Vegemite!

January 21st

Greetings from Mittagong!

Ryan, Phil and I arrived safely, without hassle in Sydney Australia on Tuesday, and I have since had 3 of the best days of my life! We were blessed to be picked up at the airport by some close friends, who then proceeded to take us on a two hour coastal tour on the way back to their home. I quickly realized that Australia was nothing at all like I had expected it to be. I’d always envisioned that Australia was very commercialized, and that the beaches would be full of high rising hotels and condominiums, with super malls scattered across the country, but that is not the case. Once we were out of Sydney, there was an extremely natural feel about everything. The beaches are extremely clean, with no signs of human interference, and the people are EXTREMELY kind and friendly. Whoever says that Australians are like Americans, and New Zealanders are like Canadians is a fool. The warmth, generosity and compassion of every Australian person that I have come across is palpable, and incredibly comforting! Within minutes of meeting the Worners, the family that has taken us in, I felt as though I was their son, and that has been such a blessing to us. Everyone has taken us in and made us feel so welcomed to Australia, I can already tell it’s going to be very difficult to leave!

The first adventure that we had was going to see the Capernwray Australia Torchbearers campus. My friends Nicole and Paul are going to that school in about a week, so we went to check it out, got a good tour, and wrote them a letter we left with the schools dean. The dean talked to us about the capernwray that we are going to, and gave us words of encouragement, and it brought us back down to earth, and reminded us that despite how amazing this vacation has been for us, we are here to go to bible school, and we are here to learn about God, and the school that we are going to will be an incredible place to do that. Steve Woods got us extremely excited about school, and that will help make leaving Australia a little bit easier!

Yesterday the Worners drove us about an hour and a half to visit their friend’s beach house, which is on Jervis Bay, in a town called Vincentia. We stayed the night there, and had an incredible time! The beaches are known for having the whitest sand in the world, and they were breathtaking! I felt like I was walking on icing sugar, they were so pretty, and so soft! Jordan Worner, Ryan, Phil and I rented mopeds, and went for a ride along the beach for an hour or so, and got to drive on the left side of the road, which was so weird!

Later that night, we went out to try and find kangaroos. We were informed that if we went to the local golf course, we’d be sure to see kangaroos, so we went there. At first, we didn’t see any anywhere. We walked down a few fairways, and were completely out of luck, until I looked a couple greens over and thought that I saw one standing on the green. Sure enough, there were two little kangaroos on the green, so we started walking towards them, ever so slowly! We were about 100 meters away, and they were both looking at us, and twitching so we decided we probably couldn’t get any closer and we started to take pictures. I was looking through my camera, and had it zoomed in with its 10x zoom, or whatever the furthest zoom I had was, and was taking extremely average photos. Suddenly the kangaroo that I was focused on left my zoom finder, and I thought I had lost him. I tried to find him, thinking I could maybe get a good action shot of him hopping away, but wasn’t able to track him anywhere. When I finally put down the camera, I realized why I couldn’t find the Roo, and it’s because he was standing 4 feet in front of me! Ryan Phil and I all got some pretty good pictures with the kangaroo, and called it a day... and an amazing day at that!

Another memorable experience we had was this morning, when one of the Mom's forced Vegemite upon Ryan Phil and I. For those of you who don't know, Vegemite is a yeast extract that contains natural vegetable salts. It is the most vulgar smelling spread you could ever imagine, and people actually enjoy eating it. It is extremely salty, and we had the blessed opportunity of having it on our toast this morning. As gross and salty as it was, it was still a fun experience, and was a neat aspect of Australian culture that we would not have discovered if it wasn't for the generosity of our Australian friends!

The opportunities that we’ve been able to experience have truly been astounding, and we have only been here for less than three full days!

The weather here has been consistently above 30 degrees Celsius, and after 3 days I’m still yet to see a cloud in the sky! It has been absolutely perfect, and the forecast predicts much of the same, only much much hotter! Tomorrow has a high of 45degrees, plus humidity which makes it feel 2 or 3 degrees warmer, so it might be a little bit unbarable!!

That’s about all for now. I’ll continue to try and keep you guys updated

Blessings

Zakk