Canberra, the coldest place on earth.....or at least in Australia

Well I'm back from Canberra (pronounced Can-bra) as of Sunday afternoon. We left on Friday morning at 6:30 for a 3 hour bus ride to Canberra. It was filled with catching up on lots of sleep because I had been up late finishing packing and getting homework done. When we got there we immediately went to the Papau New Guinea High Commission. It was a very short visit but he treated us right and gave us morning tea which is something that we have come to love here in Australia.


The Group at the Papau New Guinea High Commission

Apparently they love morning tea and afternoon tea here, which is something that I have come to love dearly...Then we were off to lunch which was SUBWAY! (haha it tasted just like home) and we ate it at a park. A bunch of us ended up finishing early and going off exploring....guess what we found? a playground that we acted like we were 5 on and a huge hill that we decided to roll down. We have a video that I have to get and I will show you all because it's super funny. We kept rolling down the hill and runing into eachother.

Then we were off to the US Embassy and it looked so much like home. As soon as we walked in they said "welcome to US soil." Everyone smiled, it was funny to be on US soil in Australia. We had a tour and we talked about what they do on a day to day basis. On the 7th of September we have the APEC summit here in Sydney which is a huge deal for Sydney. We happen to be going out of town on our Outback trip that weekend which is good because it will be crazy here. President Bush is coming as well as all of the major leaders of the world.

After dinner we went to the hostel that we were staying at, had a group presentation and then we had a commissioning service for the group. Then we hung out for most of the night, playing games and going in the hot tub and pool. It was nice to just hang out with all of the ASCers in the group. We played dutch blitz which is one of my favorite games now, I'm addicted to it =]

Saturday we went to the Old Parliment House which had a Portrait Gallery there we went to look at, then we went to the National Gallery of Australia and the Australia War Memorial last. It was really nice to be able to see all of these sites. I just wish that they gave us more time to go through all of them.


Eternal Fire in the War Memorial


War Memorial


Poppies at the War Memorial...

We had the end of the commissioning service on Saturday night and talked about our reading that we had to do for the weekend...We also talked about our paintings that we made the night before. My painting if you can tell is the one with the yellow sun and the blue ocean and sunset/sky.


All of our paintings from the commision service...

On Sunday we left for home and it was raining the whole day. We went to the National Museum which was really sweet and I really wish that we had more time there. I have some pictures of cartoons that they had on display there with Australian Phrases, I'll post them later in its own post.


A sweet window in the Museum...

Well it was a tiring but fun weekend...It ended up not being that cold and it was ok because we had a hot tub anyway =]

Haylee's birthday is tomorrow! So I will post when I get pictures from that too! =]

xoxo
Krystin