It's been a while...

Yeah, I haven’t updated in a while, but things have been pretty slow around here…


My supervisor was gone for the past two weeks. She needed to use up her vacation time before the end of the financial year, which is June 30th, so she left me with the task of researching other areas of the world with issues similar to the Murray-Darling Basin. Well, I found a plethora of articles, and all I’ve been doing is reading them for the past two weeks and summarizing them in less than a page. It is HEAVY reading, and sometimes I’ll be summarizing things I don’t quite understand. You know you’re in trouble when you visit dictionary.com so many times you “favourite” it. But that doesn’t stop me. I’ve written papers on things I don’t quite understand, and if school has taught me anything, it is the fine art of appearing to know what you’re talking about. But in all honesty I’m learning a lot about water issues, terminology, and many other things Australian…

Canberra is very, very slow. Luckily, my host mom, Fran, was heading up to Sydney last weekend and I was able to hitch a ride to see some friends up there. We went up on Friday and came back on Monday. Before we left on Friday, I had enough time to get a haircut. The only problem was I was on my own and didn’t know where a haircut place was. No matter. I just hopped on the bus to the city center and hoped for the best.

Amazingly, I found a place within 5 minutes of getting off the bus. I had an hour before the best left again to go back to my suburb, so I thought it would be a good move to just go to this place as opposed to looking around. Well, as I walk in, I realize that it’s a Korean place. A haircut was $25 Aussie dollars, which is a little steep for me, but I NEEDED a haircut, so I went for it.

Some of you might know that I really don’t like getting a haircut. I don’t ever like my hair, and I never know how I want it cut. My apathy and indecisiveness usually frustrates haircutters, and it usually makes for an awkward experience. So I try to explain to him that I want it pretty short on the sides but a little longer on top (I’ve found that’s the easiest thing to say). He just nods and he says “Like that?” and he points to this black and white photo of a guy with a greasy 50s haircut. I really wish I could show you the photo, it was hilarious. I get a little nervous from his interpretation, and I tell him maybe a bit shorter. He just nods again and starts to cut my hair.

He went to town on the back of my head. He pretty much shaved it off so the back of my head is always cold. But once he was finished I actually liked the haircut. Maybe I was just relieved I wasn’t walking out of there looking like The Fonz (not like that would be a bad thing…)

So Fran and I drive off to Sydney with only one stop at a McDonalds. This was the biggest McDonalds I had ever seen. They had 13 registers and at least one employee behind each register. I felt intimidated walking up to the counter because there were about 5 people looking at me, and I felt like I had to choose my favourite one to take my order, but I didn’t want to offend the other four…

Well 3 and a half hours later we arrive at Fran’s sister’s house. It was a really nice house, and her family is really nice. They like wine a lot too… Do you ever have those conversations with slightly intoxicated people where they try to explain something to you that really doesn’t need explaining, and they proceed to tell you about 50 times using the same two sentences? Well, I had a conversation like that about toll roads for around an hour. Needless to say, it was riveting.

While up in Sydney I saw some of my friends, Emily and Katrina (they were the ones I met in Cairns. Because of their names, I simply refer to them as “the Hurricanes”). We tried to go to a rugby game, but since it was $69 we decided to just go to a pub instead. It was a lot of fun, although I ran down the street to get some Indian food before the match started. I tried to sneak it into the pub, but the security guard made me eat it outside. He was taking a smoking break and we got to talking about the US Economy. I’m convinced the economy is how it is because of the housing markets, banks, and whatnot. He’s convinced it’s because of the Jews. After that awkward meal I went back into the pub and enjoyed the game.

So I’m back at work right now (working hard, if you can’t tell…). I’ll try to upload pictures as soon as I can, but my internet at home isn’t really catered to things like that. This weekend I’m going to Melbourne, so expect another update within a week!

You can help me!

Sydney was awesome.

I decided to travel via greyhound bus because it seemed the cheapest option. $21 all the way from Canberra to Sydney. A four hour bus ride. Not a bad deal.

My dad knows a couple in Belize who own an apartment in Sydney. They usually rent it out on a weekly basis, but since nobody was occupying it this weekend they allowed me to use it (thankyouthankyouthankyou!!). It was such a nice apartment too. It has two floors with a kitchen and living room on the first and the bedroom and bathroom on the second. It was situated pretty close to Darling Harbor too, and about maybe a 40 minute walk to the Opera House (if you actually know where you’re walking…) so it was a pretty good deal.

I met up with some friends: Emily, Katrina (the two girls from Cairns), and Sara, who also goes to Chapman. I guess Chapman people just stick together. Anyway, we met up to go see the Opera house, and of course out of ALL the days to forget to bring my camera, it’s the day I see the Sydney Opera House. That’s just how things work. It wasn’t so bad though, because the other three brought their cameras, I just still need to steal their pictures.

