Into the City!

I decided I would blog again since I had a sweet day yesterday. That and I don’t want to do the work I should probably be doing and this seemed like a good procrastinator until Bones and House are on. :)

I went into the city yesterday (Brisbane) and it turned out to be a really good day AND I made it back home. I actually had more trouble getting to the train station in Cleveland than finding my way to anything else during the day, fail. If you don’t already know, I am HORRIBLE with direction especially if it is going somewhere I should know how to get to. For example, the train station in town is a 15-20 minute walk from the house but I left with half an hour to spare, just in case. Apparently that wasn’t enough. Somehow I managed to completely miss the train station (which by the way I have walked past about 10 times since being here) and ended up at work (30-35 min walk from home). Good thing the train leaves every half hour that’s all I have to say. Side note, the train station was in view when, for some reason, I decided to walk the other direction…yeahhh.

Anyways, when I finally got to the train station I found out it was only 10 bucks for the ticket, including the return and I could apparently ride the train all day in whatever direction, coolio. I thought it was going to be $10 each way. It was roughly a 45 minute ride to South Bank, which was my destination. A few people at work told me to check out the Gallery of Modern Art both in general but also said there was a cool exhibit going on. Boy were they right. Ron Mueck, a famous Australian artist, had an exhibit going on and it was SO cool! He is described as a ‘hyperrealist sculptor’ and makes oddly sized sculptures of people. I say oddly sized because they are rarely to scale of a ‘normal’ human. They are unbelievably realistic though, it’s crazy. Everything, down to the veins of a clenched fist or goose bumps on bare skin, looks incredibly real. The expressions on the faces of the people spark interest and a ton of discussion. It was one of the things I heard people talking about the most, and a video following the exhibit exemplified his attention to the thought-provoking expressions. It was really awesome. The process for making his pieces is ridiculously intricate too. For example, he inserts every single hair one by one with a tiny little instrument so that it looks like it is actually growing out of the skin. Crazy! I have a few pictures that I will eventually put up here. Amazingly they actually allowed photos which was good due to my history of getting in trouble for snapping a few despite warnings and signs, oops.

After that exhibit I wandered around the rest of the gallery and they happened to have a New Zealand section which was pretty cool. It included 4 flat screen TVs with headsets playing episodes of the Flight of the Conchords, epic! I definitely sat down and watched part of one, love that show. They actually had a lot set up in the gallery but I won’t bore you with everything I saw, haha. I left to head to the Greek festival but got sidetracked by the adjoining art museum. They had a hat exhibit. Yes, hats. Some crazy hats for that matter. It was cool to see though, I don’t really understand who would actually wear half of them except maybe Lady Gaga, but I guess that’s not the point. There was a bunch more art in there too but by that point I was starving and just wanted some Greek food, so I left.

I successfully found the festival and it ended up being a lot bigger than I thought it was going to be. It was basically a Greek eating/dancing fiesta with a carnival attached. The food was really good, as expected, and I tried honey puffs for the first time. They are literally what they sound like, fried dough puffs with honey and powdered sugar, yummm. I hung around there for a couple hours, they had some dancers which were cool. The best part was when I came back (left to go to the mall/shopping), a belly dancer picked random guys from the crowd and made them try to belly dance, hysterical! It reminded me of when my dad went up with the hula dancers in Hawaii (I still appreciate that dad, haha), so great.

Either I was in the ritzy end of Brisbane shopping, or everything here really is ridiculously more expensive. Every store I went into had tank tops for like $85. What?! I was on Queens St which was really neat actually. It was a long line of shops that were outside with random places where the bigger mall part went inside a huge building and had like 4 stories but it was still open to the outdoors. Kind of hard to describe but it was really cool. The middle of the ‘street’ had open spaces for street performers and such. There was one guy doing magic tricks when I was there. But yeah, needless to say I didn’t buy any clothes, apart from the one Australia shirt I bought at the souvenir shop. I don’t know what it is but I am a magnet to souvenir shops, it’s not good. Everyone better appreciate their gifts, :P Haha Actually I didn't buy too much there, most of the damage was done in NZ.

I headed back to the Greek festival for another hour or so. Somehow I planned it perfectly that when I headed back over the bridge the sun was setting. Awesome. But yeah, that was pretty much they day. Highlights = Ron Mueck exhibit and wandering around the city on a gorgeous day. Lowlight = seeing a mid-aged woman with a ‘Team Jacob’ shirt on.


Brisbane!


This is what they call a pedestrian detour due to road work in Brisbane. In the US? Most likely a dirt pathway...haha


Greek festival!


