Pampered and lazy

What are you doing Teddy

'Where am I'

'Who are these people'

'I'm coming I'm coming I'm coming I'm coming'

Just ... what

'Gimmie the treat'

*Existential puppy crisis*

I was amazed at how big the park was - I mean, there were rows of swings on the top of a hill that overlooked the river, and multiple flying foxes, a massive web of ropes and slides on the side of every slope.

Friends :)

Near the end, most of us ended up on the ropes by the water where we made jokes and laughed and talked about what was to come. It was such a calm and beautiful place for all of us to reunite and enjoy ourselves for the last time before we all become preoccupied with uni.

Park Details
Location: Jamieson Street, Sydney NSW 2127
Phone: (02) 9714 7888
Website: www.sydneyolympicpark.com.au/whats_on/parks/blaxland_riverside_park

Quadrangle Lawn

Joining a soc!

Popped by N2 Chinatown before the movie to try their Green Tea Kit Kat. It tasted exactly like one, yum!

Me, Emily, Jacqueline and Martin settling in

(Hurlstonians) Edward, Usman, Veronica, me and Jason

I thought the leotard man was real too.

✌(-‿-)✌

I don't like physics whatsoever, which is the reason I chose to avoid it for the past two years, but it's required in my course to have assumed knowledge on the basics of physics, which is why I thought I would take this opportunity and try to enjoy the subject.

Yeah, fuck no. I ended up finding myself trying to leave as early as possible to go off and explore to make up for the $395 I had to pay for the course. The only thing I got out of this was that you're not allowed to have metal objects during MRI scans because they're attracted to the MRI machine. There's a story about a doctor who walked in on a patient during an MRI scan and he had scissors in his pocket, and the scissors flew directly into the forehead of the patient and there's an x-ray image of it, cause who cares about the patient when there's science right?

So one of the coolest things about our uni is that our library is 9 stories high. It's probably the most technologically modern building in the whole campus - there are toilets on every floor (which is amazing because every other building we explored had one in the whole thing), and there are actual functioning lifts instead of creaking stairs, and the lights between each bookshelf have sensors that detect when you're approaching the next shelf.

Fisher Library

Sydney Store

Courtyard Restaurant

Yummm

Graffiti Tunnel

Med Courtyard

Holmes Reception Room

The Great Hall

Education Building facing the Physics Building

Manning House

Manning Bar

Tonight I found myself wishing a few of my friends luck because they're starting university tomorrow. It's finally hit me that we're actually becoming uni students and that we won't be taking the train together to the same place, and wearing the same uniform, and seeing each other everyday at lunch and sitting on the same bench gossiping about people we know. I realised that I won't get to walk out of school on thursday afternoon to five cars in a row with red Ps and spend 20 minutes deciding where to eat before going to 'J's Kitchen' and getting extremely full from only a third of the plate anymore.

We'll all be making new friends, and meeting new people, and doing different things, and ending up in different places. I only hope that even though it's inevitable that change happens, that I'm able to keep my good friends close. Now that high schools over, and we're all starting to turn 18, we'll all be able to go to places and experience things that we couldn't before - like meeting up at bars on late nights after uni and drinking together, and going to 18+ concerts and parties, and having long road trips where we stop at everything that catches our eye, and eating at expensive places because we work and we can, and just watching each other adjust to independence as we study into our twenties.

One of my biggest fears, and I think a lot of people feel the same way, is that I won't make new friends and that I'll lose my old ones. I'm one to have a lot of hope, so even though my best friends will be apart from me, I definitely see us still being close in the future. A big majority of my close friends are going to study at the UNSW, and the others are attending UTS or Macquarie University. Luckily, I'll have a handful of close friends going to USyd with me - but that still brings to question if time and different experiences will keep us all together.

