Adventures of Miss Audoss

Hello 5SK!

Sorry it has been a while since we last spoke…I have had many adventures at camp that I am quite excited to tell you about!
 
So in my last email I was heading to camp the next day, but now I’m back from my 6 weeks. I really don’t know how to describe camp to you! It was so strange…and fun. As I mentioned last time, it was an arts camp so all the morning majors were arts related. I got to participate in musical theatre dance and photography which were both really fun.

Our days pretty much ran like this:
7:15 wake up and a jump in the lake (polar bear dip), breakfast, majors from 9-11:30, lunch, rest hour ( we always napped), 2 one hour electives (hikes, football, soccer, painting, friendship bracelets, canoeing etc), free swim from 4-5:30, dinner at 6, camp wide game (themed capture the flag and others) followed by a campfire to end the night from 8:30-9:30pm.
It was a really busy day every day. The best part of camp was the dress up days. Every night had a different theme that we had to dress to for dinner and the camp wide game usually related to the theme. Some of my favourite ones included day at the zoo, old folks supper, 80’s night, twin dinner and identity swap. On Friday nights we had a talent show and a barn dance which is just a disco in an old barn. Campers came on a Sunday and left on Saturday afternoon after the concert showing parents what they learnt that week.
I spent a lot of time dressed as either a panda, unicorn or ice cream sundae. Haha. We ate really well and everyone got on famously. The camp was in the country on a huge lake with heaps of wildlife around. There were deers and chipmunks and evidence of a black bear but we never actually saw him. I will add some photos of the lake and one of my favourite dress up pictures.
I almost forgot to tell you about my wicked toe injury. I sliced the bottom half of my big toe off. It was nasty. I couldn’t walk on it for over a week! I’m not going to add a picture because it was so nasty but I think Mrs Scharf can tell you!
So now that camp is over I have headed back down to the United States for around 2 weeks. I don’t really have any questions for you this time, but tell me about you guys! How’s life back home? What are you leaning about?!
Oh one more thing! Holy cow! The temperature here is nuts! So we are in summer right…well it was warmer in Brisbane in the middle of Winter than it was in Summer  in Canada! One day I saw that it was 2-25 in Brisbane and on the same day in a Canadian Summer it was 12-20! I totally thought that it would be warm here for all of Summer…turns out it isn’t warm everyday.

Say hello to Mrs Franklin and Mr Insch for me! 🙂
Chat soon! Miss A.

 

 

image12 

 

image10

image11

Adventures of Miss Audoss

image

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

image

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

image

 

 

And number 1 – the wildlife. The wildlife is very different here to Australia and I was lucky enough to be able to see and hear most of it. In one jungle stay, we were in an animal reserve for howler monkeys. They lived in the trees around our huts and all night from 10pm – 6am they would howl. It is a very freaky noise. They actually recorded the howler monkeys and used their noises for the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park! So every time I went outside at night I was waiting for a velociraptor to pounce on me!

In the next jungle stay, there were scorpions and jaguars living close by. There were actually signs asking people to not feed the jaguars. Jaguars are big cats. My friend even had a scorpion in her room! Of course there are normal bugs – flies, a billion Mosquitos, Christmas beetles, roaches, rhino beetles and geckos.  We also got to go to a spider monkey reserve and see them in their natural habitat. That was cool because there was a little baby on the mothers back.

 

The most amazing thing though was getting to swim with the whale sharks. They are not sharks like the name suggests. They are actually fish and they have no teeth so they live on a diet of krill like the blue whale. Whale sharks can be between 5 and 10m long. We were able to snorkel beside them 70km out to sea. I will send Mrs S a video of the whale sharks. So that was pretty cool and the next day we went snorkeling with the turtles in Turtle Bay.
Some of the beaches we got to go to are even more amazing than Whitehaven. The water temp was great, the sand was white and the water so clear! I made some great friends and even learnt some Spanish! Mexico is definitely worth a visit one day.
Now I am off to summer camp for 6 weeks. This is where parents send their kids for the summer holidays. That’s right summer holidays. School ended here in North America the same week that you went on term 2 holidays. They don’t go back to school until August now! Lucky hey! They don’t get our long Christmas break though.
The camp I am at is called Long Bay Camp, Arts by the Lake. It is a visual and performing arts camp which means every activity relates to music,dance,drama or art 🙂 There is also the normal camp activities like canoeing and camp fires. You can have a google of the camp if you want to know more.
So I hope you have enjoyed your holidays everyone! I will talk to you after camp because there is no Internet in the bush! There aren’t even flushing toilets! They are all long drops. I’m really going back to nature for 6 weeks.
Chat soon, Miss A. 🙂

Adventures of Miss Audoss

 

¡Hola!