I still have yet to go on a ferris wheel...one of these days, haha


The city at sunset :)

Fun Fact:
The money down under is really pretty, yes pretty. It is awesomely colourful with cool pictures and designs on them. The US needs to redesign. Also, I usually hate change, but here a handful of change can literally mean 20 bucks.

Koalas, dolphins and the pit.

I can’t believe the second week is over already! Looks like this little adventure is going to go by as fast as New Zealand did, unbelievable. I have spent most of my time this week in the pit, rightly named so, since once you go in you never come out. It’s actually hysterical that when you tell someone that you’ll be in the pit if they need to find you, they know exactly where you are talking about and are entirely sympathetic. For the most part I don’t mind it, it’s not unlike any other work in labs, but it does get a little lonely in there. I have had a few visitors the past few days though which helps to break up the day. Oh and it smells pretty raunchy but you get immune to that pretty quickly. It’s just the initial wall of stench you have to be ready for walking in. Oh yeah.

I saw a koala this week at work! SO CUTE! He was just chillin in a tree outside of one of the buildings. I saw a few random people staring up into the tree and I figured id just go about my business and ignore what they were looking at until Christian called me over. Good thing he did, apparently that was his first koala sighting in the 5 years he has lived here. Lucky me. :) I also forgot to mention that we saw some dolphins last weekend (maybe I mentioned it, I don’t remember, haha) on the survey trip I went on. We also saw one this morning. Apparently Morton bay and outlying regions get lots of cool marine life. Apparently mid-June to July they get whales coming through! Hopefully I will plan a trip to Stradbroke Island around the time they come through. I went on a plankton tow/sampling trip this morning and ended up getting soaked, the one day it was suppose to rain all week they decided to go. It was fun none-the-less though and I got away with not really doing any work all day. We got back at lunch, I played some ping-pong, fluffed a bit then left to come home at like 3. Solid. I then got a call to go out for drinks with some people from work. It was an awesome little place that overlooked the bay, we literally had a table right by the water during sunset. Love it.

Have I mentioned how much I love boats? Because I really do. If they weren’t so expensive and such a hassle I would say that I would own one when I am older, but I think I’ll have to bank on knowing someone that does or having one wherever I end up working. It is literally one of my favorite places to be, well anywhere near or on the ocean in general but being on a boat is awesome. (Sorry for those of you that get sea sick) Even when it is pouring out and you I am getting soaked, for some reason I still love it. Everything is so unpredictable, you never know what’s coming next or what you are going to see. One of my favorite things is crashing over waves at high speeds, not particularly good for the boat or my knees, but it is fun all the same. :)

We went to go see Robin Hood last night, it was pretty good I suppose. A little slow and really didn’t need to be that long but it was entertaining. They did a good job making it a different story or different view from the classic Robin Hood story and it was well filmed. However, it is definitely one of those movies that I would only be able to watch every once in awhile.

I decided I am going to head into the city tomorrow for the day and wander around. First I was going to go just to shop for some clothes at the mall, seeing that I have been wearing the same set of clothes for 3 months already. That and I got rid of several things in New Zealand due to lack of packing space. But I found out tonight that there is a Greek festival this weekend in Brisbane! Literally a 15 minute walk from where I was going to be going anyways. Perfect! Apparently there is also a cool modern art gallery around the area as well. Should turn out to be a good day, just pray that I find my way around and make it back home tomorrow night.

Fun Fact:
Australian’s pronounce the word fillet with the ‘t’ at the end, it throws me off every time. Try saying filleted with the ‘t’, it’s weird. Seriously…try it.

AUSTRALIA!!

The end of one adventure, the start of a new. I don’t know if this will be an adventure per se, maybe more of a journey. I hope to make it around to a few cool places on weekends and such, maybe that will make it an adventure, otherwise it’s pretty much like going to work 5 days a week from 9 to 5. My first week was good, the first few days I met a ton of people I don’t remember the names for and did some computer stuff. Shane (one of my supervisors here) had me do some basic growth modeling exercises. I was lost for a little bit, he literally just gave me some books and was like ‘go at it’, but it actually wasn’t too bad. It was cool to see how to transform data into the growth curve, since I had read about it in some papers he gave me and had no idea what it was talking about. He said he will probably try and get me to do a yield-per-recruit model soon which scares me, haha.

