Spiders!!!

Well, I landed in Sydney yesterday morning at 7:30am (late) spend about an hour and a half in various queues and having a few minor freak outs about Australian customs, which all turned out fine, aand eventually arrived at City Campus accommodation at about half 9! It is SO hot here - BBC says between 23 and 27 degrees, I'd say it's closer to the latter today!

So yesterday, to start with, I was exhausted from my flight - I mean during the day here it's night time back home - but during the day it wasn't too bad. I met a second year from college at the apartments who took me to my apartments (though none of my flatmates were there at the time :-( ) and I got to jump in the shower for a second just to cool down a bit!! And then the first flatmate I met came in :-) Her name is Roxanne, and she's from California. First impressions? Rather hyper! Always a good quality :-) I met Mallory (also American, can't understand a word I say - note to self: must speak slower!) and Anna (Northern Irish - another Brit! She's lovely :) ) a few hours later after I'd been shopping to get a few essentials with Melody, who met me at the apartments. My apartment is really pretty good, it's two to a room (I'm sharing with Anna :) ), we have a little kitchen with some decent cupboard space and...err... room for a fridge... which will be purchased soon!! But the best bit is the living room, which is quite big. It's currently unfurnished, except for a small table and a sofa that someone managed to get free :-) we also have a washing machine and a tumble dryer already, the latter was free and I paid $50 towards the washing machine when I got here.

Then I went to the local food shop, kind of like Tesco's, but called Cole's, with Roxy and bought some soup and bread, nothing requiring refrigeration :P and then we went to Saturday Church! Seriously, they have a service on Saturday evening, and then six services on a Sunday :-O However, I was EXHAUSTED by halfway through the sermon - I was getting very close to nodding off in my seat. So I headed home straight after and went straight to bed, and pretty much passed out!

Until I was rudely awakened by a squeal from our bathroom.
See, there's sort of a bathroom between two, one for each bedroom. Which is really pretty good, especially for student accomodation. But what that means is that one of them is is basically an ensuite from my room, and when Anna was going to bed, there was a giant spider in the shower.
To her credit, it wasn't her that woke me up. She just exited the bathroom rather speedily and went to grab Roxy, who, in trying to catch or kill the spider (or something), screamed when it moved. I didn't actually see it (since I was in bed :P) but apparently it was about the size of a hand and apparently it looked like this:

And a fairly large hand. Soo it took about an hour and a half before we were convinced it was either dead or going to die of starvation since it crawled under our sink (between the sink and the counter) and we poured hot water and cleaning fluid through the hole it went into, then blocked up the holes, and calmed ourselves down and went back to sleep.

Soo we got up at about 8ish this morning and went to the service at 9:45. I was awake for all of this one :P so that was great, we sat at the front for this one too with all the other cool people, like a few other students. Louis Giglio was there (last night as well). Well, I say he was there - he was actually at Hills (they have like 4 sites - Hills, City, South West, and Brisbane) and they had a video link set up, which was... temperamental. The video stream actually kind of broke halfway through his message so one of the Church pastors took over for 20 minutes, which was great too! So I'm going to see the rest of that at the 7:00 service. They actually have even more services here than on London - 5 on a Sunday AND one on a Saturday evening. And that's just at Hills campus. This is the Church site: http://myhillsong.com/#slider-nid36.

 Soo, lets see. Privations. I haven't been able to find lucozade. Plenty of red bull, if I could drink it, and coke. But I'd really like a drink full of sugar, just while I'm getting over the jet lag, and there kind of isn't any. I'm really missing my internet, but hopefully we'll get some broadband set up before very long. All the crisps brands are different, which is confusing, and the chocolate. No pot noodles, or the brand anyway. Not that that's that much of a privation.

Sydney is such a pretty city. They have palm trees down almost all of the streets. The road signs are exactly like all the ones in films - squares with a point at the bottom, bright yellow with black writing.

It's so much fun comparing accents. Anna (the Northern Irish one) was trying to get Roxy and Mallory to mimic her accent, and they completely couldn't. Course, neither could I, but I can't do accents in the first place. Mallory laughed at me this morning for saying 'Cheers'! Roxy had a wierd name for a Beetle as well (like a VW Beetle) but I can't remember what it was :-S it was something insecty though I think!

Anyway. My first couple of days have so far been great - I saw Beth just now as she walked past the coffee shop! It's like around the corner from the college accommodation so you see loads of people from College, all here skyping and facebooking! But now I think I'm going to go home and have a shower before Church, see if I can't cool down a bit! Soo I hope you enjoyed my first long post, I will try to update after enrolment maybe!