In Pictures

Queensland and NT 2010

Farewell

Last time I went up to the Research School of Physics and Engineering to get a form signed by my supervisor, there was a small soccer field taped out in white on one of the two front lawns. I thought maybe someone had set up a game for kids they had in day care at the uni. Then I went inside and found giant pinata-like soccer balls hanging from the ceiling, streamers wrapped around supports, and player profiles stuck up on most open wall space. The bottom floor lounge always seems like a fairly social place (Wen told me there are two scheduled coffee breaks a day in addition to lunch), but their World Cup outbreak really made me grin.

I was riding down a fire road at Stromlo, knowing it was probably my last time there, admiring the view of the city in the late afternoon sun. Bringing my attention back to the trail, I took an entirely unnecessary hop over a small water rivulet only to look up to find kangaroos populating both the uphill and downhill sides of the trail, looking mildly alarmed by my sudden appearance and strange antics. They then decided I couldn't be much of a threat and hung around as I rode on.

It was lucky that the weather was a little warmer than it's been-- actually above freezing at night-- as I headed down town to meet up with some friends from Engineering for a last chat. They're thinking they may want to explore the States in a year or two. Other than that, some comparisons of the 'political correctness' standards between Australia and the U.S. (these two were always giving each other quite the hard time), cringing about the exam we'd struggled through last week, and final well wishes.

The bus to Sydney is leaving in about two hours. I'm quite excited to travel to Queensland and Northern Territory (turns out it will be another camper-vanning expedition), but it's hard to say goodbye to Canberra. It's been a great place to live.


If I get a chance, I might write a bit and post some pictures from the trip when I'm home. Otherwise, looking forward to catching up with all of you in a few weeks. It's been a while! Cheers.

Plans

For future reference, Bank of America counts purchasing three one-way flights from a budget Australian airline as "unusual activity." I didn't have to stay on hold too long to unfreeze my account, though, so no harm done, and I now I have tickets! Where to? Sydney to Cairns, Cairns to Darwin, and Darwin back to Sydney. All this will commence after my last final on June 22nd, and unfortunately more in depth planning shouldn't start until after my first two finals this Friday. But for a little bit last night, while Mira and I alternated booking our flights on my laptop, I pored over the descriptions of Daintree and Kakadu national parks in my Lonely Planet Australia book. This much we know: there will be reefs, rain forests, outback, and lots of camping.

Sorry for the lack of bloggage as of late. Life has basically just been a mix of reviewing course material, going into the research lab, mountain biking (can I bring Stromlo and Majura home with me?), and enjoying the last couple weeks with people I've met here. Just about 2 weeks before Canberra moves from being a home to a memory!

Monday, 9:15 p.m.

The rain came a little early this time. Usually it shoots for the Friday or Saturday of a three day weekend and continues through, but now it's only Monday evening and the showers are supposed to be infrequent and clear up by Sunday at latest.

The weather forecast is a good thing at this point. With the skies intermittently grayer and breezes encouraging the continuous stream of autumn leaves, staying inside to face physics problem sets and engineering assignments feels a little more natural. It also means that the trails at Stromlo will be a bit better next weekend; parts were getting pretty loose from the sand-like soil drying up.

I can't believe there are only two weeks (two weeks minus one day, to be exact) left of classes. It's always funny to remember your exact thoughts at points when you didn't think time was going to fly by. Not quite as funny when you remember that finals are quite so close, but I'd say that in the mixture of feelings related to the impending end of the semester, knowing I'm going to miss Canberra and wishing time would slow down just a bit is found in higher concentration than worrying about the painful days of study that will proceed exams. (Not to belittle the strange coincidence of numbers: 3 classes, 3 week exam period... Physics and Engineering finals on the same day.)

No big adventures recently, but a number of small pleasures this weekend: Night riding at Bruce Ridge with some friends. As I apparently have a bit of a jinx in picking the headlight that will die, I discovered that my one-LED headlamp from IB does for cautious night riding in a pinch! Making "pumpkin" pie afterward. "Pumpkin" refers to all types of squash here, and I've yet to see an actual pumpkin so we picked up a green one that looked promising; it was delicious nonetheless. Watching the last half of an Australian Rules Football game on campus. I've decided that AFL >> American football, by which I mean that it's actually fast-paced and enjoyable to watch, and the rules, though unique, are fairly simple to pick up. Ask me about it sometime.