The past few days I have been in the lab chopping up fishies, or more like hacksawing fishies. You have not had an arm workout until you’ve had to hacksaw a dolphin fish, let me tell you. As a general overview for those of you I haven’t told, I am studying basic pelagic fish biology (focusing on Golden Trevally) which is part of a bigger project going on a CSIRO. Right now I am extracting the otoliths, stomach and gonads of the fish as well as doing general morphometric measurements. In a week or so I should be starting the age/growth analysis part of the project which involves sectioning and counting the otolith rings, kind of like a tree. After that I will be doing a bit of histology to determine the stage of reproduction and such so that we can better see at what age (and supposed length with length-at-age models) they mature. Cool stuff, at least I think so. It’s all for fisheries management, so like making sure that the minimum size range they are imposing on commercial and recreational fishing practices is legit or if they need to change it.

To back track a little bit, my flight from Auckland turned out to be pretty awesome. I got food, wine and movies…all of which I didn’t expect. Woot! Before the flight I got randomly picked to do an interview about my time in New Zealand, complete with me describing everywhere we went, how we got there and what we did. It took a bit of time but it was cool to kind of mentally go through it again all the way through. He gave me some dvd thing for doing it but I have yet to watch it.

I am renting a room in Shane’s house for the time I am here and so far it has been good. He has a pool and a massage chair… :) And it’s a 10 min walk into town and a 15 min bike ride to work. Sweet deal actually. I am in Cleveland, QLD which is right outside of Brisbane. It’s basically my ideal place to live, right on the bay, near a bigger city and everything you need within walking distance not to mention mostly warm weather all year round and an island with beautiful beaches a 30 min ferry ride away. Now all I need is my friends and family to come join me, hehe :)

I spent the day today with a few guys from CSIRO doing a rec fishing survey around the bay, so I was pretty much straight chillin on a boat, in the ocean, during a gorgeous day. It was fun! I took some pictures that if I ever get my ident and computer at work ill put up here and on facebook. Also, until that happens I can’t skype either, hopefully once I get the computer that will work, we’ll see! For now I’m going to have to stick with this and email though.

Apparently there is a market Sunday mornings so I am going to go check that out tomorrow, should be fun. Hopefully I don’t buy too much, I literally have zero room in my luggage and I was 0.4 kilos under the weight restrictions for my flight. Phew.

I can’t believe I am here doing this internship, hopefully I don’t mess it up! It will definitely be a great experience and I am beginning to see how many great scientists are at CSIRO doing research, so cool. It kind of blows my mind some of the things they do and new ideas they think up. A little overwhelming and kind of puts a damper on what you think you can do personally, haha. It’s all good though, I will definitely learn a ton.


First bird I saw, it was right outside the house in a bush

Stradbroke Island


Morton Island


Sunset!!

Fun Fact:
From like 5-6 pm there are masses of bats flocking somewhere. I haven’t seen so many bats in my life, kinda cool to look up from my bike ride home from work and see them flying. They are quite large too.

The Final Days

I can’t believe The Quest is over. Like, over. I am sitting in the airport (even though I don’t leave until tomorrow) and it literally feels like I blinked and it was over. Where did those 3 months go? Up until today it has felt like it was going by fast but that we had been here forever, but today it literally feels like we just got here. What is going on?!

We finished our DRP’s and all our presentations went well. My paper ended up being 73 pages. 73 PAGES! Holy crap. Granted, a lot of it was results figures and tables or site maps, but still. I haven’t had a paper that long before, unfortunately I will have papers much longer than that coming my way eventually. Boo. I realized I never mentioned what all the different projects were. Mine was marine debris; we were looking at quantity, type, sources and spatial distribution of debris around the Firth. It was cool, we got some interesting results. There was and education team that worked with the Kaiaua Primary School making a module for a 10 week environmental sustainability program. Frogs, inverts and birds were the lucky ones with traveling to cool places but they seemed to be pretty intense. The frog group wadded through streams counting frogs that were the size of a fingernail. Inverts and birds basically did surveys of quantity and type of animals present in their sites. All of them were pretty cool especially since they all were helping in one way or another.

Our final days were really awesome/sad/surreal. The days following our presentations were filled with group activities and such. They were definitely all about the ‘final group moments’, which is good, but definitely hard to deal with at times. Wednesday night they took us to the Miranda hot pools. So relaxing, I can’t believe we hadn’t gone there before; it was literally 10 km down the road. It was literally a cement pool that has water heated by natural hot springs, pretty awesome. Smelled a little of sulfur, but that’s ok. Definitely not like the smell of Rotorua. They also had us make a card type thing that everyone signed or wrote messages on, exactly like a yearbook. It brought me back to high school, haha. We went to a nice beach on Thursday, ate lunch and played a few games. I think that’s when it hit me that we were leaving, sadness! That night was really awesome though. The staff collected and painted small rocks for all of us and each of them took turns telling a story or memory about everyone. SO CUTE! Liz told mine and it was fabulous. She told a story from Leigh when I saved Ian’s weight belt. She was really good at making it dramatic and awesome, haha. I love Liz! She’s going to come visit me in Australia!!! SO EXCITED! Anyways, it was really great that they did that. We also had a fire that night where we sat around and went through memories and such. Basically a cry fest for myself and a few others. It was a good time though. :)

