Lovin' the Country

As I promised to all yous back home updated on what has been going on in the past three months, I shall continue my storytelling with our trip to visit the capital in Canberra on, let's see, oh my gosh!--the 19th of August! I'm so behind. But oh well, that's why i'm writing yous now right?

So our story tonight, or this morning, whatever it may be for you, begins way too early in the morning. We were up around 5 in the morning for our long three hours trip down to Canberra (pronounced can-bra, for all yous back home). So we got up way too early and headed off to the school, luckily our host family took us so we didn't have to worry about public transit. Arriving around 6a.m. at the school we quickly got all packed into the bus and began to the capital.

Now, something you must know before we go too much further into our story today, is that Aussies here hate going to the capital and they think that it is rather pointless to drive all the way down to visit it. This may seem odd to us because there is so much to see in our capital but let me tell you why. For starters, Australia is very young compared to the states. Secondly, they really couldn't decide where to put the capital so they decided that this little town three hours from Sydney would work and thus basically created a capital for themselves. Another reason they don't care to visit; its no where near the coast which is where all the Aussies truely live. No one really lives far from the coast because there is nothing of interest in the middle, therefore no one has interest in going to a small city far from the coast and with nothing to do.



Continuing with the bus ride; with it being so early in the morning, one would think that we might sleep the way there but no we didn't. For most of the ride we conversed betwixed ourselves and Kaylyn and I had some fun playing would you rather. Love it! Anyways, we stopped for morning tea at McDonald's which just so happened to be in the pouring rain, not fun, I totally wasn't expecting the rain. We got to Canberra later on that morning and drove straight to the Parliament House for all of about 5 minutes. we got out, went to the front, took a few pics ( like the one below and above) and then drove around to the embassies.

Kaylyn and Jacob Posing for the camera

Once on embassy row or drive or whatever it was we got to see all the different embassy houses and many of them were grandly decorated to represent their country and what not. Paupa New Guine's was my favorite and then we came around to the US embassy! Woot! We all got really excited to see the America flag waving at the top; I have a pic but it isn't that great so I'll spare you.

 Quick little lesson: Did you know that they imported bricks from Virginia to make our embassy building in Australia? Yeah, me neither until today, or that day rather.

From there we drove to the National Museum which was really fun and exciting. As with the parliament House thought, we got barely any time inside so we had to rush through everything to be back out in the foyer for lunch. I spent much of my time on this trip with Kaylyn (my roommate for those of you who don't know) and with Jacob.We decided to go first to play around in the kids section and we built these cool 3D space ships and planets and would have gotten to see a movie with the, but the thing didn't want to work for us,  so we continued on the the rest of the museum. The photo here is of us having fun with the kids side!

School house rock?

 Our next stop was a revolving theater that told of Australia's history and it was really cool. Then we just wandered around for a bit. I'll let the pictures explain from here for a bit. :-)

So the picture, that looks like a dead stuffed extinct looking creature...well its just that. It's the extinct Tassie (tazzy) Thylocean, which was a cat/dog type animal that was hunted and killed in the early years because farmers thought that it was killing all their animals and herds of sheep.

The windmill picture of Kaylyn and Jacob being well, Kaylyn and Jacob. Not quite sure why there was a windmill in the museum but it turned out to be a fun cool photo. The next is of us at one little spot that showed the old school. school houses and the inside of what they looked like. I love this photo because I look like i'm in trouble whilst Kaylyn is looking on as if I am doing something underhanded.

As this is getting to be rather long, I think that I am going to end this Canberra trip story here and for those who are more interested in what happened next, you'll have to email me or wait till i get back to hear more!