Roo

My plans changed a lot this past weekend but I still had a lot of fun. Friday night most everyone was beat from the first work week and a lot of people had plans for early in the morning. So we skipped the clubs in favor of something a little bit more tame. We grabbed the football and headed out to find a park to play catch. When we got to the park finally figured out why we hadn't seen any squirrels or mammals during the day. It's because they come out at night. They're called possums and they're the size of a small cat (like a third the size of Steve's cat). They're not afraid of people at all because Asian tourist are always feeding them. They're kinda creepy cause they'll sneak right up on ya, especially if they think you have food. We must have looked like a bunch of fools yelling out where they were and taking pictures of Australia's squirrel equivalent. It was really fun though. We kept walking and of course we got lost. So we ended up exploring parts of Melbourne we hadn't seen yet for about an hour until we realized where we were and made our way back home. We went to bed pretty early with big plans in the morning.

No one wanted to wake up early enough the next day to go fishing. We decided instead to head to the wildlife preserve at Ballarat. We took the noon train to Ballarat, which is about an hour long trip. On the way there we finally got to see some of the country outside the city. It's desolate. Red colored earth with scattered trees and dry grass. Every so often it would be interrupted by a bulbous looking hill covered in trees or a valley/dry river bed. Victoria has been in a decade long drought and it shows. Water was scarce and we only saw it in cultivated areas of which there weren't many. When we arrived in Ballarat we took a cab to the wildlife preserve. The preserve was really cool. It was a large caged in area, kangaroos and emus roamed in the open. They were almost completely domesticated and used to people. You could buy bags of feed and feed and pet them like in a petting zoo. It was really hot again (in the 100s), so many of the animals were pretty inactive. There was also several caged in exhibits within the park. We saw koalas, wombats, echinads, wallabies, crocs, and many other reptiles and smaller marsupials. I was dissapointed in the reptile house because they didn't have any skinks. Emus are just about the scariest thing ever. They're pretty much velociraptors without teeth. They make this ridiculous thumping sound which is just creepy and it freaks you out. Anyways as a whole, the experience was awesome and made me feel like I really was in Australia.

We walked back to the train station and stopped in a little hole in the wall pizza place. The type of place we would hit on the way home from a Beaver Fever trip. Australian pizza....not so great. Good enough though cause we were beat and starving. The heat pretty much wiped us out. We got back to the apartment around 7:30. Another group of people got back from surfing that day as well so pretty much noone wanted to go out. We just stuck around the apartment building and watched rugby and cricket.

The next morning Putnam, Dahlberg, Morgan, Adam, and I went to the F1 Races. The event was enormous, well over 100,000 people in attendance. It was probably the hottest day yet as well. I drank probably 5 liters of water and didn't need to go to the bathroom once. We were sweating bullets all day. The sun was brutal as well, there was very little cover from the sun and we spent most of our time walking or standing. We all had heat exhaustion (headaces,nausea etc.) by the end of the day. The races themselves were awesome. They had one race with all Porches (Carrera), a V8 Super Car race, and a celebrity challenge race as a warm up. There was a rollover in the celebrity challenge which was pretty funny. Also saw a motorcycle trick rider eat it big time. We bought ear plugs at the beginning of the day and we definately needed them once the real race started. On the first turn there was a crash that knocked one racer out of the race. This would become a trend as only 6 out 16 cars would finish the race. The sun was really sapping my energy but the race was exciting so I was able to make it through the full 58 laps. BMW Mclearn won the race in an exciting finish. All the Mercedes cars didn't finish. I bought myself a BMW Mclearn jersey that makes me look like I really know my stuff. By the end of the races we were all hot and dehydrated to a pretty bad extent. I still wanted to see the complimentary Kiss (the guys with face paint, hair, and big tounges) concert but no one else was willing to stay. I was pretty exhausted myself so I decided I didn't want to go to the concert by myself. So we went home and crashed like out of control F1 cars (hard).

After not wanting to move for several hours, I finally got up and got to work on my methodology since Max refused to work on it this weekend. Even though I was exhausted, I stayed up until 2am working on it. The draft was due Monday morning at 9am. After that I went straight to bed.