The day began by breaking the fast with free pancakes at Uni. We arrived about 9:45 am to the Hunter Building, where we at 10:30 am would go to a Study Abroad information session in the Griffith Duncan Theater.
At the table during the breakfast sat six Swedes from various cities and two Germans from Cologne. There seem to be a lot of Swedes here, but many other nationalities as well.
The information session started with a short intro followed by some aboriginal dances performed by four persons with aboriginal ancestry. According to the woman that presented the dances, there doesn’t exist a word for jealousy or suicide in their aboriginal language. Instead, the aboriginal life is about feeling the life in everything around you and know that you are never alone.
After the dance performance, the information presentation continued. It was quite relaxed but also focused on the responsibilities of us as students. The presentation featured two quite funny clips from UoNs Youtube page made by a student named Jackson Lana. In this video, things to think about as a newbie on campus were presented.
Towards the end of the information session, we were divided into groups based on a symbol on the name sign we had been given at the beginning of the session. I was placed in the kangaroo group, which later was merged with the pelican group into the “pelikaroo” group. With this group, I walked on a campus tour ending at Godfrey Tanner Bar where we got food and drinks.
After the lunch, some games were going on, and both Linnea and I tried our luck in a doughnut eating competition. The doughnut was good, although we both lost. After this, we signed up with a student society to go on a wine tour to Hunter Valley later this semester. Putting a preliminary check mark in one of the boxes on the bucket list.
Linnea and I walked around a bit on campus after the activities and after getting our student ID cards. We stuck around and in the evening we went to stand up at Godfrey Tanner Bar again. The comedians were funny and had very diverse lineups. Headlining was Steve Hughes whom I haven’t heard of before, but he seems to be well known, and he was hilarious. He started by claiming that Uni kids are so politically correct nowadays and then tried to push the audience, but everyone seemed to have a good time and the jokes landed well.
For the first day of Orientation Week, Gustav and I had signed up for the Sand and Shark Tour. We biked to Uni from our apartment for the first time that day. The bus went at 10 am from Uni to Port Stephens, which took about 45 minutes. We had heard beforehand from Jenny and Grahame that Port Stephens is well worth a visit since the beaches are even whiter there than in Newcastle.
The first activity of the day was sand boarding, so we arrived at the sand dunes in Port Stephens that at first glance looks a lot like a desert. The bus driver shared some interesting facts as we were driving, one of them being that the triangular stones you see in the picture above were made and put alongside the coast in Australia in fear of a military attack with tanks. So the stones would prevent the tanks from getting across.
After a very bumpy bus ride getting out on the dunes, we were ready to go sand boarding. We had a quick instruction how to either sit or stand on the board, and most people decided to try the boarding sitting down first after seeing how steep the hill was.
It was very fun going down actually, but I kept thinking how incredibly easy it would be for someone getting seriously hurt by doing this. And for my second go, I decided to take on the steepest part of the hill, on the right side in the picture above. That was a mistake. When I just had a few meters left of the hill, I did a somersault and face planted hard getting sand all over my body. The sand even went up my nose and into my ears, I discovered afterwards trying to brush it off. I didn’t get hurt, though. At 0:30 in the video you can see me getting up from my tumble unharmed.
When we felt finished and quite exhausted going up and down the hill, it was time to head back over the dunes on one of the small buses and get back on the big bus for the second activity of the day, which was a visit to Murray’s Brewery.
There we first got a guided tour of the brewery, the man in charge explained the whole process their beer go through from malt to finished beer. The nicest part I thought was that Murray’s aren’t trying to become a huge producer of beer, they are more into exploring different flavour and according to the tour guide, they have a new beer for you to try every week. That means that they are constantly making small changes in their process and trying new things.
An interesting fact was also that they let their beer self-carbonate in the bottle after filling it up instead of artificially carbonating it straight away like many of the big companies do. This means that it takes Murray’s about five weeks to make a beer start to finish, while the big companies have their beer done in five days. That’s a classic example of quantitive vs. quality according to me.
Murray’s Whale Ale was actually the first beer Gustav tried when we got here; Grahame said it was one of the best local ones if I remember correctly.
When we were finished with the tour, we had a beer and wine tasting, which was a nice surprise to us. We tried three different kinds of beer and three different wines. I’m more of a wine person (I know, shocker), and the rosé we tried was so delicious I’m looking into buying a couple of bottles when we get back to Sweden.
After getting a bit tipsy from downing all the beer and wine, we were finally served lunch. We got a pizza buffet with french fries; nobody says no to that! The group had people from all over the world, and at lunch, we got talking with a bunch of new people. The conversation naturally focused on languages, for some reason we ended up talking about what mushrooms are called in Norwegian, German, Swedish and Cantonese (which is the main language in Hong Kong). During the whole day, we also talked to students coming from Denmark, USA and the UK.
