The last 30 days

Fraser Island near Indian Head

Australia is so awesome. My last post was from Straddie, and we just came back from Straddie again. Other places I’ve been are Lamington National Park (UN world heritage site, huge temperate rainforest, the basis for the old animated movie “Ferngully”), Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary (hold a koala), and some downtown Brisbane exploration. Oh, and an amazing little island called Fraser.

The beaches at North Stradbroke Island have such a fine grain of sand that it packs incredibly hard…you feel like you’re walking on concrete, until you wait a couple seconds and sink half an inch and stop.

At the top of the hill where the beaches are, there’s a small, hand-made gelati shop (they call it gelati instead of gelato in Australia, don’t ask me why). Lime-pine-mint was the best gelati flavor I’ve ever had – so light and citrus-y. Pretty much the favorite destination of everyone on Straddie ever after, I think.

Lamington National Park
Does anyone remember the animated movie Ferngully? It was inspired by this national park, and does a pretty good job representing some of the plants and life I saw in animated form…the evil mountain in the movie, Mount Warning, is the real name of the mountain there.

Anyway, we went on hikes every day, the longest of which was 17 km. I don’t think I’ve ever hiked that long before, or in worse conditions – it was pouring rain, leeches everywhere (I got 5), and we saw some of the coolest waterfalls ever. Everyone was soaked, and my clothes took 2 days to dry. I couldn’t believe I was in class.

Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary
Cool koala sanctuary, with kangaroos and emus…plus many other Australian wildlife. You can feed the kangaroos, hold a koala, watch live bird shows, etc…very small, but offering loads more than most zoos can. Jackie Chan visited here quite a few years ago, and watching his movie “Supercop 4″ where he went to Australia and had a koala in his own hotel room inspired me to come here just to hold one as well…no kidding.

Fraser Island
By far the best trip so far. Fraser Island is the world’s largest sand island, but it has a ton of trees and stuff. But the beaches are amazing…I found a beach beyond some rocks around a tide pool which looked virtually untouched, and couldn’t resist just sitting there and staring at the ocean. It’s that good.

Most awesome thing I saw was at Indian Head, though, where if you climb past the “Death May Result” signs, you can go down a little more and see manta rays, sharks, whales, etc…and about 20 feet below, I found an eagle’s nest, with two eagles feeding its chick! Forget National Geographic…this was the wild, in plain view. So amazing.

Plans:
I’m in the process of getting scuba certified, so I’ll be diving off Moreton Island in Moreton Bay all this weekend. Possibly a Gold Coast trip on Monday and Tuesday for surfing, then back for some lectures next week. Currently planning trips to New Zealand for glacier climbing, river rafting, zip lining….all depends on how much money I have left. Scuba stuff and certification already cost AUD$750 alone…if it wasn’t for the favorable exchange rate I wouldn’t be doing as much.

More to come!

Straddie

Right now I’m on North Stradbroke Island across Moreton Bay near Brisbane. The locals call it “Straddie,” as Australians would naturally shorten any word longer than 5 letters.

In a couple of days I’ve seen tons of endemic species. Giant puffer fish the size of a football, stingrays that can cover your face – common sights that are seine netted close to shore. Not the least of our concerns are all the venomous and poisonous critters that can kill you in minutes. Around here, there are blue-ringed octopi that hide in shells, stone fish that sit on the ground during low tide which can cause excruciating pain without trying. But awareness and thick diving booties go a long way in preserving your life from the more passive creatures, if not sharks or riptides.

In the mean time (actually, most of the time) we’re taking in lectures and labs about algae, sea grass, turtles, and plankton. At the moment, we’re all working on independent projects related to the local marine life. I’ve chosen to work with soldier crabs, blue crabs the size of your thumbs which come out during low tide to feed on nutrients in intertidal sand. They leave behind millions of little balls of sand all over the shore, and can somehow sense the tide coming in – despite the tide times moving forward by 50 minutes every day.

My experiment is to test varying water levels and the crab’s ability to sense the tide – basically see if they still come out during low tide when they’re covered with water. I expect they won’t. The more interesting question is how they sense the incoming high tide well before water reaches them – knowing how slow tides move in, there must be some other indicator other than the water itself. But, I can’t think of an easy to do experiment that can be done in the three short days we have left.

Off to find the little bastards.

from down under

17.5 hours after leaving SFO, I’m in Melbourne, Australia, and wondering what to do.

I came pretty unprepared as far as planning goes – I bought a travel book guide right before I left for the airport, and read some of it on the airplane (watched movies the rest). I spent my first day exchanging money, getting a cell phone SIM, and wandering around the city aimlessly – public transportation is very good, and there’s even two completely free shuttles and trams for visitors. It’s very visitor friendly, and the city seems to have worked hard to increase travel.