And I leave you with the following Aussie words: heaps, keen, and dodgy.

Happy Trails

The above picture summarizes my weekend. It was a good one.

A mountain biker I've met here planned a bike-touring trip through part of Namadgi National Park. The plan: park one car at the entrance to Smoker's Trail, drive to the top of Pryor's Hut trail. Ride mountain bikes down through Cotter Catchement, and back up to car #1 over two days, taking small bushwalk side trips along the way and camping out for the night.

We got a bit of a late start on Saturday (the story of nearly every bike trip I've been on...), but since the first leg of the trip was very rocky but mostly downhill fire road, we covered a fair amount of distance. We even decided that the walk up to the peak of Ginninderra was worth it so I saw the Namadgi Ranges and Canberra from one of the highest points in the ACT.
Can you spot the city in the middle of the bush?

We rode till riding was no longer a safe activity (possibly a bit after that, but we wanted to find a nice place to camp!) and settled down right next to a deep-burbling creek in a clearing in the valley. It started getting chilly pretty quickly, but I was with two of the biggest outdoor-buffs you'll ever meet (seriously, they mountain bike, mountaineer, rock climb, xcounry and downhill ski, kayak, canyon, scuba dive, and who knows what else) so we fared pretty well. Sven got an awesome fire going, and I definitely took note of a few good ideas for short-term camping food ideas. It was my idea of a Saturday evening-- chatting with some pretty interesting folks, alternating between considering the fire and staring up at the stars, two of which were considerate enough to fall while I was watching. Waiting for the billy to boil!

Having gone to bed sometime between 9 and 10, I woke up pretty early, but, peeking out from under the tent (we'd just used a tent cover so that all three of us could fit under what ordinarily would have housed two quite cozily) and seeing the helmet that had been black the day before pure white, coated in the thick, crystally layer of frost like everything around it in the gray morning light, I was quite content to stay snuggled up in my borrowed sleeping and bivvy bag until more of the chill had worn off. After the sun had been hitting it for half an hour or so.

Some breakfast and repacking, then off to the next day of riding in beautiful weather. Starting off with more rolling hills and then downhill to the lowest part of the valley, we made light jokes about the impending climbs to come. The topo map showed that Smoker's Trail would be quite the quad-killer. However, when it came, we rode as much as we could, walked sections where the combined inclination and weight of our packs made keeping the front wheel down more effort than it was worth, and stopped for lunch half way up, so it wasn't too bad at all. Despite toodling along, when we hit the intersection with another hike up to Square Rock, we figured we had enough time, stashed the bikes and headed up. I didn't take a picture of the square rock (it was behind me), but this is a small section of the view!

It was downhill back to the car from there, and then came the hardest part of the weekend... waiting with the bikes for about three hours for the two who could drive manual transmissions to go and get car #2. I was just about ready to pull out my sleeping bag again as the cold set in with the dropping sun when Jasmine showed up again. We loaded up and headed back to Canberra. It doesn't look like such a small city as you approach its welcoming sprawl of winding lights at night.

Snapshot

This guy was a bit camera shy. I have a plan to do a post entirely consisting of pictures and descriptions of the awesome birds here, but as the times when I see flocks of them and times when I have my camera have been fairly independent categories, its prospects aren't looking good. Anyway, he's just one of the many cockatoos who hang out at B&G. They make a veritable racket around 6:30 am every morning, and one of them always sits and screeches about how pissed he is about getting wet every time it rains. Regardless, they're really beautiful birds, and I do a double take nearly every time I see a flock of them in a smaller-sized tree since it's branches are so covered in white that it appears out of the corner of an eye to be holding up the remainder of a snow fall or to have sprouted strange, immensely oversized blossoms.

But I miss you most of all

The inevitable has happened. I wore a fleece jacket to classes yesterday. Despite the sunny days over the past week during which I had no trouble pretending that late April was full spring as usual, the color of the trees and the leaves they've began to shed (excepting the eucalyptus and pines, of course) and the sudden change in ambient temperature has incentivized changes in clothing choices as well as admission that it is autumn in Canberra.