With our bellies full and spirits on top we went back on the bus heading to the third and final activity of the day, the Irukandji Shark and Ray Encounter.
We were given the option of either getting on waders or a wetsuit. Since I had never worn a wetsuit before I wanted to try it and Gustav went with the waders which you could wear over your regular clothes.
Once I had squeezed into the wetsuit, I was eager to get in the tank with the rays. First, we learned how you’re supposed to feed the rays. They were not shy at all, and you could pet them as much as you wanted as long as you didn’t grab on to them because it could damage their skin and kept your fingers away from their mouth.
Once we had learned that we could go in the ray and shark tank, I made the discovery of that there were sharks in the tank half way down the stairs, but I quickly discovered that they weren’t so bad as their rumour says.
Now we can check petting rays and sharks off our bucket list! Experience from the encounter is that rays feel much slimier than sharks which have a rougher skin. At the end of the encounter, we also got to go in the tank with the huge sharks. The only difference was that we had a thin plastic wall between the sharks and us then. The largest one they called Gigantor, and you don’t feel very cocky with him swimming towards you. After feeling the rough skin of Gigantor (mind you, we had gloves on), we got changed and tried our best to get the fishy smell out.
All in all, a packed day and a very long post to reflect it! Hope you made it through, we’re very happy that we did anyway.
The day had come. It was time to leave the Woolstore apartment and go to our student accommodation. But before we left, Jenny and Grahame had prepared a wonderful brunch consisting of scrambled eggs, ham, bread, and tomatoes, with orange juice, tea, and coffee to quench our thirsts.
Jenny and Grahame drove us to our new accommodation where we met Mecca, who gave us our keys. We went to our room with packing and all. We had a heartfelt farewell with Jenny and Grahame, although we’ll meet soon again. But they have simply been great! Finding people as nice as them is hard.
We started unpacking a bit but stopped to fill out the condition report we got from Mecca. A while later it was filled out and done, and we decided to walk to Woolworths (a nearby grocery store but their stores are common in Australia). We bought both food and things for the room. It proved good to have cash as both our debit cards were declined, which we will have to look into.
We had some ready-made soup for dinner. We’ll have to get used to the kitchen, though. It’s in an overall okay condition. It has a sandwich grill, which is nice.
Now it’s 10 pm, and we have had tea, Tim Tams and skyped with our parents. The blog is pretty much up to date and tomorrow we’ll have our first Uni experiences. We’ll bike to Uni on the bikes we borrowed from Jenny and Grahame, and then we’ll go to Port Stephens for some activities. But more about this then.
Linnea, Grahame, and I went on a bike ride into the city today. Linnea and I got to borrow bikes from Grahame and Jenny. We biked down to Nobbys Beach and around to the Newcastle Ocean Baths. We made it back to the apartment before it started raining.
Linnea and I continued our biking adventures by biking to Uni to meet “Dan the Bike Man” and check out what bike services Uni had to offer. After making it to the Uni (at last) we got bells, lights, locks, and help from Dan. So now we’ll be able to ride safely around Newie.
When we were going to ride back from Uni it had started raining again and it had become dark. So with batteries in only some of the lights and no rain clothes with us, we called Jenny who picked us and the bikes up and drove us home.
Friday started with us going to sign our lease for our apartment. Grahame and Jenny dropped us off at the property management firm where we met Mecca.
After the lease was signed, we went walking in the city and started looking for a place to have some fika. We found the café One Penny Black where we had some banana bread and cappuccinos.
We walked along Hunter St and found some market stalls where we found some homebaked cookies, which we bought.
So walking over to the Queen’s Wharf, cookies in the backpack and sunshine in our eyes, we started walking towards Nobbys Beach. Nobbys Beach is a big beach located next to the hilltop where Fort Scratchley is situated. Nobbys has a lot of surfers, but also areas for bathers.
Alongside Nobbys Beach is a walkway that goes past Nobbys Head and out on Newcastle Breakwall, which stretches out into the ocean where the Hunter River flows out. Nobbys Head is a big hill where a lighthouse stands.
When we arrived at the end of the walkway, we climbed one of the huge blocks lining the breakwall. On top of the block, we sat down and had one of the cookies and some water. While seated, Linnea noticed that some of the people started to gather at the end of the walkway looking at something. When we looked, we saw four dolphins swimming into the Hunter River. Linnea went over to watch them while I just filmed the dolphins a bit and continued eating the cookie.
Walking back, we went out to the beach and walked a bit in the sand. The waves were crashing in, surprising us sometimes when we had walked out too far.
While drying our feet, a fighter jet startled us as it swooped around Nobbys Head. Apparently, this is a manoeuvre they exercise at the nearby airbase.
Back in past Nobbys Beach, we stumbled upon Linnea’s classmates who are also going to study at Uni. We talked about the journey to Australia and the housing situation, and then we went separate ways.
