SamPaulling.com

Well, first of all, i know ive been here longer than 10 weeks, but its the tenth week of school and thats kinda how we are judging time here, so yeah… lets start with last weekend.

Saturday:       Last Saturday was probably one of the most fun days Ive had in a long time. I went for a morning run (morning as in like 1030) down on the beach, and while I was there, I saw some friends that I hadn’t seen in a long time, one of which goes to KU. They introduced me to some of their friends and we hung out for a bit on the beach, and after a while, we started hearing really loud music coming from the park across the street. We couldn’t see it because the beach has massive sand dunes, so I went over to check it out.

Newcastle was having a Poverty Awareness Festival. It was amazing. Basically, they were raising money to completely support an entire village in Africa. Not just buying them food, but creating job opportunities so that they could become self-sufficient. This village was so poor that they couldn’t even pay for things like farm equipment, seed, fishing rods, and other basic tools to get business started. Once they have these things, they can work for themselves and make money by trading with nearby villages. Its a great program. And there was an awesome band there. Afro Moses. Basically, a new version of Bob Marley. They played a good bit of Bob Marley as well as their own reggae stuff.

At one point, I was just hanging out in the back and a group of kids about my age came through and I just started to talk with them. After a few minutes, one of the girls I was talking to was like “Can you hang on for just a second? Ill be right back.” And then she went up on stage, took over for the drummer, and played the next song for the band. It was crazy. Then she just came back like nothing had happened and was like “Sorry, where were we?” It kinda reminded me of Maggie. Anyways, that was pretty cool.

When I got back home, the roomies had decided that they wanted to go to the Newcastle Knights Rugby Game. Awesome.

That night we went to some of our frisbee friends house because they were having a get-together party for all of the kids that they had met on Spring Break. (Half of them had gone on a trip through the university travel agency that went all the way up to Cairns and included everything in the trip.) There were a ton of people in that house, and we got there late, but we met a lot of new people and that is always one of my favorite things to do. Actually, after I get done typing this I’m going to go hang out with some of them. I love Australia.

Sunday:           Luke, Devin, and I took Steph and Rach to Caves Beach. (The place where Luke and I went Kiteboarding.) It was really cold, but we swam anyway. It was a higher tide than the last time we went there, and there is one cave in particular that you have to swim through that is my favorite, and it was particularly deep this time. I wanted to play a little trick on everyone else, so I ran ahead to the cave, went inside, and swam down it about 20 meters until there was a little more of an opening and I could hide around the corner out of site. (Basically, the cave is a long, narrow corridor coming straight in from the ocean with one opening pointing out towards the ocean and another pointing towards the beach.) As soon as I heard that they were in the mouth of the cave, a huge wave came throught the cave and I jumped in, riding the current down the chute, yelling like on a rollercoaster, and freaked out everyone. It was awesome. And then I talked Luke and Devin into trying it as well. So much fun. Also, we went to the place previously talked about as the toilet bowl (from the last Caves Beach post) and the water was higher this time, so we jumped off the cliffs beside into the swirling water below. Great day.

Monday:            Cinco De Mayo! It just so happened that the friends I met on the beach Saturday were having a Cinco De Mayo party, and they invited us to join. It was a blast. They actually live really close to us, but they have a back door that opens right into the park beside the beach. Its a fantastic location. So we hung out, played some cards, ate Kangaroo Burritos, and got to know our new friends.

Tuesday:            Tuesday was a long day of class, like usual. And I felt a little sick again, and I had a massive lab report due the next day so Tuesday was slow. The weird thing was, on an everyday scale, Tuesday was a pretty bad day, but I never felt like it was a bad day. I had read some in the Old Testament the night before (a point where God was angry with the nations, and he spent many many chapters talking about his anger, but then at the very end, he says that if they come back to him, he will forget his anger and pour out his love on them.) and I kept thinking about that all day. And I noticed a lot of new things. Everywhere I went (mostly on campus) seemed a little more beautiful than usual. There were so many birds flying around. Not just normal birds, but white cockatoos and rainbow lorikeets, and tiny little finches, and cookaburras that sound like monkeys. They sky was lit up with a bright blue, and the trees seemed more majestic than usual. I came home that night from class and wrote a song about it. Its still a little rough, but basically its like a prayer asking God to not let me become like the nations he had become so angry at. They weren’t necessarily being wicked, they just forgot about God, and sometimes its so easy to get caught up in the everyday routine that God and the beauty of nature gets puts on the back burner. Sometimes its just good to return to the simplicity of what life is all about.

Wednesday:           I woke up early with the intention of surfing, but the waves were bad, so I was a little disappointed. I had my lab at 3, and after that we had frisbee at 8. It was a good game, but I felt like I didnt play very well (I felt slow because of my toe thats still cut up from diving.) and we eventually lost the game by a few points. Oh well.  It was close.

Thursday:             I finally got to go surfing again! It wasn’t great surf, but it was probably the most fun I’ve had surfing because not 10 minutes into it, a pod of dolphins (near 12) swam by. Rather than trying to surf stinky waves, I took off and swam with the dolphins all the way down the beach. They weren’t particularly friendly, or rather, not as friendly as Flipper in the movies, but they hung out around me, just out of arms reach, and some of them swam under me a few times. One even grazed my arm with his dorsal fin. I think they were hunting fish, because they moved in groups of two and all of them came to the surface at the exact same time to breathe. (Im guessing this was to make less noise.) After a while, I got really tired of swimming with them because I eventually swam near a mile (about the length of the the beach plus half way back.) so i headed in.

Friday:            The day was pretty chill, but that evening was swing dancing in the park with the Newcastle Christian Organization. (The ones that run Uni Church.) They called it Semi-Formal-ish, so we dressed nicely, but when we got there, there were like people in suits and ties and I was like ‘well dang.’ but we had fun anyway. There is this little gazeebo in King Edwards Park, usually used for weddings and such, and this is where is was. (Earlier in the year, this is the place where we went to Theatre in the Park.) They had a live band and everything. A drummer, keyboardist, and saxaphone player. My three favorite instruments. I walked through the gazeebo and started talking with some guys, one of whom was the drummer. They asked me all about the States and if I was beginning to understand Aussie Slang and the like. Pretty fun guys. And now I have people to look for when I go to Uni Church again.

Saturday:            We spent most of Saturday on the beach, because it was warm again. Also, a bunch of friends who have never been to bogey hole came over and we took them there. It was freezing in the shade, but always so much fun. A couple of huge waves came through and made it so worth the cold. After that, we went back to Newcastle Beach, laid around for a while (which I cant stand, just sitting there.) and I went and got a frisbee. We played frisbee for a while, then came back, cooked hamburgers, watched the office, and headed to bed. The sun drains me and I went to bed fairly early. Like midnight.

Now its Sunday Morning, I just woke up, and we are meeting some friends for brunch in just a little while, so Im going to wrap this up. That was this week in a nutshell.