Its been a crazy summer so far jumping from the end of the semester at Dson to spending 8 weeks in Alabama with a research program at Auburn University to ~40 hours back home in the Land O Lakes to flying off to Aussie land. Craziness but its been a great ride so far. Anyhoo, I left Duluth on July 11th after a short weekend with the fam and flew Chicago where I ran into the head of Dickinson Dining Services. It was funny because he was on his way back to Dson from some conference in Cali while I was on my out to Cali because I wouldn't be heading to Dson this fall. Small world much? I was delayed a couple hours out of chicago so I had to hustle biiiig time when I got to LAX but got to my terminal maybe ten minutes before they started boarding. Everyone else from the Dickinson group was already there (of course) and there are 12 of us in the program. By this time i was utterly exhausted (it was about 1am Central time) and starving because I hadn't had a chance to grab food in LAX like I had planned so I managed to conk out pretty quickly after watching Clash of the Titans and having a much needed dinner. At the time I thought it was pretty good for airplane food but I learned later that it must have been my hunger because it didn't sound like anyone else was particularly impressed. I'm realizing that this is dragging on, I haven't even landed in bloody australia yet so I'll pick up the pace here!
We actually had to refuel in Noumea, New Caledonia, which was absolutely beautiful. Picture Lord of the Rings mountains and other scenery. We finally landed in Brisbane about 9am local time for a total travel time of about 29 hours. Our awesome program coordinator, Ann, met up with us and we got on a bus into the city. Brisbane seems like a pretty sweet city and our bus driver was a good tour guide as well. Best part of the drive though was maybe thirty seconds after he was telling us how there are only two levels of police in Australia and what their vehicles look like we heard a quick police siren. We'd been in Brisbane maybe 10 mins and we'd already been pulled over! What was interesting was that rather than sitting and waiting for the officer to come up, apparently here you're expected to get out and go to them. Strange.
We're living in what are called "colleges" which are basically the University of Queensland's on campus residence halls. I and three others in the group are staying at Cromwell College, which is of course the best one. There are only a few other students here right now as we've arrived a couple weeks before the semester actually starts. Everyone has been really nice, the friendly Australian stereotype has definitely been correct in our experience. the rest of the day was basically spent getting settled in and such. Wednesday morning we all met up and a bit of orientation and we went on a bus tour of the city. Public transport is great here, the bus system runs everywhere and they have the CityCat which are catamarans that run up and down the Brisbane river, which the city is built around. Since then we've done some exploring around the city, gone out to a couple bars etc. I was a little bummed to find out that they're really big on American music so I haven't really heard much cool Australian music but I still have hopes.
Yesterday was an awesome day. We went to the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary where we got to see and PET kangaroos, emus, and even hold a koala! For those of you aren't aware, koalas are the chillest animals and are only active for about 5 hours a day, 3 of those spent eating. I'll have to see if I can get a pic of me with one up here at some point. We then spent the rest of the day on a "scavenger hunt" through the city, which was effectively us doing ridiculous things at different places. Examples include singing the US national anthem at a bus stop, staging a public break up on a street corner, and stopping for drinks at a few pubs along the way.
I think that about catches me up with a quick and dirty synopsis of my past 5 days here. I miss everyone in the states dearly but am very much enjoying myself here. Cheers from abroad!
Edit: here's that pic of me and the koala I promised
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