This morning was a bit rough. We all stood in a circle and Jono and Ria spoke to us. I was doing well considering 10 of the girls were crying, but right when we started saying goodbye to some of the staff and students we weren’t going to see at the airport, I was toast. Definitely sunk in that it was over. Then I started thinking about everything being ‘the last time this..the last time that’. Sad sad sad. Its ok though, we will definitely find a way to see everyone again and if I have anything to do with it, I will be back here in a flash. No doubt about that. If anyone is headed this way, let me know and ill tell you where you should definitely go and what you should do.

About a week ago a few people decided to put everyone into 'Questwarts houses' like Hogwarts...special I know. It was hysterical though. One kid decided to make an EcoQuest jeopardy. It was so awesome. We all dressed in our house colors and he had a ton of questions relating to the Quest. It was complete with both Harry Potter AND Jeopardy music. So much fun!! Gryfindor won though...booooo. They got 2 of the 3 double jeopardys though..not fair. Even Ria and Jono (main directors at EcoQuest) came and dressed up, it was great.

I am leaving for Australia tomorrow, ahhhh. I will describe more about it later as I have a limited amount of internet right now and should stop blabbering on.

Fun Fact:
New Zealand commercials are hysterically non-relevant to the item the commercial is for. Also, there is an epic NZ soap opera called Shortland Street. Worst acting ever. hahaha

13 days left...!

Seriously, where is time going? This is ridiculous! AHH!! We still have half our papers to write, but apparently they are due a week from now, oh boy. Should be fine, hopefully we will get our results back today. Unfortunately the Quest has been a bit dull for the past couple weeks. All the other groups came back from their trips and everyone’s pretty much just writing now.

Last night was a blast though. We had a joint birthday party for 3 of the staff members and a few of the students. SO many people were here, well for the Quest it was a lot of people and of course I was on kitchen crew and had to clean all the dishes. But the food was SO GOOD! One of the cooks husband made a rotisserie from a keg, so unbelievably cool, not gonna lie. Anyways, there was so much food. Hors d’oeuvres, pasta salad, pulled pork, potatoes, salad, curry rice salad thing, sausages, lentil patties, couscous, etc. YUM! Then for desert, a giant cake with awesome frosting, homemade chocolate éclairs and these maple coffee square things. But besides the food it was really fun to have everyone there having a good time. It felt like the earlier days at the quest where we would all just hang out, play frisbee and grill. It’s been awhile since that’s happened.

After hanging out here we all went down to the pub for Maree’s (field leader) boyfriend playing music. SO GOOD. He’s Irish and has an awesome voice and can play so many instruments. He was the one that played the drum and flute/recorder thing in the cave at Poor Knights. They played a bunch of music and had a good variety. I actually liked their rendition of some American songs more than I like the original song. It was really fun to jump around and fail at doing an Irish jig, haha. Even the staff was dancing. Bottom line, it was a very good night. :)

Not too much else to report on. I’m getting things ready for Australia seeing that I am going to be there sooner than I realize. AH! Should be good though, it will definitely be another adventure.

Fun Facts:
Jandals = flip flops
Courgette = zucchini
Ratbag = child
Bumbag = fanny pack
Dairy = corner store
Entrée = Hors d’oeuvres
Lolly = candy
Wellies = gumboots
Tramping = hiking
Rubbish = trash
Banger = sausage

Common Phrases: No worries, Bugger, Sweet As, Cheers

Lovin' The Quest

So its DRP time and everyone seems to be scattered around all the time. None of the groups schedules really mesh together well so it’s interesting to figure out when you can actually hang out with people outside your own research group. It does kind of suck that this how we are spending our last month here. We finally get to know everyone pretty well, especially after the 3 weeks of close quarters in the South Island, and all of a sudden we are split up. Three of the groups left this week to go to their respective places for data collection. My group, marine debris, and the education team are staying at the quest. Unfortunately the education group is literally staying at here 24/7, we at least get to travel to a few beaches during the day.