Mira, my IB companion, sincerely regretted the shorts and flip-flops she'd chosen for the predawn hours of Anzac Day; as the group of us shuffled into the bleachers that had been set up around the War Memorial at the starry hour of 4:30 am, she realized that she'd just about lost feeling in her toes. We sought out hot drinks, though, as the hundreds of seats for the Dawn Service continued to fill, and those that got there too close to the start at 5:30 stood at the top of the ampitheatre-like set up. The sun didn't rise till nearly the end of the half hour ceremony, the most light coming rather from the battery-powered candles, which had been passed out at entrance gates, as wreaths were laid, prayers and reminders of the spirit of Anzac were read, hymns and the national anthem sung, and a section of "In Flander Field" read by a young boy. I heard a kookaburra's laugh for the first time, from the trees somewhere behind us, during the moment of silence. It reminded me a bit of a chimp. The majority of B&G residents that had gone seemed to be curious international students-- one from the Netherlands, Sweden, Colombia, and of course the US. However, Mira explained that most students have probably been to the Dawn Sevice many times before as it is held in pretty much every home town, and then she gave us Anzac biscuits.

Now the short week following a public holiday weekend is half way gone, and most uni students (myself included) are spending more time with the books as the "20-80 rule" kicks in-- 20% of assessment (graded assignments or tests) in the firt term, 80% in the second.

Slipping in runs at the ends of days, I'm passed on the bike path by both commuters, well-equiped with panniers, bells, and blinkies for their daily ride from civic back to the suburbs, and mountain bikers, tearing into the evening with camelbaks and headlights. I know where they're headed and itch to join. I went to Stromlo three times in a week after a first ride there.

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Note: The title is really the line that comes after this one, but that would have been too easy. Did anyone sing it in their head?

Aotearoa

Christina's and my campervanning-around-New Zealand venture went surprisingly... smoothly. We didn't miss flights, ferries, or buses, run out of gas, get terribly lost, or any other things that become little memorable horror stories on vacations. I guess I shouldn't have prefaced that with "surprisingly," but... you know.
Anyway, we did what NZ tourists do: lapped up the scenery along the West Coast of the South Island-- snow covered peaks and glaciers mixed in with jagged, rain forest covered mountains lining an unfettered coast fed by opaque minty-gray colored streams and pools-- doing some shorter and longer hikes to take more of it in along the way. We spent several hours in a cute town called Hokitika to see people carving NZ "green stone" (jade) and an animal observatory that had a nocturnal kiwi house. Kiwis are pretty ridiculous looking things.

Queenstown is recommended by most as a must-make stop in NZ. It is certainly in beautiful place (apparently a good deal of LOTR filming took place in the "Rembarkables," the mountains at the base of the lake the city borders) and set up very well for tourists. It kind of reminded me of an overgrown Northstar village, though, and my favorite places of the trip actually came in the days of travel directly before and after it-- Wanaka and the Fiordlands.

After waking up to sunrise over Lake Hawea (we'd thought it was Lake Wanaka when we pulled in... it was dark), we'd actually made our way over Wanaka. It's at the edge of Mt. Aspiring National Park, and apart from having its own beautiful lake, has hikes that look out in different directions at Mt. Cook (tallest peak in NZ) and Mt. Aspiring. We did one of these hikes, Roy's Peak, and instead of more words to describe the results of a 2-3 hour climb, pictures:



Te Anu is the stop-in, get gas, figure out what you're doing point for the Fiordlands. The afternoon after leaving Queenstown, we stopped in, got gas, and signed up for sea kayaking on Milford Sound the next morning. The drive out to Milford (broken into two parts, having camped at a remote conservation site part way out) was breathtaking in it's own right. It starts out with serene lakes, meadows, and dense forests, before opening up to serious mountains that probably put others to shame. Kayaking on the Sound (which is actually misnamed; as it was carved by a glacier, not a river, it should be Milford Fiord) was so much fun. The wind was a worry at points so we couldn't go as far out as they usually do, but we made it around a bend that opened up to a deceivingly long stretch of dark water with Mitre Peak rising on the left, water falls on either side, and a small mountain-island in the center; I wasn't disappointed. Couldn't take pictures at that point since the waves/wind demanded paddling, but here's when we went up a calm side river a bit:

(Obviously that's not us, but we were all wearing the same black thermals, fluorescent wind jackets, and goofy fleece hats, so who's to tell?)

The drive back up the East Coast to Christchurch reenforced the lesson that New Zealand has very, very many cows and very, very, very many sheep.

