we pack up quickly, get out by 10am (check out time), and i fall asleep at the back. tim drives us to a beach (!), cooks breakfast and makes coffee, and then wakes me up to the view of the ocean, blue skies and smell of coffee. i believe i may have found the last perfect man on earth.

float on

my new favourite song of the moment is modest mouse – float on. totally.

ai assignment has been submitted; 5 days to write an essay and prepare for an exam. i’m having a quiet evening in the super clean living room – kevin and smita cleaned it up while i was doing the assignment today. lesley ann, mike, and La’s friend cheryl left on a trip through the outback, and the apartment feels considerably more empty.

last night was a big out night – the last one with all the people that i have met here. james, a guy from wales has left australia, and he was one of the major people who we hung out with here. we ended up staying out until about 6am… and i finished the ai assignment in 7 hours today :)

it feels excellent to be done with classes. even though i still have 2 essays and 2 exams left it truly does feel like the semester is over. :D

all about study

in my AI class we’re learning how to design a program using a naive bayesian method that would build a most efficient tree to solve problems. we’re learning about how designing a min-max tree for a battle with an opponent can give us more or less possibility for higher scores, but with more risk. basically, we’re learning how would we go about giving a computer a chance to beat a human opponent in some game.

in my philosophy of mind class we’re learning why should humans presume they are playing a human being when they are playing a chess game on a computer, instead of trying to break it into lines. essentially, we’re learning why is it that we assign intentionality to other things, even when we know the computer is not really a human opponent.

this is all a little crazy. all the courses i took, all the information that i paid to study and learn, its all coming together, and its a bit freaky to study two sides of one problem during one semester in two different classes.

oh, also, additionally, submitting my 3rd AI assignmnent, just on time:

: -bash-3.1$ ~cs3411/bin/classrun give ass3 ass3.pro

Period: 06s1
Submission: ass3
------------------------------
Files found: ass3.pro
------------------------------

Submission datestamp:   Wed May 31 23:59:54 2006
Assignment deadline:    Wed May 31 23:59:59 2006
This submission is on time.
Submission accepted

and now, i’m off to write my philosophy test. yay!

full of fantastic fun

(get a flickr account and let me add you as family to see above photos)
it is week 12 here in unsw there are 3 weeks left of studying, and then 2 exams, and then tim and i are off to drive up the australian coast.

hesi is arriving tomorrow! and so i will finally drag her and tim to see various sights around sydney and in sydney.

last night smita, lesley ann, tim, roshan and moi went out to sushi to some local place. it was the first japanese experience for lesley ann and smita – i was promising lesley ann to take her to sushi for a while and this was it. they both seemed to enjoy it quite a bit, liking the small rolls and nigiri sushi the most. (they did have problems figuring out how to eat the larger rolls – i’m still unconvinced, are you supposed to eat it in parts or just stuff it in?)

i realized i haven’t been writing much about my so called “australian experience”. to be honest, looking back at the past 3 months since tim has left it doesn’t feel like there was much of an experience, at least towards the beginning. the last month and a half were better in terms of fun as i have gotten closer with my flatmates, and thus ended up going out and doing interesting things far more.

the brighter experiences up until this moment was the day of the “races”, which i still failed to blog about. let me make a short attempt at it here.

the races

racing seems to be a huge australian phenonenon. apparently, there is this melbourne cup when the entire country shuts down to watch that race. of course, there is a huge race track just north of the university. and on one particular weekend in april, there was a large race occuring there, or rather a number of important races, to which barker apartment number 9 (that is the apartment in which i live) decided to head out to see. it was actually me, lesley ann, kevin (all of us from 9) and a bunch of other people who they have met from their earlier residence here in sydney.

in case you are not aware of the general things that happen at races, here is the approximate list of interesting and notable moments:

everyone dresses up. the most traditional form of uniqueness to the races is the hat which should be elaborate and odd and fantastic. while being the poor students we couldn’t figure anything out, many girls have arrived in fantastic contraptions.

drinking before noon is mandatory. champagne is $3/glass (or something like that), and betting on your horse while holding a pretty sparkling glass is oh-so-classy!

and of course, the betting! we bet; we lost. alas. our horse knowledge is not successful. however, mike and james (LA’s friends) who have researched the chances the night before, have won something atune to $100.

after returning home, we have ate, relaxed, and went out dancing! and as the tale goes, we danced the night away, and it was good.

st patrick’s day
while it was not any different from many parties i’ve been to, it was awesome because:

i live with 2 irish people and st patrick is the national saint

everything was green. we bought green food coloring and it went everywhere. people wore green head to toe. milk was green. water in the toilet tank was green. beer was green. water was green. anything that could be coloured green, was. windows were green. the room was decorated with green lighting.

and of course, people drank :D

kevin’s party
one of the most notable things about kevin’s birthday party was that it was 4 days before tim’s arrival here. (and i think that sentence summarizes how i felt the entire 3 months he wasn’t here). of course the dinner, the drinking and the dancing was also notable – and a load of fun!