Everything is similar, but just a little different – Burger King is known as Hungry Jack’s, but they have Subway and Maccas. Food is really expensive…8.50 for cheap Chinese takeout that would cost 6 in the US. The nice thing about Australia is that it’s the first foreign country I’ve visited where I can read all the street signs and talk to the people fluently…haha. Though, some of the “‘Strile” (slang) slow me down sometimes…e.g. “Buskers” = street performer, “Maccas” = mcdonald’s, “shout” = to spot/treat someone. My friend Nancy has been instrumental in teaching me the lingo…funnily enough, I last saw her 4 years ago in Japan! These international connections seem crazy sometimes haha.

I can’t upload any pictures because I didn’t bring my card reader and didn’t expect to have free, fast internet at this hostel (which I do!). Anyway, expect more posts to come…

mexican soap

This entire summer I don’t think I ate lunch at home without turning on the TV. Usually I watch People’s Court or whatever court show*** happens to be on, just because I think I’m going to be a lawyer someday.

***(fyi all the shows are not real courtrooms. The judges are contracturally-bound arbitrators acting as intermediaries in disputes…and nobody actually loses any money because they appeared on the show; parties only stand to gain).

Recently, I’ve gotten into Mexican soap operas on Univision. They’re so much better than American soap operas because I don’t understand anything they’re saying. My favorite is Lola… Érase una vez which is apparently about a bunch of people connected to the star character, Lola (duh).

From what I can figure, Lola is a girl who wears lots of yellow. In fact, the same yellow dress. Every day. Nobody ever sees her shower, or change out of this yellow dress. Most of the time, family members and interested suitors try to figure out when the last time Lola showered was, and when she tells them, everybody cries. This is pretty much the main thrust of the show.

I’ve been watching a couple of the other operas that are proximate to Lola’s timeslot, and the plot devices they use all about the same — people unknowingly walking in on other people, eavesdroppers, etc. American shows do this stuff too. I think a lot of the problem is that characters don’t close/lock their doors. Can you imagine a serial soap opera existing with locked doors? No. If Jabba the Hutt simply didn’t let jedi-looking wanderers into his lair, he coulda kept golden-bikini Leia AND frozen Han Solo. Instead, Jabba died.

On the same token, people wouldn’t be sneaking around Lola’s bedroom looking for evidence of showering if she simply locked it.

It’s the doors, fool.

Reboot

It’s time to reboot this blog.

Graduation:

Still hasn’t really hit me yet. Didn’t hit me during graduation, either. But then again, I’m not technically finished with school yet…

Summer internship:

I had an internship with a company based in Woodland, screening Illinois appellate cases for them. They are a service company for other law firms to use, specializing in legislative history documents – that means all the documentation surrounding the creation of a law, but not the law itself. Needless to say, it got a bit tedious at times, but I remained surprisingly interested despite all the legalese I had to wade through. The best case:

Plaintiff:
Weird man shows up in kitchen in the middle of the night. 16-year-old girl turns on light, sees this guy standing there with no pants. Guy approaches girl, drags her outside, then runs off. Girl has nightmares.

Defendent (weird man):
Truck who was in the area, was promised oral sex from a prostitute via a friend. Prostitute takes him to a shed, takes off his pants, then runs off with all the cash in his wallet. In a drunken stupor, stumbles into the kitchen of what he thought was his house, and gets freaked out by some weird girl.

Police:
Drunken man was found not far from a home in the middle of the night. His pants and wallet were found in the doghouse in backyard. Blood-alcohol level: 0.82.

Australia…

I’ll be flying off to Australia in a week and a half (Aug 6)!!!!!!
I’ve been buying necessary equipment for the trip…it is part of EAP (study abroad) through Berkeley, so it will be my last semester as a Cal student. I wish all outdoors stuff I need wasn’t so expensive…I’ve spent $450 on it. Buuut at least my internship income will cover that, so I’ll break even. Plus living at home, rent-free, is sooooo sweet…

Anyway, I’ll be in Melbourne from Aug6-Aug17, then flying to Brisbane to begin the quarter. It will be a three month, completely unique UC course with integrated field studies at 3-4 different research stations, encompassing marine biology and terrestrial ecology – one is on a sandbar island in the Great Barrier Reef, another station is in the middle of a rainforest. During these field trips, there will be no phone or internet contact with the outside world…………SO COOL!

Anyway, I’ll be keeping this blog up-to-date with the latest, though internet access is much more limited than the US, so no promises on frequency…

k, off to do some travel research.