This week, for most universities, is O Week, where the first years get to sign up for clubs and societies and find their way around uni from orientation and attending parties in hopes of meeting new people. I'm very excited to see what type of people I'll meet in the next week, especially since I'll be going to the UNSW party as well as USyd. I have orientation tomorrow at 9am and I currently have a spider bite on my eyelid that makes me look like I got punched in the face, or that I'm diseased. I find myself hoping people won't judge me as the chick with pink eye on orientation day, but rather the mysterious chick with the eye patch or something (actually just praying the swelling goes down, although it could possibly work as an ice-breaker). Meeting new people is always scary.

But even as I do get to make new friends, I hope, at the end of this year, I see myself close to the same people that I am now. I've made too many good memories for me to let different schedules change anything, and keeping them is extremely important to me. I want to be able to look back with the same people 10 years from now and laugh about how immature we were in high school, and bring back fond memories as we get drunk and play board games. That would be fun.

Just south of Burwood is a small suburb called Croydon, and in this small suburb is a small bakery called 'Spoon and Fork', and in this quaint little shop there are sweet little treats, two of which I love to eat - cookies and cakes.

Behind the counter was the work station, where all the magic that goes into creating these adorable little sweets happens. Despite being such a tiny store, it's stock full of colourful cakes, cookies and every type of sweets you'd need for a party.

There is clearly so much effort put into making this store as home-grown as possible, because each item was perfectly packaged and displayed in cupboards and behind the glass at the counter - they even promote taking cooking classes run by the woman who opened the store.

Unfortunately I didn’t take any photos, but here are some from their Facebook page.

Image by www.spoonandfork.com.au

Image by www.spoonandfork.com.au

Image by www.spoonandfork.com.au

Of course I couldn’t resist not buying anything, and so I got two boxes of the banana cookies and a chocolate cupcake.

Verdict: It was perfect. It wasn’t overly sweet, but it wasn’t plain either, plus they were so freaking cute!!!

Check out their website and Instagram for more

Bakery Details
Location: 23 Hennessy Street, Croydon NSW 2132
Phone: (02) 8021 2990
Website: www.spoonandfork.com.au

When I tell people I've been to 'High Tea', you'd be surprised at how many thought it was tea that you would drink to get you high. I've always thought it involved wearing bright, flowery clothing and pretentiously drinking tea with your pinky up and nibbling on tiny ass sandwiches that would get you no where near full, and I never thought I'd enjoy it, but I can definitely say I was pleasantly surprised.

So for Trang's birthday, we gathered most of our girls together for high tea at 11am in 'The Tea Room' located on the third floor of Queen Victoria Building. We walked up a small spiraled staircase and into a cozy and extremely elegant foyer where a very well-dressed man in a crisp teal suit lead us to our table.

We were seated comfortably on a large round table near the end of the room, and attended to immediately, while another well-dressed man with a strong British accent placed napkins on our laps and handed out very fancy menus. He then proceeded to explain the history of high tea which involved the Chinese bringing in teas by boat. Interesting fact, there are more than 150,000 teas in the world - they had 20, so about 0.2%. Even then, there were almost 3 pages worth of teas that were new to us.


Our waitress for the day, easily picking up on our confusion, recommended the Traditional Morning Tea at $45 per person, and a variation of black, and sweet teas for each person to choose. With most of us being so inexperienced with this level of fine dining, we decided on four different teas for the table - Wild Berry, Heaven & Earth, Chai and Orange Pekoe, which were included in the price.



Now onto the teas - we had two sweet (Wild Cherry and Heaven & Earth) and two black (Chai and Orange Pekoe). The set comes with unlimited tea, so every half an hour or so the waitress would refill our teapots. The sweet teas were slightly bland, so we added a cube of sugar, which was a really bad idea because it left it tasting like sugary water with a bitter aftertaste. The waitress highly recommended the Orange Pekoe for us to have with our Traditional English Tea in place of the typical English and Irish teas, and honestly it was the best one, even over the Chai tea, which had a very strong cinnamon taste -  mix it with some milk and a cube of sugar and it's gourmet milk tea.