there were many other moments. i tried curry (made by smita) – she made some specially for me without the spicy part. and she used all authentic indian ingridients. tonight, she’s making curry again – and this time tim has a chance to try it too!

each monday night lesley ann and i (and lately smita too) watch desperate housewives while eating a shared dinner, and having dessert afterwards.

before i got really sick at the end of the vacation week (end of april), i went to the gym, loads, together with LA again. unfortunately it stopped because there were 2 bad weeks which i spent mostly entirely in bed. after a few doctor trips, everything is now confirmed as being fine, which makes me very, very, happy.

baking – bread, cookies, carrot cake, my mom’s apple pie.

i got everyone here hooked on “oladushki” – thin slices of apple dipped in batter made from my grandma’s recipe.

i guess food was a major part of this experience. i really love food and cooking now, and bubble over with excitement of trying new recipes. in the last 2 days i learned how to make a kick ass goatcheese salad (add small cubes of peeled apple), and fettucine carbonara.

and of course, today tim has been here for more than a week. while sharing a tiny room as opposed to a whole apartment is interesting, thankfully he doesn’t have much clothes (although now the whole closet is taken up, and not just half ;) ), and we’re compatible people.

i’m very happy. life is falling back in place again; the next 3 months look to be full of fantastic fun again (how’s that for alliteration). almost a month of study and party and fun in sydney; then almost a month of travelling around australia and 10 days in japan, and then a month back in toronto, together with my friends and family who i miss oh so much.

tim has arrived!

i guess i’m a sad person with not much happening. or, i guess i’d be writing about nothing happening if nothing had happened, but yesterday the most important thing of all finally happened.

tim came here!

we are having a grand time. went to bondi junction, which is a very cool area and stumbled around until we got tired and then went home. had nice dinner, i think i’m getting another cold or flu, watched a bunch of episodes of house and here i am blogging.

last saturday was kevin’s birthday, and we had a fantastic party, started off with a dinner here, and moving on to dancing at a bar. i made russian meat pies (pirozhki, vegeterian version too), (oh i messed them up so badly. wrote down recipe verbatim from my mom’s email on a post it but i totally forgot to add the part where i need to add yeast because its not mentioned in the original email. so when i mixed stuff i FORGOT TO ADD YEAST WHICH mean that an hour later i realized the batch was ruined. thankfully i had time so i made ANOTHER batch and added yeast, BUT of course i realized i added too little (abt half of needed) too late again. they actually came out fine anyway, but i spent a majority of the evening kicking myself) which were loved and annihilated, and apple pie (also finished), and helped figure out a ceasar salad. LA made a veggie and chicken lasagna, and a swiss roll.

i got my 2nd assignment in AI back, 88%. first assignment, 92%. i may get a good mark in a computer course for the first time in my life. … yeah … right ….

i almost bought a moleskin today. tim gave one as a present to LA when she spent a day roaming the hospitals with me. its *DELICIOUS*. has 5 sections for travellers: facilities, food, places, people, sleep – for keeping notes on great places. i wish i had one in europe!

sydney is looking like a decent place afterall.

bad strings continue

well, it seems fate’s not giving me too many breaks lately. all the important ones are there – my watch got found, tim’s coming here in only 2 weeks!!!, and the picture above is of a super cute and stylish journal i got from lesley ann. she has one identical to it that i’ve been awesomed by, and she uses it as a recipe book and i’m really tempted to do the same. anyone has other ideas?

except, i caught my friend smita’s cold/flu, which started yesterday with sore throat and merged into a headache and sore throat today and will continue by her experience for the next week. yikes!

nothing much has been happening. i’ve had tests (yuck), and that’s all really.

here’s another photo from the races:

LA and i bet split our bets, and we lost in the end. but it was really fun! and we all got to dress up and look really pretty. in case you didn’t know, you’re supposed to dress up majorly for big races, including hats and such – actually, as far as i can think its one of the few occasions nowadays you can wear a fancy hat to without looking silly. alas, none of us had hats, but we all did something special to our hair.

LA curled mine.

CURLS.

i had a head full of curls.

its an awesome look, and i’ll post a photo when i figure out how to do it without going through flickr :P

also, in order to have something to wear for the races i went shopping and bought 2 dresses, a skirt and a shirt. and then yesterday i bought a journal to get 20% off for a hair place thingie and got a free scarf. and i bought a shirt and another dress before that. i’m like all outfitted!

i still need 2 things: jeans, and .. okay i need one thing. i want 2 things; one is a good pair of jeans. in a nice dark color. crisp and dark. that fit. very properly. and the other is a bag that i don’t really need.

yeah, i think i’ll end up sending stuff back with hesi and tim. that way i don’t need to count on fate and post to actually deliver anything.

did i mention being sick gives me a 30 second attention span?

assignment end, break begin

she-crab soup made from this recipe (its awesome)

today was definitely a good day. first off, last night after making triply sure that the assignment works (thank you, dad!), it was handed in with no problems, and i went out to have some drinks – for the first time evah! (the drinking out that is). that was fantabulous fun, and i came home and crashed to sleep.