P.S. - Clicking a picture opens it up bigger in a new window.

Jerangle Bound, Circuitously

Digital devices, including cameras, were on the list of prohibited items for Inward Bound. Disposable or film would have been ok, but it also seemed unlikely that in an ultra running race there would be time or appreciation for "Smile!" moments. But oh, if I'd had one, I could show you pictures of mist rising off a clear river in the first blue notes of dawn, isolated by miles and miles of Australian bush; sun hitting the tops of eucalyptus forest-covered mountains (the variety of bird screeches, much more grating than the calls I'm used to in the US, would have to be imagined), across a valley from the small range we were crossing; a strange moment oddly reminiscent of the opening credits of Sound of Music, with green rolling hills of pasture land opening suddenly, darker mountains in the distance to either side, and our lanky Scottish navigator considering an alpaca, their hair colors and eye level perfectly matched.

Let's just say that while IB could be called an adventure race, mine tilted drastically toward "adventure" more than "race." Such is an alternate way of saying that because of ambiguities regarding resticted areas surrounding the Division 4 drop, things went terribly wrong for the div 4 B&G squad. After about 12 hours and 75 kilometers of running, hiking, and bush-bashing, we arrived at endpoint. Needless to say, it was frustrating to have trained for essentially a full-on running event and end up having to walk so much (while trying to navigate off trails and once the distance had so exceeded expectations), but I really couldn't have asked for more of an outdoor experience. Too bad IB is only at Australian National; I'd do it again in a heartbeat. While I don't have pictures from the event, here's one of the whole team in our snazzy red shirts (the backs have a silly quote from Troy):I should clarify the title-- the endpoint ended up being in the small town of Jerangle. I just Google mapped it and discovered it's near the Snowy Mountains in New South Wales, which explains why at the 2 am drop point I was wearing a fleece and still shivering.
Anyway, now it's on to class work, lab work (highlights from my first day without supervision: snapping the head of a screw, being shown the "power" button when I didn't understand why the cryostat hadn't been cooling for an hour, becoming frustrated over laser alignment before being kindly told that the component coming off the sample wouldn't be very visible and that I'd been chasing irrelevant reflections), and getting ready for the next adventure-- New Zealand in less than a week! Cheers!

Various Sundries

I'm not sure what a post written directly after last Wednesday night would have looked like; B&G's final big training (and team-deciding) event, 'Mock Drop,' felt like one of the craziest and/or physically strenuous things I've ever done. The drop was hard-- very few navigator's could pinpoint where we were from the start, and ours was not one of them so we ended up unnescessarily crossing a river valley and running a roller coaster of a rocky maintenance road before doing a bit of bush bashing and river wading (definitely the best part) to get back on track. We were dropped at 10:30 p.m. and got to endpoint at 3:15 a.m. (and we weren't the last ones back!). All that being said, here's the actual Inward Bound update: The final squads were posted. I'm running in division 4, which was a huge surprise and means the drop will probably be 40 to 50 km from endpoint. Wish me luck!

Usually a fireworks display is associated with some sort of fair, holiday, concert, or other event. On Saturday night, though, Canberra had fireworks for the sake of fireworks. "Skyfire" is an annual event where seemingly everyone comes out-- families and Uni students with equal enthusiasm-- to picnic and visit on the shores of the lake before ahh-ing over the showers of curling golden sparks, requisite cutesy hearts and smiley faces (and cubes...?), and traditional blue and red bursts.

For this, and other things, I'm really beginning to see Canberra's beauty. It's not an exciting, bustling city like Melbourne or San Francisco per say, but it's wonderful how there is the full convenience of a city, from things like shopping needs to social events like Skyfire or the Symphony in the Park and places to go, surrounded by mountains, pastureland and forest. It was so peaceful last Friday to slowly ride along the bike path next to the lake, first through meadows, then past the dam into rolling green hills, Black Mountain and other darker, gum tree-covered peaks behind my right shoulder, an equestrian park next to one stretch of path, and a mix of Friday evening strollers, seasoned bike commuters, and kitted cyclists finishing their day with a ride as my companions on the path. Having a city built "in the middle of nowhere" isn't such a bad thing.

Hope everyone at home is staying well or having speedy recoveries and enjoying spring (break, if applicable).

