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!