The Opera House is different than I had imagined it. It’s a lot smaller than I thought, and it’s actually three buildings, not one big building. One is for orchestras, the other is for plays (I think), and the last one is a restaurant. It also has weird textured tile that you wouldn’t know just by looking at distant pictures of it. It was still pretty cool to see it up close, but unfortunately I didn’t get to go inside.

I had a big worry before I came to Australia. While on Semester at Sea I noticed the unimaginable lack of Mexican food around the world. There was one “Mexican” place in South Africa, but that’s the only place I can remember out of all the countries. See, I LOVE Mexican food, and I was worried that when I came down under I was not going to be able to satisfy that Mexican craving until I got back home. Well, let it be known that there is a little taste from south of the border down under. On my first night in Sydney we went to the grocery store and were able to cook a HUGE plate of nachos. I’ll try to attach a picture if I have one.

For the other two days I had in Sydney we went to Bondi Beach and then took the ferry up to Manly. They were both beautiful, and seemed like great places to live (if you have the big bucks…). There were some great beach trails and I climbed some of the rocks/cliffs along the beach. It was gorgeous. Manly was especially fun because they had a food and wine festival going on at the time, and everything there had the word “Manly” in front of it, such as the Manly Council, or the Manly Information Booth. You can bet I had a LOT of fun with that.

There was some kind of celebration going at night around the Opera House too. It was called Vivid, and I think it was some commemoration for an anniversary of Sydney, but I’m really not sure. People probably told me, I just don’t remember. What it basically was was a bunch of lights put around a section of the city in different artistic ways. There were some projections onto the opera house, a constantly changing color spectrum, pillars of light, weird artistic things like that. It was kinda neat, and again I think I have some pictures of that.

Well I took the bus back up to Canberra on Monday, the Queen’s Birthday, and had to get ready for work the next day. There was some sort of workshop that my supervisor was putting on, and I had to be there early to help her with it. This workshop was apparently a bigger thing than I realized, and I definitely felt lost and a little out of place.

This workshop brought together about 13 (distinguished, from what I could tell) people from different fields and areas to discuss the current state of climate change and water supply in Australia. The goal of the workshop was to determine what further areas of research would be useful and to ultimately develop an adaptation plan to save Australia from imminent doom a la global warming.

Everybody brought a different perspective into the playing field, and I was there to take notes. My job was to document what happened so that I could help formulate something in the end. I felt out of place because everybody there was at least twice my age, and my background knowledge on the Murray-Darling Basin and the effects of climate change on it were minimal to say the least. Although, everybody there was pretty impressed with my typing skills because I didn’t have to look at the keyboard. I guess they don’t have good typers in Australia? I didn’t have time to distinguish what information was important for notes, so I just typed out everything that was said. By the end of the workshop I had 19 pages typed out. Needless to say, when I got home I didn’t want to look at a keyboard for a while.

The workshop ended, I tried to summarize my notes as best I could, and gave them to my supervisor. As luck would have it, my supervisor is leaving on vacation for two weeks, so I wasn’t sure what I was going to be doing now. Well, she gave me an assignment…

Here’s where you can help me out.

For the next two weeks I’m supposed to do research on other parts of the world that are going through similar issues. The issues at hand deal with a decreasing water source and how people adapt/deal with not having as much water. Things like that. So, if you know any place in the world that has some sort of problem with water supply (which I’m sure there are plenty), please let me know! I already have a few leads, but anything helps!

Cheers!

The week so far

Here’s a little update as to where I’m at now.

I woke up the next morning (Monday) at 7:30. I’m not sure why I did, as I wasn’t being picked up by my supervisor until 9, so it proved to be a little overkill. It was another awkward/hard to explain moment when my supervisor came to pick me up. I felt weird having to get picked up for work by my boss on the first day, but that’s life.

She is a really nice lady. As soon as we got their she gave me a little tour of the place and bought me some tea. We just had a little chat and I told her a bit about my life and what I kind of wanted from the internship. Even though it’s a government organization, everything is so relaxes. She told me that people usually arrive anytime between 9 or 10 and that people leave anywhere from 4 to 6. I have my own little desk with a computer and everything. It feels really weird. Kind of like I’m supposed to be important or something.

Now that I’ve worked for about a full week, I really can’t complain. A lot of my tasks right now involve reading and summarizing articles and reports, and I made a power point presentation for my supervisor to present at a workshop next week. I’m researching issues about the Murray-Darling Basin and how it should adapt to the climate change so Australia doesn’t die. It deals a lot more with environmental issues than economic ones right now, but she said this was only a temporary task until sometime next week.