Geek out

Content Warning: The following is possibly very boring to approx. 90% of suspected reader base. Probably higher.

Have you heard of a lock-in amplifier? It's one that is connected to both an input signal that is being supplied in intervals at some frequency and the output signal so that it "knows" to amplify just the signal you're after, being referenced to the proper frequency and phase. I remembered the professor in my circuits class last semester describing that set-up as a good way to pick up your signal and cut down noise. I pictured the front end being electronically turned on and off really quickly. When your input signal is a laser beam, though, there is a simpler way--you can use a chopper. What's a chopper? It looks like a fan, or one of those annoying wheels at miniature golf courses, and sits spinning in front of the laser-- blocking the beam, letting it through, blocking the beam, letting it through, at the required frequency. People are so clever!

My research supervisor explained somewhat apologetically that the set-up for each run of photoluminescence analyses will take a long time since everyone moves all the pieces around for their different experiments. I don't think he realized that lining up laser beams with mirrors and lenses, funneling liquid nitrogen into mini dewars, and setting parameters on equipment that actually use tricky principles I'd thus far only seen on physics exam papers isn't exactly a drag.

In case anyone was annoyed by the rambling about what I find interesting at the research lab without a more formal description on the project/task (unlikely, but hey), the plan is to characterize various samples of III-V quantum dots (grown by someone else in the group) to see how different growth methods affect their physical and optical properties (hence the AFM and PL trainings). They're shooting for a specific band gap/emission wavelength. Wikipedia can tell you more accurately and succintly about quantum dots than I could if you're interested, but apparently they've been around since the 80's. Who knew?

Public holidays

Canberra is bordered by some beautiful mountains called the Brindabillas, running 20 km's in the pouring rain is bound to make a group a bit giddy, and the original Starry Night is amazingly rich and textured. In other words, it was a three day weekend in the ACT (hoorah for Canberra Day), and I split the time off between bushwalking in Tidbinbilla Nature Preserve, getting caught on what felt like a pretty epic IB training run, and waiting out the 50 minute queue to get into the Masterpieces from Paris exhibit at the National Gallery of Australia (...and doing course work, too, of course).

The exhibit was worth the wait. There were six rooms of Post Impressionist paintings ordinarily in the Musée d’Orsay. I thought some of the most interesting aspects were how the order of pieces really showed transitions between styles and choices of subjects through the different phases of Post Impressionism and how pointillist pieces change appearance with distance. It's practically what computers and printers do today, just with more creativity and I'm sure many more hours of labor! As mentioned above, though, despite the huge range of artists and styles, the Van Gogh wall really stole the show. Man, that guy knew how to do blue.

Transitioning back into the school week has been pretty fast-paced; lectures are charging ahead pretty quickly, and I had a first substansive meeting with my research advisor today. It was pretty enjoyable. My head is still swimming a bit with substrate/MOCVD quantum dot growth and things like semiconductor strain, but I don't need to figure those out any time soon; today was about learning to set up and run the Atomic Force Macroscopy machine without damaging the tiny tip and then differentiate between the funny dots that mean you damaged your tip and are getting fake results and the funny dots that are actual quantum dots. Next week: photoluminesence.

Mountain biking report: Mt. Majura is pretty fun. I will not be doing any full gap jumps, but the gullies keep you on your toes (...or pedals? Other parts if they don't go too well.) It's mostly pine forest that reminds me of Tahoe, except with kangaroos.

And the home of the brave

"You can thank the Americans for that."
"Why American can't work in SI units, I don't know."
"And once again the Americans have moved in and changed all the units on us!"
Turns out my engineering professor didn't think the Poise (1 g/cm*s) and Stoke (1 cm^2/s) were the best units for measuring dynamic and kinematic viscosity. It was a good lecture, though, the second time in one day I found myself listening to an explanation of boundary layers. The first was in the physics class on fluids and was full of mathematical approximations related to dimensional and scaling analysis. This one was much more pictorial and eventually led into a warning against falling into a tub of tomato sauce.

The U.S. pops up in the intellectual property class, too. I find it pretty interesting that, compared to the theoretical legal studies classes I've taken at Berkeley where examples are drawn solely from U.S. cases unless 'international' is explicitly in the title, the lecturer for the laws class I'm taking here moves freely between cases from the U.S. Supreme Court, Australian High Court, and Canadian appeals courts, and asks international students if they are aware of ways in which their home governments have been addressing the relevant issues. It's a small example but an example nonetheless of what seems to be a trend for ANU academics (particularly in the social sciences) to keep an eye to global conditions rather than maintain an inward focus.