Marine debris is turning out to be quite hysterical, our data collection is anyways. Our methods for rubbish collection is basically 4 people walking with 3m horizontal sticks protruding from our backpacks side by side down a 500m long transect line. It’s quite the site to see. I carry my ihome in my backpack so whoever is in my group gets the jams :) Sorting through the rubbish is pretty interesting as well, usually very smelly, but we get to see everything people collected. The first day we found a dried up baby hammerhead shark. Obviously it didn’t count in our data but it was really cool none the less. We’ve found some huge aquaculture ropes, rusted engines, clothing, disgusting nappies (diapers) and who knows what else. We are planning on decorating the wet lab (our work place) with our treasures, or at least I am planning on it, haha.

Friday night we went to a Cheifs rugby game. SO MUCH FUN. And SO unbelievably intense. Those guys are beasts, legit, they are huge. They were playing South Africa (Bulls) who are apparently one of the best teams in South Africa. We lost but it was close for awhile, some really awesome plays. There are like 6 of the All Blacks players on the Cheifs which was awesome. I really wanted to see an All Blacks game, but I’m really glad I got to see the Chiefs!

Instead of writing the introduction to my paper yesterday (which ended up to be 7 full pages, just the intro…holy crap) I went kayaking with a few people to the shipwreck again. The tide was lower than the first time I went so it was cool seeing more of the ship. Afterwards we went to fish & chips. SO GOOD. They are apparently the best in New Zealand which I don’t have a hard time believing. I have a feeling I will be there every weekend until we leave. Probably not a good idea.

I realized the other day that I am roughly only half way through my time away from the states. Everyone keeps talking about 3 more weeks here and then they are going home, I tend to forget that I am not leaving yet, haha. Ten more weeks in Australia, wow! Everything seems to be playing out well with that so far though; it has been a bit stressful trying to figure out all the grant stuff but hopefully it’s just about done! I should be doing some really awesome field work while I am there in addition to the project I am doing. I can’t wait! :)


Marine Debris and our sticks


Its a tough life


RUGBY!

Week 10

I can’t believe it has been over 2 months. WHAT?! Where has all that time gone? We have done SO much though, it is unbelievable. We have been back at The Quest this past week, where I will remain for the next 5 weeks. No more fun trips, at least not during school time.

We spent last week mostly doing work. We were told of a debate assignment, in which we didn’t get a grade so nobody was very motivated to do anything for it. It turned out well though. They didn’t pick the speakers were going to be until an hour before the debate which was a little annoying and of course with my luck I got picked as a speaker. It was good though. Our topic was about the Clean Streams Accord, we were in favor and lost. Apparently ‘it was close though’, whatevs haha.

We had our final on Thursday, 3 ½ hours of essay-like questions. Boo. It was significantly better than the midterm though, it helps when you don’t have a presentation the day before to prepare for. :) Hopefully I will find out what my grades are soon! 3 classes down, 1 to go! It’s amazing how much less work and stress I had for those 3 classes. I would have like 4 times that for just one class at UNH. Go figure.

After the final we had a four day weekend. Eight of us went down to Taupo and Rotorua for two days of the weekend. In total, I drove over 1000 km in like 2 ½ days, lots of gas money. The ride down to Taupo was SO long but at least there was some good music on the radio for most of the ride. We hit a station that was playing 90’s music the entire weekend. Some dancing and rockin out to Blue and some Backstreet Boys happened. It was awesome. We didn’t get to the campsite till 12 am, after leaving The Quest at like 6:30 pm. Boo. The next morning a smaller group did the Tangariro Crossing hike (8 hours), but I thought that I shouldn’t chance it with my knee. We saw Mt. Doom though!! Pretty awesome, go Lord of the Rings. A couple of us did a smaller waterfall hike which turned out to be pretty awesome then went to a small lake and hung out for awhile. That night we drove up to Rotorua that night and stayed at a camp ground. We found out that New Zealanders take their holidays seriously. The DoC site we were at had TONS of families with tents that seriously had 8 rooms. They were huge. The next morning we went Zorbing! SO MUCH FUN! For those of you who I have not already explained it to, you are basically in a huge plastic ball with some water inside and roll down a hill. We did a zigzagged track, it was so insanely fun! You are literally uncontrollably rolling around getting soaked in water. I want to do it again and apparently they have one in Tennessee. Road trip anyone?

The remaining couple days of the weekend were pretty chill except for the 30 km bike ride I had to do. When we returned the cars we didn’t have anyone to come pick us up, so we rode back. Longest bike ride I’ve ever been on but it really wasn’t that bad. Could be those morning bike rides though. :)

We are starting our DRP’s this week (directed research projects), but I will discuss that more this coming week since I probably won’t have much else to talk about.


Mt. Doom!


Tongariro Crossing


Waterfall 1


Waterfall 2


ZORBING!


So awesome.

Fun Fact
I have had more peanut butter and jelly sandwiches here than I have had in my entire life. Significantly more.