My Witherspoon 335 girls

My creative arts class flew by since I knew that I had something exciting waiting for me at noon; finally being able to skype with Jessica and Noelle my old roommates! I got so wrapped up in my visual arts project of making a collage out of my drawing from the previous week that I had to practically run across campus to set up my laptop outside and log into skype. Being that I was fifteen minutes late I knew that the girls had figured I had forgotten them, but we were all excited to finally be able to see each other. Talking to them and hearing all about UNCC really made me miss home and getting to talk and laugh with them, but it also made me appreciate my time here even more. They asked me lots of questions about Australia since they were of course curious, but it also made me realize that I still have a lot to experience. Also weird to think that they are about to get out of school for the semester and I am only halfway done with mine. Definitely makes me jealous, but then again two of my classes, and Riley’s, will be ending soon so that makes everything a little better. It was getting past Noelle’s grandma bedtime (that’s a joke) so we had to end our skype session but we all agreed to do it more often! This left me to finish my lunch with Riley and catch up with him. I was done with classes for the day, but that also meant I had a lot of free time to catch up on some schoolwork. The internet got the better part of me again and sucked away about an hour of my time before I finally cracked down and started on one of my reflection papers. Riley soon joined on one of his breaks and we were able to knock the majority of our papers out of the way. We only have one more paper to write for our Australian Sport Culture class and we are beyond excited. Although the class takes us on a lot of field trips that we would not have otherwise experienced, our interest in the class has severely dropped. We haven’t really connected with many people in the class since they had prior clichés it seems, and the professor isn’t exactly professional. I stayed behind at the library to finish some work while Riley headed off to his last class. Afterwards we knew we had to get some quick dinner before heading off to the Great Southern Hotel in Ultimo to meet with Niell for trivia night. We had agreed to try out another pub for their trivia night at the previous event and were excited. We had passed by their ‘hotel’ several times on our way to Darling Harbour, Town Hall or the markets but had never been inside. We instantly knew why whenever we stepped in and were confronted with a wall of loud noise and chatter along with a cloud of smoke. I don’t think Australia has the same ‘no smoking inside’ rule that the US does and man, do I miss that. I’m afraid that I’m actually getting used to the smell of secondhand smoke because literally everyone smokes here. I can’t even walk to the grocery store without getting stuck behind at least five people that light one up right in front of me. Niell was sitting right inside the pub so it wasn’t hard to find him. We had thought that we were running late, but turns out we were actually early since the event didn’t start until 7:30. It was only going to be the three of us for the night since his other friends had fallen habit to creature and have permanently settled at the other pub. Niell is adventurous like us and likes to try new things, so for that we are thankful. This pub was a little different with the categories and scoring. The first category was potluck where any question under the sun could be asked, followed by sports, food and drink and music. Your team was able to pick one category and put a star next to it meaning you would get double the credit for every right answer. We chose to go with the potluck category and definitely worked out in our benefit since we got 8/10 in that category. After two rounds we were in a solid second place and extremely excited about our efforts. We were a good mix of people since we had all contributed to the answers! However, things quickly turned for us. We weren’t so hot on the sports or food and drink categories and unfortunately our title slipped from us. But, that is not entirely our fault because we had some cheaters on the premises. There was a possible 50 points your team could have gotten, 60 if you did the double points with the stars and guess what? One team got a perfect 50/50 questions right! Tell me how that is even possible without using google as a search engine for every single answer. We were beyond annoyed and mad that people had ruined the fun of the night. The team that followed got 49/50 questions right so obviously there was something not so honest behavior going on. We were completely happy about our 32/50 answer set especially with only having 3 people on our team! Niell informed us that we would come across more backpackers in the city that tend to break the rules and cheat with their phones since they’re just after the money and prizes. That being said we will not return to the Great Southern Hotel for trivia night. We probably wouldn’t have anyways because of the atmosphere and smoke that exhausted us out.