Anyhow, this afternoon I was feeling undecided about what to do next so made the sensible decision and wound* my way over to Bruce Ridge for a bit of mountain biking amid the eucalyptus. Bruce Ridge isn't huge or incredibly technical, but it's a pleasant place to be in general and has enough log piles to remind me that I never actually mastered the whole picking-up-your-front-wheel thing. Ah well. I appreciated the trail builders' vision on this part:

* Due to an excellent memory for directions, "wind" remains the operative word! No worries, though-- the way home is always just to point towards Telstra Tower as B&G sits near the base of Black Mountain Road.

Inward Bound

Some kangaroos hanging out around the base of Black Mountain in the evening. A somewhat modern carillon gifted by the queen of England playing at three o'clock on a Saturday afternoon. A conglomeration of high school students in crew uniforms, waiting for their division while their parents cheer from shaded tents. The dam that forms one end of Lake Burley Griffin below hills planted evenly with pines for logging. My rationale for aiming to partake in Inward Bound was that it would be an amazing opportunity to really take in the Australian bush, but the training runs in just the past week have been the best way to experience scenes from Canberra farther afoot than the Uni or downtown (when I remember to look up from the heels in front of me).

Backing up, Inward Bound is an event unique to the ANU. As mentioned earlier, competitions are between residential colleges; the signs recruiting for IB around Burton and Garran say things like "Help bring the trophy home!" and "Winners are grinners!" or provide the "Top Ten Reasons To Do IB," both serious and humorous components. Competitors are, in teams of four, blindfolded and dropped off somewhere in the bush. To explain exactly what this means, at the first meeting, Liam, the head trainer (who has done 7 IB's), held up a map of the ACT and pointed out that there was Canberra... and surrounding it nothing but an expanse of green or yellow-indicated "national parks." There is one end point-- a set of map coordinates that all teams are racing towards. Teams in the shortest division will have been dropped 25-35 km from the end point, with distances increasing from there. One of the big tricks is for the navigator to figure out where the team's been dropped (it will be dark, sometime between 1 and 5 am) and the right direction to run. Needless to say, I didn't sign up for nav training.

I have no idea if I'll feel up to running 30 km in less than a month (during the hot 15k Saturday run I was quite skeptical), or even if I do, if I will make it into one of the four person squads. Regardless, I'll continue to enjoy sunsets in Canberra, slightly breathless, trying to keep my feet at tempo with a pack of other runners.

Aussie Government

I was planning on articulating the cohesive impression I got from touring the Parliament House last week, but, instead, here's a list of some things that went into it:

- Burley Griffin wanted to put the Parliament House on a hill. All the Australians involved were very against having the government building physically "above the people," so they dug out the hill, built the building, then put the hill back in around it. As a result, everyone enters the government building at the same, ground level, there are lawns going up the sides of it (see above), and you can walk around on and take in an awesome view from the top.

-In the main functions room hangs a huge tapestry based on an oil painting specifically requested from Arthur Boyd of a eucalyptus forest. The picture above doesn't really do justice to the tapestry or the room, but it's really beautiful, and the effort to incorporate the colors of the Australian bush runs throughout the building in more subtle ways. (By the way, there's one cockatoo and an artistic rendition of Haley's comet in the tapestry... bonus points if you find them.)
- There are some pretty funny sounding traditions followed in the House and Senate. To reflect the fact that Speaker was a historically undesirable position-- the Crown eventually lent protection, a Governor General, to stop him from getting roughed up or killed-- each time a new one is put into office, he/she is supposed to physically resist being dragged over to the Speaker's chair. The tour guide said it's fun to watch, quite embarrassing for them. There's a requirement in the Senate, too, that has to do with slamming the door in the face of any royalty that comes to visit before letting them in.
- Question time! A couple of people have told me I should go (to question time); it's apparently well-known for being a more exciting government event to attend. Since public audience is encouraged, House members are likely to fire questions that are of importance to their constituents at each other, battles of policy and oratory skill ensuing.

