"No part of Australia is more than 1000 km from the ocean and a beach. "

I have made it through my first week of Uni!

The Australian school system is so different compared to what I’m used to at Bridgewater State. I am not too worried about studying, and doing my work, its just the most difficult thing that I have found is during lectures. I cannot for the life of me, listen and take notes at the same time. Since the class sizes are much larger than 30 people, the lecturers can’t just stop for a question. During my first real biology class, I realized that I’m going to need some help if I’m going to remember anything from the lectures so I ended up going to Dick Smith, Australia’s electronics store, to get a voice recorder. By spending the money on the recorder, I can already see that it has made a difference to how my study habits will be.  It seems like for the three weeks I’ve been here, I’ve spent the most money this week on school supplies, books, and field trips.

School supplies..yay! Well down under, they don’t use paper that is 8 ½ by 11, its just slightly larger at 8.3 by 11.7.  Its not that big of an adjustment but its annoying that if I bring my notebooks back, they will be a different size. With all of my classes, I needed a total of three books, which was great. Many of the professors put their notes online because they do not want students to waste their money on material that they cannot sell back. The highlight of the week was paying for my field trips! Like I said in an earlier post, I will be going on 4 trips this semester, most of them day trips, and one 5 day trip.  Here are my research trips!

March 19th- Brisbane National Park Research Trip

March 28^th- April 1^st- Fraser Island Research Trip

May 7th- Lamington National Park

May 28^th- Australia Zoo ( behind the scenes! )

This past weekend week was a relaxing but eventful weekend! Since I have no Friday classes, my friend Emily and I went into the city, but then decided to go a different way to explore! Well in a few short minutes we found the entrance to Brisbane’s Botanical Gardens! It was such a lovely find, it didn’t seem like it belonged in the city! There were lakes, flowers,  tropical trees, picnic areas..everything! We enjoyed it because for the past 6 days or so its been raining and even in the misting rain, the Botanical Gardens were beautiful! There was so much wildlife, I couldn’t believe I was in the city! Giant bearded dragons, ducks, eels, (yes eels) it was awesome. Friday night was an early one because I’ve been planning on going to an event in the city for the past few months. It was Brisbane Welcomes International Students Day! So I got up and headed into the heart of the city with Emily and Chelsea. We got some great information about the city, we heard Brisbane’s Chancellor speak, and best of all I got to meet and speak with “Greatest Job on Earth” winner, Ben Southall!!!! That 100% made my day!

Sunday my roommate Melissa and I deiced that we were done exploring Brisbane and made our way to the Surfers Paradise, on the Gold Coast. Our apartment complex is in the perfect location beucase we rolled out of bed and caught the 8:03 train down to the beach right next door. The ride was about 45 minutes and then we hopped onto a bus for about a half hour to take us right to paradise. The ride was smooth! This is defiantly a day trip/ overnight trip. We got their early and it was BEAUTIFUL! The water was 74 degrees and the sand was so soft. Since we were their early in the morning we were able to watch some surfs schools, lifeguarding classes and swim team all in different areas of the beach! I was very impressed with the lifeguards.

 Watching them practice made me miss guarding a lot, but it was really interesting how they recovered victims from the ocean as opposed to a pool in the U.S like I am used to. As we were walking, I was also mesmerized by the swim team swimming laps in the ocean! This may not seem like a big deal, but the swells were at least 6 to 7 ft high and all of the kids just jumped right in! After sitting in the sun for a while we decided to take a walk around all of the different shops and food areas. It was a great area and the people watching was by far the best in Australia so far! We both put layers of sun block on but we still managed to get burnt. The sun is just so hot that after just a half hour you really feel like your baking in the oven. My burn isn’t bad though, its like a usual beginning of a summer burn that goes away in a day or two. We headed home at about 5 o’clock so  I would say it was a successful day trip! We are already thinking of going back on Friday!

Fast Fact of the Day! What is a Seppo? Well, Australians sometimes refer to Americans as Seppo's.Why? Because this is an abbreviation for 'Septic Tank' which is rhyming slang for Yank as in Yankee. If you dont get the lingo, it understandable because usually someone would have to explain where a certain name came from. 

Cheers from the heat!

Love & Miss.