She gave me a bike too, so that I can ride from home to work. I like to think that I’m not too out of shape, but riding that thing really takes it out of me. I can’t tell if it’s because the bike’s in a high gear, it’s a little small for me, or that the pedals are weird, but I have a hard time pedaling. I’m usually covered with sweat when I arrive, but luckily it’s been overcast this whole week so I can blame it on the rain. I think I’ll just have to bring a change of clothes all the time…

As far as things outside of work go, I haven’t had a quiet night in Australia yet. Monday night I went with Fran to her daughter Stacey’s house (she’s the fiancée of Mike, the guy with the Batman tattoo) and I had my first rugby experience. It’s actually a very fun game to watch. I am now a Canberra Raiders fan! It was a small game that night, but Mike invited me over to one of his friend’s houses on Wednesday to see the first State of Origin match. It sounded like fun, so I decided to go.

This is apparently one of the biggest games of the year. It’s a weird system they have for it. They basically choose the best members of the league and put them on a team, either for Queensland or New South Wales (depending on which state they were originally from) and they pit the two teams together in three matches. Fans go absolutely crazy for their team, and you definitely don’t want to get a die hard rugby fan angry. One of the best parts about that night was that they made NACHOS! I was really worried they wouldn’t have Mexican food down here in Australia, but fortunately all my worries have subsided.

So right now I’m about to go to bed after Kelley’s birthday dinner (one of Fran’s daughters) so that I can wake up tomorrow morning to catch a bus to Sydney. Since Monday is a national holiday, The Queen’s Birthday, I thought it might be a good idea to get some traveling in. I bought my ticket yesterday, and for some reason it was $20 each way if you buy the ticket one-way, or $30 each way if you buy it round trip. I’m not quite sure what the marketing idea behind that is, but needless to say I just bought a one-way ticket for right now.

So I’m off to Sydney with no idea what I’m going to do! But that’s always half the fun.

The other half is figuring out how I'm going to get cash...

So I met my new mum, Fran, and the two other inhabitants of the house: a little poodle named Maddie and a cat name Meisha, both of which are extremely friendly. I spent most of the night talking with Fran and getting to know what life is like down under. I told her about Chapman, my majors, Semester at Sea, yadda yadda yadda, you know the rest. Of course the topic of food came up since I’m going to be eating most of my meals here for the next couple months. I told her I that I’m not picky at all and I’ll eat anything that’s put in front of me and ask for seconds. She said that was fine and that she is doing the Weight Watchers diet, so I suppose I’m inadvertently now doing it too.

I forget how it first came up, but I found out that she is a part of a medieval club. A very, very, very, very, very, very intense medieval club. I’m talking about she sews her own medieval clothes and goes camping in a huge, round tent that can fit her whole bed (the one she actually sleeps in at home), her dressers, and still has room to spare. They have weapons training, which I don’t think she does, and there’s some sort of system where you can get knighted and stuff like that. She said that a family friend was getting knighted soon. It sounds a little weird… but I kind of want to see it. Don’t judge.

On my first full day in Canberra she took me out grocery shopping and to see the city. It’s weird how here they have grocery stores in the mall. I was talking to Sasha about that too, back in Cairns (when he was trying to find a liquor store) and he said that it was common to have grocery stores at the mall in Germany too. I guess not having them is just an American thing.
We went to a lot of the government sites and went to the top of a mountain that has a great view of the Australian Parliament building. For some reason they have an American war memorial here… I have no idea why. After a mini-tour of the city we went back home to have dinner right before going out bowling with the family.

We left for the bowling alley to meet two of Fran’s kids, Adam and Stacey. They are the two oldest and I think they’re in their mid-20s. While I was there I met my new favorite person down here, Stacey’s fiancée, Mike. Here’s the first time I saw him at the parking lot in a mini script form (because that’s how I seem to write everything these days…)

Thomas (20), young, vibrant, and extremely good looking, and Fran get out of the car and walk toward Stacey and Mike, also getting out of their car. Stacey extends her hand.

Stacey
(to Thomas)
I’m Stacey, how ya goin’?

Thomas shakes her hand with a firm, manly handshake.

Thomas
Thomas. Nice to meet you.

Stacey
How do you feel about tattoos?

Thomas
(caught offguard)
Uh… I don’t know if I would ever get one, but I don’t mind them on other people. Why?

Mike turns his back to Thomas and Stacey lifts his shirt up, revealing a partially completed Batman tattoo that covers half of his back.

Ok, so I might have gotten a little carried away with that and the formatting got messed up when I copied it over, but it was a classic moment at the time. I don’t think Mike had said anything, he just showed me this new lifelong sign of devotion to Batman he had gotten that day. I might have to say that that is the single biggest act of Batman dedication I’ve seen my whole life (AJ… I think you need to step up your game).