Before getting back to the apartment, we grabbed a bite. We had some fish and chips from Scratchleys on the Wharf and ate it by the riverside.
Last but not least, of course, Linnea met a cat and had to pet it. The cat was nice and seemed to like Linnea. This situation seems to occur in every place we visit (it happened in Cologne as well).
We stayed in until after noon as we were deciding what accommodation we should choose. We engineered our way to a decision by ordering data in a spreadsheet, measuring distances and clearing all facts.
When we had selected the accommodation, we called Mecca, the property manager and scheduled a meeting. At the meeting, we handed over our applications from which she would make the lease, and then we booked a meeting on Friday for the signing of the contract.
After the meeting, Grahame drove us up to Fort Scratchley, a former coastal defence installation built in fear of a Russian attack in 1882. The first time it had to fire to defend the coast was during World War II against Japanese submarines.
In the evening, we ate dinner with Jenny and Grahame. The dish was curry chicken with rice, much better than those served on the flight.
The dinner was followed by the AFL game between Sydney Swans and Hawthorn (Melbourne). AFL (Australian Football League) games are rugby games played according to the Australian rules. The game was different from the State of Origin and had a much fast pace. It was also more similar to football (soccer) than Rugby League. Hawthorns won.
Wednesday started with us joining Jenny for a walk along Lake Macquarie. The weather was nice although it was wild and woolly.
From Lake Macquarie, we were driven to Blackbutt Reserve, which is a wildlife reserve. At Blackbutt Reserve, we got to see all kinds of animals. We saw kangaroos, wallabies, koalas, emus, a wombat, peacocks, owls, and a lot of other animals.
We got to the reserve right before 2 pm, which was planned since the koalas are fed at 2 pm. We walked by and stopped at the kangaroo, emu, and wallaby enclosure. The kangaroos were quite active. The were jumping, eating, and shoving each other. We continued along the other enclosures stopping at each of them. We got to the koala enclosure just in time for their feeding time. The koalas were enjoying the eucalyptus leafs. Some of them were agile, jumping between branches and trees. At one point, a bird (a Little Pied Cormorant) also present in the enclosure swooped down and picked up a dead mouse, which it proceeded to eat and swallow whole.
While walking back to the car past the first enclosure we visited, a wallaby came to the fence so Jenny and Linnea could feed it and pet it a bit.
In the evening, we ate dinner with Grahame and Jenny, as well as Meredith and Bill. After dinner, Grahame, Bill, Linnea, and I went to a pub nearby and watched the State of Origin game (i.e. a rugby game). In the State of Origin series, New South Wales goes up against Queensland. This rugby game series is played according to the rules of Rugby League. During the night, Linnea and I became acquainted with the different kinds of rugby and the rules of Rugby League.
New South Wales ended up winning the game, although losing the series. Both Linnea and I found rugby league more interesting to watch than football, soccer that is, although it was rough and a bit brutal at times.
Tuesday started with Jenny and Grahame serving us breakfast. It consisted of yoghurt with muesli and toasties. Jenny prepared pieces of toasties with vegemite for us. If you don’t know what Vegemite is, then I can tell you it’s an Australian bread spread made from leftover brewer’s yeast extract. It tastes salty and a bit bitter. It’s not bad tasting, but you should only have a very thin layer of it.
After breakfast, we went to our second house inspection. This one was in Warabrook, which is located northeast of the Callaghan campus in Newcastle where we’ll be going to class. We met the owner at the house, but the room we were interested in had apparently been taken. So Linnea and I decided to walk to Uni instead to have a look.
Uni was almost completely abandoned apart from some personnel. Walking on the campus almost felt a bit like walking through a jungle with strange animal sounds everywhere.
After walking around the campus for a bit more than an hour, we took the bus into the city. At the city, we walked along the shops, and I bought an Australian SIM card for my phone.
For lunch, we found a restaurant called Three Bears close to the wharf. We had a toastie each and I ordered chips with mine. The restaurant looked like a remodelled rundown farmers shop, but the look had all been made for the restaurant.
After lunch, we went just across the street to the Queen’s Wharf and up the tower located there. It was really windy, or may be rather wild and woolly. We struggled climbing the stairs, but we arrived at the top only to be joined by a gang of punk kids riding their kick bikes and rocking the tower back and forth. We took a few pictures but decided to go back down again shortly after arriving at the top.
Walking along the wharf, we arrived at the Maritime Museum where we went in to look at the tourist information. We picked up a couple of maps and brochures, but we didn’t look at the exhibition at this time because of the entrance fee. Instead, we walked to the Newcastle Museum, which is free. We looked at their steel and coal exhibition, which focus on BHP and the industry in Newcastle over the years.
We walked back to the apartment and had dinner. After dinner, we went to the grocery store to buy more breakfast material, but we also bought Tim Tams. Delicious!
