My birthday and Canberra Trip

Hey Everyone!

Sorry I haven’t been writing too much. There’s this thing called school that I totally forgotten about. It’s really not as bad homework wise as school at home considering I’m going from science and math classes to drama and dance classes, but it is still school. Over the past few weeks there has been a lot of work, and it’s hard to find the medium of school, and hanging out with friends, and just getting out and exploring the city and surrounding areas.

So much has happened since last time I’m written a post. For one thing I’m no longer 19, but 20! My birthday was amazing! We had Thursday and Friday of that week off from school for a camp. The camp was part of the school, but was optional for student (except ASCers). It was great! There was a lot of fellowship and worship, and the theme was ensembles. One of our activities was that we split into groups and had to form an ensemble to perform a skit that included all the subject of the school. That is dance, drama, graphic design, music, and theology. Our skit won 2nd place! It was about some toys, and a music box that gave them life, and there was a bad toy (Satan) and a creator (God), yeah it was really good! Then the best part of my birthday was that I finally got to stare gaze on the other side of the world! The stars are so different down here. The most amazing part is that my view of God even got that much bigger. Whenever I look at the stars I always think of how amazing it is that he made, and can count each and every one.. Plus, it all fits into his hands. Well, just think about this for a minute, I thought he was big just from the stars in the northern hemisphere. Now, I get the fact that that was only half of what God is. There’s a whole other hemisphere that makes the world he fits in his hands even bigger. God is so amazing that he could make one huge beautiful world with millions and millions of beautiful stars, and gorgeous people! A bunch of us went down and were there forever, some of us were down all night and slept outside. Not quite a good idea sometimes considering it was pretty cold. Getting sick is a bad birthday present L.

There seems to be a lot of birthdays in August here. One girl in my housing has the same birthday as me, and I feel like I’ve been celebrating birthday after birthday. It’s so much fun though!

This weekend the group from ASC got to go to Canberra (pronounced Canbra by the aussies). The capitol of a country is also the best place to be when an election is going on! We went to the New Zealand High Commission, the Indonesia Embassy, and the US Embassy. The difference between a high commission, and embassy is that a high commission is of a country part of the common wealth. We were able to listen, and talk to some people that worked in these places about their relationships with
Australia. All three had very close relationships with Australia. New Zealand and Australia are partners for everything and reminded me of the US and Canada except a lot closer. After those visits we stayed at youth hostel, which was a really great experience in itself since I’ve never stayed in one, and when we went out we learned that there really wasn’t much to do in Canberra. There we also had a discussion about the song American Idiot by Green Day. That was a really good discussion, and it really amazed me how much each of our views about being an American has changed in just a month of being in a different country. We all still have the pride for our country that we left with, but have noticed the power our country really does have, mostly in the form of media, on the other countries in the world.

On Saturday we visited different museums. We visited the Portrait Gallery, the National Art Gallery, and the National War Museum, and a few others. The portrait gallery was interesting because you could see the different people that made an impact in Australia. I was reading all the captions of the pictures and came across some interesting people, from the first cricket player, to some scientists. My favorite portrait was the one of my favorite Olympic swimmer in the world, Ian Thorpe!!!! I don’t think he’d be as good as Michael Phelps, but anyone would agree that he’s probably a better athlete to look up to. Plus, he’s Australian! The war museum was interesting too. Before we went we watched the movie Gallipoli with Mel Gibson. The movie’s great, and you can definatly tell it’s not an American Hero Story by the ending. This was a battle during WWI and we spent most of the time on a tour for that battle. When we got to look around ourselves,. I looked a bit at the WWII section, and it was mostly the same history as America, but a different direction of looking at the war.

Then, Saturday night, was the most important thing that will happen while I’m in Australia. The 2010 election. I bet some of you want to know who won. Well, too bad cause I can’t tell you. It’s now, as the youth worker here puts it, “in the hands of three farmers”. Here they have many small regions that vote for their local representative, from whatever party they want to win. So each region gets a vote. To win a party must get at least 76 votes. By the time I went to bed last night the votes were about 69-72, with 3 left. As you can tell, no one was going to make it to 76. No party has won yet, and we won’t know who one for maybe a few weeks. As of now Julia Gillard is still the Prime Minister, and the Independent votes will have to decide what party to back. These Independents are mosty farmers (as why the elections in the hands of 3 farmers). I’ll update you when we find out for sure, since for some reason I’m getting into this whole election thing. It’s so interesting probably because of the same reason everything I like here is, only because it’s different.

Well guys I’m having an amazing time! I have some pictures on face book, but I’ll try to post some here when I actually figure out how to post pictures. I’ll also try to post a bit more. I just have to figure out how to do everything, but I will soon. I can’t believe I’ve been here for a month already! I had a little miss home feeling yesterday, but I’m getting really comfortable here. I just can’t wait till it gets a little warmer and I can learn to surf!

Love you all!

mariah

Source: http://mariahrosedownunder.blogspot.com/2010/08/my-birthday-and-canberra-trip.html