Weekend Update

So my students are going to art for a half hour, and I finally have a quiet moment at school. I forgot to update from last weekend, so here's a rundown of what happened...

On Friday we spent the day at school teaching. They have morning "parades" on Fridays which is really an assembly. The whole school (prep through year 11) got to attend the Year 12 assembly which is similar to our graduation, only not as big. It was fun seeing all the students together, but it was definitely hot with everyone packed in their assembly hall/gym.

Friday evening, we decided to catch a movie at the theatre in South Bank where we are staying. Most of us saw New Moon, the new Twilight movie, but since tickets were sold out, we had to see the last show at 9:30 and didn't get home until after midnight. We wondered around the river boardwalk for 2 hours prior since we had gotten there hoping for an earlier show and didn't want to walk home. It was fun relaxing at one of the numerous outdoor cafes and enjoying the ocean breeze.

Saturday we took a bus to the Gold Coast which is about an hour on the south side of Brisbane. Gold Coast is a group of beautiful beaches all along the Pacific Ocean, and we stayed in Surfer's Paradise area. This would have been wonderful except for one thing: Schoolies. We found out from the news and teachers that Year 12 students finish their year 3 weeks before the rest of the school. In order to celebrate, the ENTIRE east coast of Australia heads to Surfer's Paradise for 2 week-long festivities. Although the Sydney schools still had another week of school, we got to spend the weekend enjoying the beach with 36,000 17 and 18-year-old Queensland students. Fun! The drinking age is also 18 in Australia, so that added to the chaos. We decided that Schoolies is basically the Australian high school equivalent of college spring break in America. Luckily, all the schoolies had to wear yellow wrist bands that allowed them to gain access to the beach area where the schoolies concerts and events were going on in the evening and through the night. We did get confused as schoolies a couple a times, but our accents quickly changed that.

This is a picture of the entrance to Surfer's Paradise beach and all the schoolies. We definitely observed Australia's youth at their finest :)

But despite all this, we had a pretty quiet afternoon at the beach enjoying the cold Pacific Ocean. All ten of us went to dinner at an outdoor cafe and spent the entire dinner people watching. Besides the schoolies, there was also a huge bar crawl going on for the non-schoolies people, or toolies as the locals call them. There were lots of police and hundreds of civilians that volunteer their time to supervise the schoolies and keep them safe. In order to avoid the majority of them, we ended up going to a really nice bowling bar that didn't permit schoolies. We enjoyed bowling, and my Baylor bowling class definitely paid off. We also fought our way through the masses to go to an Irish pub that overlooked the schoolies entrance so we could people watch. It was definitely entertaining to say the least.

We were trying to show off our nice outfits and bowling shoes in the first picture, but it doesn't show the shoes.

Thankfully, our hotel monitored who came into the hotel so schoolies who weren't staying there couldn't go to other floors. But someone did set the fire alarm off at 3am Sunday morning, and we were on the 17th floor of the hotel. The front desk came on over the PA as we were about to leave our room telling us everything was fine, but they had to repeat the entire message in Japanese and again in both languages 15 min later.

This is the gorgeous view of the mountains from our hotel balcony.

Sunday morning Kimberly, Jennifer, and I took surfing lessons at Cheyne Horan School of Surf which is owned by a world champion surfer. The group we had was really diverse with college-age students from New Zealand, Israel, Belgium, France, Switzerland, and the Philippines. After a 2 hour lesson, I was able to stand up completely once and ride into shore on my stomach and knees the rest of the time. It was definitely a lot of fun and a lot of work! All 3 of us woke up the next morning with sore arm muscles. Needless to say, I have a lot of respect for professional surfers now.

Since it was the Baylor vs. Texas A&M game that day back home, I took a Sic 'Em picture on the beach with my Baylor shirt.

Last weekend was a lot of fun getting to hang out as a big group and spend some time at the beach. The sunscreen here is amazing, and I only ended up with the top of my head and my ears a little sunburned, even though the same couldn't be said for everyone in our group.

This weekend we are all heading up the coast to Cairns, which is known as the gateway to the Great Barrier Reef. Tomorrow we are taking an all day reef tour complete with snorkeling and visiting a few islands. This is probably the weekend I have been looking forward to the most. We will also hopefully be visiting the Daintree Rainforest on Sunday.

I hope everyone is enjoying their Thanksgiving weekend and Black Friday!