I hope you all enjoyed the last few weeks of school. Who won the athletics carnival? Go Dalrymple! Hehe ☺

 

Alrighty time for me to tell you about the next part of my adventure. I went to Mexico and felt like Dora the Explorer. Hmm Miss A the Explorer. What do you think? Haha. Okay so basically Mexico is still a developing country which means around 80% of the population lives in extreme poverty. It’s pretty sad actually. You really don’t realize how lucky we are until you see how bad other people have it. I went shopping for fruit one day at Walmart and all of the nectarines and peaches were growing mould but that is the quality they are used to. I will never throw away a bruised piece of fruit again!

 

Ok so lets talk about the amazing parts of Mexico! I had 10 days on a Trek America tour where I met some amazing people from the UK and Ireland.  Alexandra from Ireland was my buddy for the trip and we became great friends – we are already planning to catch up again on Mexico in January.

 

As there is so much to tell about this trip, I, am just going to give you a quick run down. As they say a picture is worth a thousand words so I will share some pictures again. There are three amazing elements that make up Mexico. 1) the wildlife 2) the Mayan ruins and 3) the Cenotes

 

 

I’m going to start at number 3 because I bet you are wondering what a cenote actually is. So a cenote is a deep natural pit, or sinkhole. They are special to Mexico in particular the Yucatan peninsula where I was. The only other place in the world they exist is some of the Caribbean islands close by. How it happens is that there is a water supply underground and overtime the limestone collapses and exposes the water underneath. The other super cool thing is that the Mayans used them as sacrificial pits sometimes.  We got to swim in 3 cenotes while in Mexico. For two of them we had to climb down a ladder into a tiny hole that opened into a cave like cenote.  In one of the cenotes there were even bones of the Mayan people at the bottom. They were over 1000 years old.

image

You might be wondering who the Mayans are. I bet the only thing you know about them was the end of the Mayan calendar on December 21 2012. Clearly they were wrong and the world didn’t end.  They were an ancient civilization who lived in Mexico. That’s all I am going to tell you about them though. You can find out what time frame they existed and maybe even where they originated from and what happened to them.

image

All this talk brings me to point number 2 – the ruins. The most famous Mayan ruin is the Chitzen Itza. If you ask Miss Challis she has been here too! It looks like a big pyramid but actually isn’t. The way the Mayans worked was that every 52 years they built a new temple over the old one so when these temples were discovered, archeologists actually found many temples inside one another.

 

 

I was lucky enough to visit 4 archeological sites in Mexico. The Chitzen Itza, Uxmal, Tulum (the only Mayan city by the sea) and Palenque. Palenque is quite amazing as it is in the middle of the jungle. These ruins date back to 226 BC! The empire fell in 1123 AD and they were abandoned and left to be covered in jungle until the 1600s when an archeologist discovered them.

image
image

Adventures of Miss Audoss

garçons et filles bonjour!

The last time we spoke I was sleeping in a creepy old jail! A lot has happened since then!
I was traveling with some girls who were from Germany and the Netherlands and together we went on a train through the countryside to Montreal. Montreal is a pretty cool city. Did you know that Montreal has a city underneath the city? The Underground City is a maze of tunnels and shops that covers more than 28kms.

Montreal is also the second largest French speaking city in the world..can you guess what number 1 is?  It is an old city so there is an ‘Old Town’ which has many very old buildings in it. We got to try lots of yummy maple syrup products here. Do you know how maple syrup is made? It’s pretty cool..I look forward to your response!

Also in Montreal something pretty amazing was built for the 1967 worlds fair..maybe you can figure it out! Montreal was even home to the Olympics once! There is even a wooden roller coaster which is one of the largest in the world in Montreal.

After Montreal I travelled even further north east into the very French city of Quebec City. It is the most European city in North America so that was cool. There is something special about Quebec that has to do with a wall.  Maybe you can find out!

Quebec is the birthplace of a traditional dish called poutine. Basically it is chips and gravy but with cheese curds on top. It’s pretty gross. It would be nice without the cheese!  The weather was nice and warm in Quebec so we spent the evenings sitting on the wall watching the sunset. I really loved Quebec City! So beautiful! Mrs S you will have to come visit here!

Oh my I almost forgot to tell you about my favourite part of Quebec….beaver tails!! Oh my they are sooo delish! It is like a donut but about 15cm long and it is flat. Then you get to choose your topping! Nutella, cinnamon, crushed Oreos, Nutella and banana or my favourite, caramel pieces and sauce. Very fattening but soooo worth it!

After weeks in big cities I decided to take a break and head to a mountain ski village called Mont Tremblant. As it was the first day of summer when I arrived, there was no snow except for a bit on the top of a mountain. The town has the same population as your town, so it was nice and small. The hostel I stayed at had a lake right out the back that you can swim in or kayak around. There was even a teepee that had a camp fire inside of it.
The village of Mont Tremblant is picturesque.  It reminded me of Whoville from The Grinch. Brightly colored buildings and common squares where people sat and ate their lunches at the bottom of the mountains. In winter you can catch the gondola right to the top and ski right into the village! In summer there is a luge ride which is fun!