the morning of thursday was excellent. first off, dad confirmed everything is fine. thus this huge, terrible weight of that unbearable assignment fell off my shoulders. the linguistics assignment was almost done, so i spent my morning cleaning it up. (i also made scrambled eggs. yum!)

the constant question of where to print if you’re not really in possession of a printer can drive a student to do odd things, especially if they have to hand in the assignment by 2pm and its 1:50. i tried printing at the library (which smelled like smoke, and later i found out that it was evacuated!), but ended up crashing their computers. so, on kinda vagueish instructions from LA and Kevin i found the place where all the american students get their sponsored labs – its a gleaming, white, clean room, with lots of big macs with flat screens and pretty mice and fast computers and fast printers. i printed and was outta there under 1 minute. yay!

next problem was finding the drop off box. i got confused between two buildings, both of which intials begin with MB, so i ended up being at the hand in place at 2:10 or so. but they still took it on time!

i also spoke the prof, and wished him a good holiday. yay!

random memories on the walk home, when the world suddenly became bright and assignment free:

a bearded, white, curly haired professor at his desk going “hmmm” in a serious tone to a young naive first year student cowering in front of him.

“but i did everything i could!” “well my grandad was in the navy you know!” (as part of one conversation, very loud argument)

a guy eating a watermelon (like 1/4 of it) on the run.

the feeling joy surrounding the campus despite the rain as this was the last day of classes before the break (actually i felt the joy but didn’t know that second bit).

upon arrival home i found out i have no classes tomorrow, and that elin will be going to the gym 2 hours later, so i snacked, chatted, relaxed, and then went to the gym for a hard core workout!

this was my 4th time. i biked for 20 mins @ lv 5, elliptical for 20 mins @ lv 5, and for the first time, ran all 20 mins at 7kph (before i was 14 mins run and 6 walk, and then 16 mins run and 4 walk). then elin showed me some weights training, so i did about 40 sit ups on the big ball, some leg excersizes with the ball, some back excersizes with the ball, weight training for back and arms and legs, and stretched. it was good!

came home, made the she crab soup, and that’s where the day ended, basically.

i wont count the evening because i washed all of the dishes in the kitchen again for the 2nd time (not a single. clean. cup. 2nd. time. in. the. day. i washed almost all of them before the gym.) (so before sleep i went in and did a major clean up – washed majority of dishes that were “anonymos” – like not from LA’s baking – and finally cleaned off counters. yay!), and watched wolf creek which was scary. but that’s okay. it doesn’t count.

i want to be a food photographer! so much fun!

choice is what moves us

i recently finished 2 books: one is “woman in the dunes”, by kobo abe, and second is “my sister’s keeper”, by jodi picoult.

moral of the story, in both, as coincidental as it was, is that people care about having their personal freedom of choice. while their actions might be the same at the end (staying or leaving, donating a kidney or not), the moral, the intent behind the action is far more important to them – but rarely to those who surround them.

its almost like art. it is the intent that makes a piece meaningful to the artist – even if the public never cares.

i’d highly recommend both books, even though they are completely different in style, they make an excellent match in story. woman in the dunes is rough, gritty, pressing on you from every angle, and drives its point hard:

“I have a one way ticket to the blues, woo woo”. If you’d like to sing – please, go ahead. In reality, the last thing that a man who has been given a one way ticket will do, is sing like that. The shoe lining of the people, who have a one way ticket, is really thing, and they scream if have stepped on the smallest pebble, and won’t move further. They would like to sing of a ticket to the blues that goes both ways. Only a man, holding a return ticket, can hum to himself a sort of sad song about a one way ticket. It is because he is afraid – afraid that he will lose it, or it will be stolen…

(rough translation to english from russian which was translated from japanese. some ommissions.)

i can’t think of an equally poignant quote from my sisters keeper, it felt far more gentle, if still very painful, just on a different level – here, everyone suffers, and most realize their suffering, but like abe’s characters they keep on digging themselves out.

i guess this comparison makes no sense if you haven’t read one, or even both of these books, but i really hope that one of you will pick it up. here is the russian version of woman in the dunes.

i’m going to go sleep, so that tomorrow i can dig sand of assignments again.

feeling good (or not)

the past few days have been riddled with mixed feelings. on one hand, i was wearing a very cute “feeling” shirt (it says “FEELING” on it, and the shirt is light, cute, baby blue), on the other, i was feeling sick and tired and very very unwell the entire of friday. i even skipped class, for the first time, as i couldn’t concentrate on something like an email, let alone a hard math class.

i have a big assignment due on ~~sunday~~ wednesday thanks to the extention, in AI. i can’t wait to be done with CS courses. no clue how i ended up being so far into the degree, but i’m glad i’m almost done. at least i did learn some useful things i’ll be able to apply in the facianating field of web management! haha.

i took pretty pictures today as first i made breakfast, and then lesley ann. my favourite one is the butter uptop there. i really really love it, even though its just butter.

i can’t wait to be done with the assignment.

also, i ate sushi take out today. it sucked, compared to toronto’s sushi that i love, but it was not as bad as bad sushi could be. appreciate your luck, people, i’d kill for a nice salmon piece right now. yuuummmm….