A long week-end

It is currently Tuesday, and i have decided to reflect on my long weekend full of activities. It all started off last week Friday evening, Penny had managed to pull some strings and get Tim, Scott, Jonno and me to attend an orchestra performance in the Sydney Opera House. The orchestra, rePlay: symphony of heroes, played many songs from a variety of games, ranging from the legend of Zelda to Kingdom Hearts, all the way to Halo and Portal 2. Every symphony was accompanied by a short cutscene of the game, depicting its genre and style. In between cutscenes, wonderful graphical animations of the Scottish island from the game Dear Esther would be displayed along with a short narrated story of what was to come next. Overall, I really loved listening to the symphonies played in Final Fantasy or the deep bass songs of the Bioshock series. Moreover, i managed to get a good look at the Sydney Opera House from the inside, an i must say, i was really impressed from seeing it all up close. I also got around to reading the various architectural methods used to construct such a great Opera House that really represented Australia's drive of culture. I read about how they designed a model of the sails, cut out of a spherical shape in a circular order, in such a way that exact precision would be maintained. It was all really impressive, both the building and the orchestra itself.
The next day, Tim and i went to our last tennis training, barely playing any tennis as the scorching sun rays burned anything it touched. As soon as we got home, i got changed into casual clothes and decided to spend the day at the aquarium, i would have to go by myself as Tim was taking a nap after a bad headache that he'd developed on our way back from tennis. Chris agreed to drive me out to Darling harbour, where the Sydney Sea Life aquarium is located, i would make my way home by myself afterwards. The aquarium was one of my main items that still remained on my to-do list, i wasn't disappointed by what i saw. The aquatic collection of nautical creatures ranged from the blue-ringed octopus to the white shark, the platypus and even the gigantic Japanese deep-sea spider crab. The entire complex consisted of a collection of smaller fish and sting rays in salt water tanks and multiple transparent, glass-made water tunnels that provide a panorama view of the sea above you, enclosed by nets to prevent the sharks from escaping. I was flabbergasted by the entire experience that the aquarium delivered with its amazing fish and crustacean collection. After finishing off a tour of the Sea Life nautical zoological park, i made my way to George street, picking out appropriate souvenirs for my family members. As soon as i got home, i changed and got ready for the Derby of Sydney grudge match between the legendary, Del Piero-owed Sydney FC and the newly created underdogs, the Western Sydney Wanderers. We arrived at the match about 1 hour before the great match began, and i went through the usual pre-match rituals of buying a club scarf of the home team. The match itself was extremely exciting and tense, with the Ono scoring the opening goal in the second half for the Wanderers, before receiving 3 goals against from Sydney FC. We watched through to the end of the game and i can very well say that the Western Sydney Wanderers supporters match if not even overtake some clubs' supporters in the Eredivisie. I just loved the passion with which they cheered on their club as if it was a grand final, even encouraging them to perform when goals against were scored. After the final whistle, we all made our way back home and i got into bed directly because i was extremely exhausted, after a day of waking around Sydney my legs were too sore for walking. The next day we all headed out to the park for the Altis family fun day, where we hired Kayaks, went fishing and played football. It was a great day to be outside, the sun was shining and we went for swims in the bay and enjoyed a good 'yak' around the docks. Monday i went on an excursion with the english boys from Newington, Jasmine from our school, two boarding Japanese girls and Tim, to the featherdale wildlife park. Here, we got to feed kangaroos on our laps, touch koalas, emus and even wombats. We got to see pythons, lizards and tasmanian devils, they even had a giant salt water crocodile. After our visit to the park, we headed out to the Sydney University to look around campus and check out the university building. That pretty much sums up my long weekend of endeavours and adventure

.

Late Update

The past week has been long and awesome! I participated in activities ranging from boomerang throwing to sheep shoving to watching sheep being sheared. This all was part of an excursion organised by Newington and PLC for all exchanges, including Tim, Josephine, Jasmijn and me from The Netherlands, Jake and Alfie from England and two shy boarding girls from Japan. We assembled in the morning at 8:25 at PLC together with the other exchanges and Mr. Bennet. We then endured what would be a long and warm bus ride that took 1,5 hours. By the end of the ride we had only just left Sydney and already the Blue Mountains were in clear sight in the background. We had arrived at a real Australian sheep-shearing station, which was more of a farm than an actual shearing holdfast. A man landed Nick was assigned the tedious job of handling the tourists and he started off by explaining to us just how huge Australian sheep farms can get. It turns out, they're pretty humongous. Apparently there are farms the size of the UK, The Philippines and Indonesia combined! This is mostly because deep into the Australian desert, the rule of 1 sheep per 10 acres of land (but mostly even more) is taken into account when establishing a sheep farm. However, because this farm, the Tobruk Sheep Station, was so close in to Sydney and had fertile and grassy fields, the rule of thumb that was taken into consideration was 5 sheep per 1 acre! Now you can imagine the amount of money they made on selling wool, selling meat and selling bio fuel. So we were then demonstrated how sheep are sheared, tried throwing a couple of boomerangs and were taught how to use real whips. After a tiring day at the farm, we had some sausages and made our way back into Sydney.