Blog? Why, Hello!

In 4 days, I’ll be leaving for Australia for a little more than 3 months. I’m going down under! to Oz! Crikey!

To be completely honest, it’s weird for me to keep a public blog because I am a very private person, but I thought this would be the best way to share what I will be doing in Australia. Despite all the informational forms I’ve been getting from the abroad program about where I’m going to be going and what I’m going to be seeing there, I’m still not at all sure about what to expect. Bits and pieces of details stick out to me, but I am at a loss about a lot of smaller things, such as how I’m going to survive without internet for two whole weeks while I’m at an island somewhere in Queensland. Hmm. Sort of defeats the purpose of having a blog, right?

But Australia is ever creeping closer. I just finished 10 weeks of work in a lab, went to Hawaii for a week with my family, and now I have 4 days to complete colossal to-do lists that seem slightly impossible to finish. But I will prevail!

So, until next time, here are a few lists of things I need to do and things I will miss on my quarter in Australia. I really enjoy making lists to organize my thoughts, so you, my faithful reader, will probably be getting a lot of lists throughout my blogs. I’ll try to make it interesting, but I swear you’re gonna LOVE it!

Things I need to do before Australia:

• Buy a ton of stuff (this is a huge list in and of itself)
• Figure out tuition payments
• Finish summer volunteering stuff for SCOPE and HELP
• Pack! (ughhh… not looking forward to packing)
• See friends
• Visit Stanford
• Hang out with my sister

Things I will be missing on my quarter abroad:

• A lot of TV shows (does Hulu work in Australia?? I don’t think so…)
• Stanford football! Go card!
• Ingrid Michaelson in November
• Sara Bareilles in September (free concert with a lot of other good artists)
• Train in Berkeley
• Probably other bands as well but I’m afraid to check
• West Side Story tour in SF
• Dalai Lama and various other people visiting Stanford
• Fall-specific only-offered-every-other-year classes
• Kodi

Lastly, about the name of this blog – it was something I came up with as an afterthought at 1am a few weeks ago. I really wanted to pick a creative blog name before I went to sleep, but I couldn’t come up with anything. As a space-filler, I just put “TAgoesplaces” (roughly modeled after my sister’s “travelswithsongmy”). Then I thought about puns I could make with my name and Australia (Twozzie?) and finally landed on twallaby. I just found that day that my TRP (targeted research project) assignment would be on wallabies, and thought that “twallaby” sounded cool. The next day I realized that twallaby sort of rang a bell, and remembered that in Kindergarten, my class learned a song called Willoughby Wallaby Wee. It goes: “Willoughby Wallaby Wee, an elephant sat on me! Willoughby Wallaby Wodi, an elephant sat on Kodi!” and etc. (according to a Google search, this song actually exists!). We even made a coloring book about it which featured stick figures in crayon with a cartoon elephant pasted on top of them, often with quite a lot of crayola bloodshed present.

Anyway, after a quick poll among my close friends and sister, twallaby was chosen. I can’t say I totally love it, but it’ll grow on me, or sit on me, or something of that nature.