Come October, Come Spring! « Anette & Charlotte Down Under

Posted by: aussiegirlz | October 16, 2009

Come October, Come Spring!

Spring has sprung here in Southern Queensland; you can tell by the weather, the temperature and the homework load. Although we’re currently buried underneath heaps and heaps of essays, presentations and other assignments, there is still stuff that makes us smile. The sun allows itself 45 more minutes in the sky every afternoon (it sets at 5:45pm now) and it’s generally a lot warmer. We’re blessed with clear skies almost every single day but we have also experienced the occasional evening thunderstorm. Ah, we’re definitely getting closer to summer! x)

Yeah, as you can see we’re still alive! It’s been too long since our first blog post, so shame on us! From now on we’ll try to be better at updating you on all the big and small happenings in our Aussie lives. And that was the plan from the beginning, but getting settled here in the bay and into the university life was more time consuming than we first thought. Anyway, here’s a short summary of what we were up to in the beginning:

Next Backpackers was our headquarter the first weeks. After seven day in the six bed dorm we moved upstairs to Girl Zone; a ten bed dorm for girls only. Two of our Girl Zone roomies were Sonia from India and Gita from Nepal who also study at USQ. During our stay at Next we got to know the manager, “uncle” Mark, and several of his crew members, including Denise from Germany. We also spent some time with Katrina from England, Vincent and Victor from the Netherlands, Job and Rutger from Belgium, Chris from German and a group of bigheaded French guys! x)

This is how it looks like when 10 girls share a dorm... x)

Mark behind the counter at Next Backpackers.

Mud cake at Blazin' Saddles with Denise and Mark. Here with our waitress Jess in the middle.

The first weeks of school were filled with several info meetings and a lot of things we needed get our heads around. Lectures, tutorials, assessment… Kinda stressful! For those of you who don’t already know, we’re attending University of Southern Queensland. Anette’s studying Primary Education, while Charlotte’s trying to figure out the Business courses.

Our university, USQ Fraser Coast.

The university canteen.

Sonia and Anette at the BBQ for international students at USQ Fraser.

While staying at Next we spent a lot of time trying to find our own little crib. We rented pushbikes the fourth day and biked around looking at apartments. Luckily there’s a fantastic guy known as Richard who has the responsibility of us international students at USQ. He provided us with a list of available furnished apartments for rent in Hervey Bay at that moment and drove us around to check out the ones we hadn’t already covered on our biking round. Well, actually he drove us to all of them except one! Haha! x)

Charlotte's checking out where the apartments on the list are in the bay.

Anette with the pushbikes we hired. The thing here is to remember to bike on the left side of the bike trail! ;)

Anette with the pushbikes we rented. The thing here is to remember to bike on the left side of the bike trail!

Sunnies and palm trees! We like! B)

Sunset at Hervey Bay Beach <3

Eventually we winded up getting one of our applications approved and after approximately two weeks at Next we moved in to an apartment with two floors situated only five minutes from the beach. Oh yeah! Then we had to go shopping for food, linens, washing powder, kitchen supplies, and of course pushbikes. We need to have some means of transport here, right? And with the pushbikes it’s only five minutes to Woolworths and BSW (bottleshop), ten minutes to the university, 13 to Blockbuster and McDonalds, 16 to Target, and 20 to the local cinema. In other words it’s not so much to complain about! :p