- Why yes, that is a kangaroo and an emu sitting in prominence on the House floor. As part of the official seal, they're hanging out in giant metal form on top of the building front, as well.
- The expansive lawn leading up to Parliament House, Federation Mall, can be (has to be) reserved for protests or other events.
- The circular stone design in front on the main entry way is of aboriginal symbolism; circles designate a meeting place, the number of circles correlating to the place's importance.

And one last one, taken on the roof, for epicness:

To do/Have done

1. Settle in.

It felt a bit odd to be back in the dorms again, though this time it's a bit different. The units are generally called 'residential colleges,' rather than dorms, and I'm supposed to have school spirit for Burton and Garran Hall rather than ANU. I applied to B&G as it was one of the self-catered options, meaning instead of a cafeteria, there is a giant kitchen where we cook for ourselves. By giant, I mean a basketball gym-sized room set up with cooking stations to meet the needs of 500+ residents. That's a lot of burners and sinks.

Meeting people has obviously been a huge part of settling in, mostly done through college social events since no classes or clubs have started. Traveling beforehand has had the advantage of giving me some picture of where students say they're from whether it be a small inland town, Sydney, Melbourne, the Blue Mountains, or other places we visited. Regardless of hometown, most people are friendly in the sense that they go out of their way to help you, which came as a bit of a surprise at first but is pretty nice!

2. Classes.

The enrolment (not a typo, enrol has one 'l' here) process was actually quite pleasant; the adviser(s) who worked with me were very helpful and asked a lot of questions about interests and classes I'd taken at Berkeley. The main adviser I worked with is actually the professor for Theoretical Physics this semester, and when it came down to choosing my final class between his and Physics of Fluid Flows, I felt quite guilty for picking the latter. That filled out the four class required load along with Energy Systems Engineering, Maths Methods 1 Honours: Ordinary Differential Equations and Advanced Vector Calculus, and Principles of Intellectual Property. First lectures tomorrow!

3. Play tourist.

All of the above has been about campus and school, probably because after the first day or two here, I had seen next to none of Canberra apart from B&G, the central mall with a Target, and the streets in between. I started my further explorations with a run up to Telstra tower on Black Mountain. It was the first time I realized the size of Lake Burley Griffin and how everything sits in relation to it. It really adds a lot of beauty to the city overall... but I guess the architects thought of that when they planned to put it there! (In case anyone wasn't aware of it, Canberra is a planned city, constructed specifically to be the capital of Australia. It was a fair distance between Sydney and Melbourne who both wanted to seat the government. An American architect won some competition to do it, but I recently learned that there were actually many architects and planners involved, often a different one for each suburb.)

Though there "isn't that much to see" in Canberra, I've made a pretty pitiful dent in taking in its notable attractions. I walked to Parliament House, took the guided tour, and found it very worthwhile-- a post to come on why it's such a cool place! The National Gallery, Museum, and War Memorial remain unexplored, something I'll be remedying in the coming weeks.

Kookaburra sits in an old gum tree

It’s been a little over two weeks since I first arrived at the Bay View Hotel in Sydney, and after a whirlwind tour of the South East Coast and Southern Australia, I’m back for the weekend-long UC EAP orientation. Since I didn’t spend my squeezed-in wi-fi hours (Do all McDonald’s in the US have free wi-fi, too? I never thought I’d be on the hunt for Maccays, as they’re called in an Aussie accent, but it’s the best way to get online while traveling here!) giving daily blog reports, I figured I’d do a nutshell/highlights version. Let’s start with this little guy:


Unfortunately he’s not sitting in an old eucalyptus tree as the title claims but on a fence at Featherdale Wildlife Preserve, which was one of our main stops on the way back down from Newcastle area and where we saw all quintessentially Australian critters-- echidna, Tasmanian devils, dingo, kangaroos, koalas, snakes one doesn’t want to run into, and countless slightly bizarre feathered creatures, including kookaburras who made throaty sounds, if not full throated laughter. The little guys have recently been stirring up some trouble, as the Australian News ran somewhat frequent headlines about the authors of the original children’s song who waged a multimillion dollar lawsuit against Men At Work for using the melody in the short intro to "Down Under" thirty years after the song was released… and won. Oh, copyright law.

So how are the beaches?

I have seen many, many beaches, and they are all beautiful, whiter than any in California sometimes to the extent that makes them painful to look at without sunglasses. (Conveniently, one is rarely caught without sunglasses around here.) We drove down the South Eastern Coast, eventually making it to the very Southern tip of Australia, where Corner Inlet Marin and Coastal Park hides some of what were our favorite beaches a short walk through eucalypt forest.


