Entrance to Cob cave


Lori on cool cable bridge


Cob (coz they found ancient corn cobs in
here apparently) cave (cave we slept in)


Me at da top of Twin Falls


Lori and I at Twin falls


Twin Falls


View of Horseshoe Canyon

Photos

Well Mom asked for a few photos so here they are. These were all
taken in the first week i think, except for the bike and bullet shots. That's my new bike if u didn't notice, i recon it's tops. Just so every one knows I DIDN'T WRITE THAT WORD IN THE SNOW someone else did it (and i need to shake their hand, great effort.). The other photos are of campus after the ice storm, despite the beauty of the trees covered in a thick coat of crystaline ice it actually caused a ton of damage and ended up killing around 70 people and the national guard had to be deployed since it was a state of emergency. All's good now and the streets are all pretty much clean of all of the debris that was around, classes are in full swing, not that it feels like it because most of our classes are prac. I think we've got a bit of a 5 day weekend coming up too since our lecturers decided to become slackers and cancel classes. We might go for a treck down to Akansas just for fun and climb some mountains, but who knows? Anyhow ill keep on doin this sorta thing on this site coz it's a heap easier putting photos and stuff on here rather than using email. C-yaz Mark.

PS that photo at the b-ball, MSU (us) are called the bears and we ended up loosing that game by 10points, just thought yoos might like to know, thats all.

Wed 31

Well, I s’pose it’s time to write a bit of a more detailed letter, it’s been around 2 weeks since I left home with another 18 weeks (I think) until I get back. Lori and I have settled in pretty well, we’ve scored some wheels (in the form of 2 brand new fully sick looking racing bikes that we bought from target for 49.99) so now we can go and explore, the only thing is, is that it’s way too cold most days to even think about braving the wind chill to hit the roads. Today is the 31^st and it’s my 21^st, instead of it being a nice 35c we’ve got –35c (Mum style exaggeration, it’s really around –20c) it started snowing for the first time since I arrived, we went out for a walk to the supermarket and made snow angels on the way, then of course it was time to make some yellow snow. Tonight we’re having a guitar hero tournament (playstation guitar game) with all the people on res which should be interesting, us Aussies will be sure to show em up. Lori and I have also developed a new sport that involves running flat out down a road and then sliding as far as you can on the black ice without falling over, it’s the closest thing to surfing as I’m gunna get and since I hold the world record of 10m against Lori’s poor effort of 8m I think this sport has a great future. Hopefully tomorrow we can con one of our friends Lindsay to take us snowboarding, the snow is looking as if it’s gunna get pretty deep, it’s already around 2.5 inches on the ground and it’s predicted to snow for the next couple of days. Another free form of entertainment that we’ve discovered is trafficspotting, it involves just sitting in our rooms and watching the poor fools trying to get out of the icy carpark on road tyres, it’s great fun, only seen one crash so far, a car just drifted sideways and bounced of a parked car, all I can say is that there’s no way you’de get me trying to drive Edy on these roads.

Feb 2

Apart from the cold, ice and snow the dorms are really comfortable, having a room to myself is a real bonus too, the floors are split into boys and girls floors and all the boys on our floor have been really friendly. Some of the rooms in the hallways on our floor have the little American flags coming out of em so Lori and I have decided to counteract em by putting little aussie flags out, this only made more American flags pop up on other American doors so we had to bring out the big guns and we ended up sticking Kev’s big aussie flag on the roof of the hallway so that whenever an American had to get to his room they had to walk through the Australian flag. The other day we played basketball with the boys from our floor and I found out 2 things, americans are better than we at basketball and they take their sport very seriously, the game was just supposed to be a muck around sort of thing but the americans started arguing over scores and fouls and all sorts of rubbish, Lori and I still had fun though being ignorant Australians. After feeling a little showed up when it came to basketball, Lori and I were quick to bust out the AFL footies, the stoopid americans were soon put to shame with even my poor drop punting technique. Other than playing a bit of indoor sport and throwing snow at each other when we’re walking to get food from the dinning hall I’m actually going to a few university classes, the highlights being shooting and bowling. My bowling class involves 2* 1hr classes and all we have to do is bowl 2 games per lesson and hopefully average 130 inorder to score a HD (I think I’m on around 125 at the moment) so it’s fair to say that that’s the easiest class I’ve ever had the pleasure of taking. With the shooting class, we got to actually shoot this week, I found out that it’s a lot harder than it looks since I missed the whole target for the first few shoots and it didn’t get much better after that, I still maintain that it’s the gun’s fault though, I’m sure the barrel was warped or something. Apart from the fun classes believe it or not I’m actually taking some useful ones too. They include injuries (really good), team sports, practicum experience, coaching and PE teaching practicum, the last three involve spending 30 hours per subject in schools (their version of the 8 week round kinda). With coaching, Lori and I were able to get into the Laboratory school on campus to do tennis coaching which is perfect really. With the other two, we’re gunna start doing them when it warms up a bit so that we can actually take kids outside so I’m looking forward to that. Kev’s doing his teaching rounds at the moment and he’s already gotten himself into trouble by calling the kids “mate”, the kids thought it was sexual or something because apparently, they only use the term “mate” when it’s “mating season” or something like that anyhow it I found it pretty funny.

Apart from school and all that there’s not really all that much going on around campus, we just usually hang out on our floor at res. I’ve also attached some photos to this email, one of the mountains that I walked to in fiji, (I think I actually prefer the cold to the 43 degree c heat in fiji), another of Lori molesting the uni mascot statue of a bear and one of the view from my room.

Anyways, that’s the way it is from America on the 2^nd of feb (3^rd of feb in oz), hope the photos give you a better idea of how cold it is here c-yaz.

From MARK.