The weather in Mont Tremblant reminded me of North Qld  in summer. Very hit and humid. I loved it! Was a nice change from rain and cooler weather.

Right now I am on a 5 hour train ride from Montreal back to Toronto where I will meet my cousin for the first time. I’m spending a few days with her before I fly out to Mexico on Friday! Yay hot weather. Around 45* actually! I will have another language change..think you might know to what?

Don’t stress too much on reports Mrs S and K! There were a few questions for you this time…I promise to go easy next email!
Miss you all!
Salut!

Adventures of Miss Audoss

Hello! Did you figure out where I went? If you thought New York you were correct! NYC or the big apple was pretty spectacular! I saw all those places I mentioned and more. We hired bikes and rode around Central Park as it is way too big to walk. It was very pretty. The seasons are opposite to Australia so as you are getting cooler, it is supposed to be getting warmer here. It is spring at the moment so nights are still cool but days are warming up.
I said goodbye to the USA and headed across the boarder to Canada! First stop was Toronto. It was only an hour flight from NYC to Toronto. That’s less than Brisbane to Proserpine!
So I headed north to Canada and boy was it cold! A few nights it was as cold as -1 and the warmest the days got was 15! I didn’t really pack winter clothes as it shouldn’t be cold until November here!
Anyway, I was walking to do my laundry one day and I got attacked by a giant hail storm! It doesn’t just rain here…it rains ice! It was very cold! All my clothes and washing got covered in ice!
I also went and saw Niagara Falls.  It’s pretty amazing. Thousands of mega litres of water flow over it every day. Can you find out exactly how many? I got to go on a boat ride to the bottom of the falls and we got soaked!
After Toronto I went north to the capital of Canada….Ottawa! It was really pretty. They had a tulip festival on so the tulips were everywhere. It was a celebratory 2 week event with the Dutch people. One cool thing about Ottawa was that the hostel I stayed in was an old jail! Worked for 110 years before it was shut down in the 70’s. It was pretty creepy. My friends had to stay in actual jail cells! They say ghosts live there too.
From Ottawa we entered the Provence of Quebec. A Provence is like a state. The Provence that Toronto and Ottawa is in is called Ontario. Quebec might sound a little French and that’s because it is the French part of Canada. Bonjour! Obviously I love it but I do wish I spoke French so I could communicate! Only about 50% of people speak English here. It has a very pretty Old Town with the original buildings and cobble stone streets. There is a mountain I’m going to hike today called Parc Du Royal. It should give me amazing views if the weather is nice.
Au revoir!
Miss A.

The Adventures of Miss Audoss

Hello 5SK!

I hope you are all well and I bet you are glad Naplan is over!

Let me tell you a little about my adventure to North America! This email will be a little long as I have been away a month already. It started on the 28th of April with a 13 hour flight to the home of the stars……Los Angeles! I didn’t see anyone famous unfortunately but I saw lots of famous names on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and plenty of famous hand and footprints in the concrete outside of an important building…do you know what building it is?

My next stop was the famous Santa Monica pier and the amusement park that is on the pier. The beach here is very pretty…almost as pretty as your beaches! The Ferris wheel here is the largest solar powered one in the world…but it isn’t as big as you would think.

I saw some cool ice age fossils at a special tar pit – a wooly mammoth and many saber tooth cats were just some of the creatures stuck in the tar and fossilised. Did you know tar is still coming out of the ground via a lake?!

Los Angeles had some beautiful weather which was nice. I jumped on a plane to fly across the country all the way to the nationals capital….Washington  DC.  It is very similar to Canberra I found. DC is the home of the President of the United States of America – Barrack Obama. He was a bit too busy in his special house (do you know what it is called?) to say hello.

DC is also home to a collection of 13 museums all called the Smithsonian. There is the Natural History, American history, Indian history and the Air and Space museum just to name my favorites. Best of all it is free to see all the museums! Most days I walked at least 12km. The walkathon track at QB around the whole school is around 1km I believe, so I walked that at least 12 times a day!

I drove with some friends to my next state. It is the home of the Yankees baseball team, the Empire State Building, Broadway, Times Square, Central Park, the Statue of Liberty and heaps more! Do you know where I went yet? Here’s another clue just in case. The movie, ‘Night at the Museum’, was filmed in the Natural History Museum here….Home Alone is also set here.

I will let you have a think about it and will email you the next part tomorrow.

You could plot my journey on a map of North America to see all the places I go. We can compare maps at the end of my holiday.

If you have anything you want to ask me I’m happy to answer!

Chat soon,

Miss Audoss 🙂