With all the choices, my absolute favorite comes down to a pretty close tie between Tea Garden’s Ocean Beach and a small bay found on Kangaroo Island. Tea Gardens is a sleepy town off the beaten path, and its beauty, semi-remoteness, and coziness coupled with memories my dad’s family had of frequent visits while they lived in Newcastle combined to make it a warm and lovely place. The bay on Kangaroo Island was even more remote, the drive to get there a bumpy ride on the gravelly dirt roads with reward of sharing a still, clear bay with two other living souls.

Takes my breath away


Wilpena Pound, Flinders Ranges, pictured above. The hike to get this picture was a bit of a straight-upwards rock scramble, enjoyable and totally worth rising at a pre-sunrise hour to do before the heat. The Outback was the best part of the last couple weeks. Wildlife was everywhere (nothing poisonous, mainly ‘roos, emu, and a few rabbits), and the stars so far from any city life were almost as amazing as what I could see during the day. Seeing green eucalyptus trees thriving where only srub brush seemed to come out of the reddish dirt increased my already developing fondness for them.
The Blue Mountains also fall under this category. We were stuck in the clouds the first morning we were there and were afraid we wouldn’t be able to see the massive rain forests, cliffs, and renowned rock formations at all, but we stuck it out and were rewarded with the Three Sisters, pristine cascades, and eucalyptus trees whose size spoke to their hundreds of years in existence. We hiked down into one of the rain forests (is it bad that I was surprised to learn that Australia has rain forests?) and forwent the walk back up to experience a ride on the steepest-tracked passenger train around; it traveled a 50 degree grade at some points. Yes, that’s steeper than Marin Ave. in Berkeley.

You go downtown

Though cities aren’t my favorite place to be, I have to concede that the ones I’ve wandered around have been pretty enjoyable places. Sydney feels a bit overpowering because of its size, but the novelty of the opera house and its many beaches boosts its score a bit. Melbourne has a funky downtown square, an mix of artsy modern structures and old brick buildings, that reflects what I saw of the culture there-- a lot of fashionable younger people (multiple universities) and entertainment or shopping meccas with beautiful parks housing war memorials and other historic monuments running along the edge of downtown. The night I spent there happened to be a Wednesday, the one night of the week the Queen Victoria Market is held at night so I enjoyed some live music and food on at the very crowded, lively QV Marketplace.
I've heard it called "an overgrown town" and "a city of churches," but my favorite city was definitely Adelaide. The central district is bordered on all sides by parks, and the central Victoria Square (it's more of an oval, really) highlights old-style buildings and a pretty, quaint, brick church.


Both Melbourne and Adelaide were very promotional of cycling as transport and recreation through their bike paths, lanes, and signage, more so than any city I've seen in the US (and much more than Sydney).

In a word

Expansive. An obvious choice, considering Australia is the same size as the continental US, but I'm not referring to a quality shared by various parts rather than the country as a whole. When one is traveling through rain forest, one travels through lush, eucalyptus covered hills for a long, long time. When one in the mountains, it seems apparent that landscape of cliffs and massive rock formations extends indefinitely. Driving down the coast, it's easy to start taking the white sand beaches for granted because there are just so many. When there's nothing but dirt, scrub brush and some tough trees, there's nothing but dirt, scrub brush, and some tough trees for hours driving. Since the population is so condensed in the coastal cities, a place like Sydney isn't just a city, it's an expanse of city. I'm still working on a rational explanation for why the sky seems bigger, too.

Addition

18 hours till plane #1 departs SFO
2 hours from NorCal to SoCal
11 hour layover in L.A.
15 hours from LAX to SYD...

= 46 hours. In just less than two days, I'll be in Australia, getting in a car, and heading up to Newcastle.

Baggage regulations

Right along with other personal necessities such as canes or crutches, outer garments, child safety devices, food, and water that don't count towards one's carry-on baggage quota, is "One musical instrument, not exceeding a size of 45 linear inches." Logically, this is probably United's avoidance of the hassle of checking and possibly damaging an expensive subcategory of possessions. My first reaction, however, was that United clearly has their priorities straight. And that I should have taken up the french horn.