There are two things you should know about that story.
1) How ya goin’? Is the Aussie way of saying “Nice to meet you”, or “How are you doing?” It’s really strange and I’m not quite used to it yet.
2) A few weeks ago I heard a story about this last voyage of Semester at Sea where a student got a little intoxicated and while under the influence got a tattoo of a titger on his butt. Never in my life have I been tempted to get a tattoo until after I heard this story.

Well, I wasn’t very good at bowling. I actually got progressively worse, but I didn’t care too much. The night was fun and I got back home in time to rest for my first day of work.
Till next time!

Finding Nemo...

First thing’s first. I tried vege-mite. If you’re curious how it tastes, mix red wine with soy sauce and spread it on toast. I don’t recommend it.

I had to get that off my chest.

Well, I met up with everyone from Australearn, and I have to say that it is kind of a weird Orientation. You meet up with fellow students and get to know one another for two days, and then you go off to different parts of Australia, most likely to never see each other again. I wasn’t quite sure what the meaning behind all of it was.

As a result of all this though, it was a part of the Orientation to go to the Great Barrier Reef. Not a bad deal. We had to wake up at O’dark thirty (which I just found out the Australian equivalent of that expression is Stupid O’clock, which I like much better) to catch the boat for a two and a half hour ride to the reef. Keep in mind that it’s winter down here also, so it’s a bit chilly out on the water. We rode on a giant catamaran, and I thought I was cool because I was lying out on one of the nets in the front with my camera, just casually taking pictures and getting some rest. Then all of a sudden, out of NOWHERE, a big wave splashes from under the net and completely soaks me. Completely. I was soaking wet. I didn’t care much that I was drenched in cold ocean water because I was more concerned about my digital camera I was holding. Luckily, by some act of fate, my camera was in its case at the time and barely got any water on it. It was safe, but if it would have been out of its case, I would be singing a different tune. Regardless, I decided that it wasn’t safe to have my camera out, and that marked the end of my Great Barrier Reef pictures.

Fortunately, that was a wise choice. There were many other moments on the trip where I got completely soaked from waves. On the trip we stopped at two different spots on the reef. It was odd going to the Great Barrier Reef, because for some reason in my mind I pictured some sort of landmark or big distinguishing factor for the largest reef in the world, but as we pulled up it seemed just like any other reef. Needless to say the diving was incredible. There was so much life under the water that everywhere you turned you were likely to break up some school of fish. Sadly, I didn’t find Nemo, but I did get ot have a talk with Crush. I saw a sea turtle, which was the highlight of my dive. He was just cruising along, and sea turtles don’t mind humans as much as fish do, so you can catch up with them and actually pet their shell without them minding. It was awesome.

After the dive Australearn had a final presentation on the differences between Australian and American culture (and let me tell you, the language is very, very different), and then we were left to do as we pleased. I went out for a little bit that night to get some gelato with some other students. Remember how my debit card isn’t working? Well, it still isn’t, but I tried to pay for the gelato with it. When I bought my Skyrail pass, I didn’t have to punch in my pin number, so it let me purchase it, but for the gelato the lady needed my pin number. I punched in what my pin number used to be, and the receipt printed out with a big DECLINED on it. She must have not understood what that meant, because she just had me sign that paper and gave me the gelato. Maybe having a non-working debit card isn’t as bad as I thought! (errata: it is not actually that much fun to not have a working debit card. The cons outweigh the pros by a long shot).

The Orientation ended and I headed up to Canberra. It wasn’t that bad of a flight. I connected through Sydney, and as I was flying in I could see that Opera house from my window. You know how you have those moments when something in your life actually hits you? Well I think the moment I saw the Opera house was the moment I realized I was in Australia. Other than that my flight proved uneventful, and when I arrived in Australia’s capital city I gathered my bags and caught a taxi to my new home.

The driver was a cool guy: a local University student from Afghanistan. It’s always so weird when you see somebody who is not Australian with an Australian accent. I can’t even explain how weird it is, but once you see it, you’ll understand. He told me a little bit about the city, and dropped my off at my new house. I stood outside the door and waited for a minute to ring the doorbell. It’s such an odd feeling when you are about to see something that will become an everyday routine. I knew that what was behind that door would become a part of my life. I tried to take it all in while I had the chance, and rang the doorbell to meet the lady who was welcoming a complete stranger into her home for the next few months.

I’ll stop this entry right here, because I don’t want it to get too long (I know when things are too long, I’m less inclined to read them…). But rest assured that my new mom is quite the character.

Cheers!