SILENCE!

Yesterday, my friends, was the much-awaited Market Day. I joined about a million clubs. It was pretty fantastic, but ultimately not very exciting to write about. Instead, I'm going to write about what I did last night.

First I went to a bar called the RE, with Eike and two of her friends, Philip (Germany) and Beccy (England). It was this large, open bar with a roof and no windows, and there was an old guy in the corner playing acoustic covers of about every mega-hit from the 80s that he could think of. We'd been there for about half an hour when Emil flounced in with a group of kids he'd met at a dance class, one of whom turned out to be another friend of Eike's who she'd been trying to get to come. Emil was very excited about having learned to salsa, and he showed me the dance step he'd learned, and I promptly trounced him at it. Engineers, you know--they just can't dance.

There were about forty various exchange students at the RE because it was a QUEST event, so I met some girls from Brazil, a girl from California, and a dude originally from Australia who was raised in Miami, who was intent on getting me to join the wake boarding club. I told him I'd consider it, but frankly I think the Brisbane River is not somewhere anybody should be swimming. It might mutate your eyeballs into ping pong balls or something.

Around 11, once the RE had lost its charm, we swam to the Regatta hotel, with Eike and Philip complaining the whole time that it was winter and therefore suppose to be dry, and it was all my fault for bringing Seattle weather to their tropical paradise. Yeah, it was raining that hard. But we made it to the Regatta, where the most amazing thing was going on: silent disco.

You went into the back room (called "the Regatta Boathouse"), and they handed you a set of radio headphones, and you put them on and danced to one of two different DJs both performing in the same room. It was fantastic because you could control your own volume, you could take the headphones off if you wanted to talk to someone, and if you didn't like the music on one channel, you could just change to the other one. The best part was whenever a really good song came on the channel you weren't listening to, and you'd hear all the people around you start singing along to it, and then you'd have to switch channels really quickly to get with the program. The best one was when "What Is Love?" by Haddaway came on, and people just went nuts.


We left the club around midnight, and since the Brisbane public transport system is absolute shit, we ended up taking a taxi home. This is really stupid, since technically my house is about half a mile away from the Regatta, but directly across the river. You have to go all the way west to Campus, or east to the downtown area where the bridges are.

Today I have one class, and then a lot of time to kill until 7 o'clock, when I'm going to a snow party. Yeah, you heard me. Snow party. In Brisbane. We'll see....

Much love,
Morgan

P.S. I feel like I complain about the Brisbane transport and navigation systems a lot without ever justifying myself. So, in validation of my whining, I give you this test:


This is a perfectly average Brisbane street sign. Now say, for a moment, that you needed to go down Hardgrave (the street in question). Based on the information from this sign, which way would you go: straight, or right? Have a guess. I'll tell you the answer later.

Day 20

Well. It's been a while, hasn't it? That would be because I haven't been up to terribly exciting things. I discovered that my insanely cheap bike didn't have functional brakes. That was a fun discovery. But then Emil discovered it as well, and an hour and a half later the brakes were as good as new. He then tried to go home, leaving my house around 11, and then at 1 AM I got a call from him asking if he could sleep on the couch since he'd missed the last bus. I found this very interesting, as at least four buses had gone by since he left, and he'd apparently managed to miss all of them. He says he got distracted taking pictures of the stars. Crazy Danish man.

Yesterday I had my first class! It was a three-hour lecture about Aboriginal Cultural Heritage, but it felt like far less than three hours, which I'm taking as a good sign. I had thought it was going to be a huge class, but looking back I'm not sure where I got that idea. There're about 25 kids in the class, 10 of whom are international students, 8 of whom are from North America. Apparently, I go halfway around the world to meet Americans and Canadians. I did mean a couple Australians who seemed really cool, too.

Then, last night, I spent about an hour and a half talking to my German roommate Eike, who I've seen very little of up until this point because she's been gone, but she turns out to be awesome. She's a biomedical major, doing a research project about magnets at UQ. We're going to this thing on Wednesday where people get together at a bar to drink and make new friends. It's organized through a group called QUEST, which I haven't actually joined yet, but I plan to find their booth on Wednesday at Market Day and join then, along with as many other clubs as I possibly can.

Today, I have 7 hours of class: 1 hour of Marine Biology lecture, then 6 hours of Australian Cinema broken up into three separate sections. I'm pretty sure the first 2 hours of that are to be spent simply watching a movie, though, so it shouldn't be too bad. I'm planning to bring candy and share with my neighbors. People are surprisingly easy to bribe into friendship.

As for extra-curricular activities, I guess there's a festival of sorts going on in South Bank next weekend. I have no idea what to expect from it, but I have been promised free concerts, so it should be worth it. This weekend, I have no plans yet, but I know that the crazy Danish man wants to rent a car and go camping on top of Mt. Tibrogargan, so roasting marshmallows at the summit of a "mountain" is a distinct possibility. :P

Hope all is well,
Morgan

Grafitti

More on my photo dump. Go see! :)

Backlog.

Emil FINALLY loaded a few of his pictures to facebook, so I can FINALLY show you the best ones from our hiking excursion. Prepare to be amazed:

Day 14: Things are Accomplished!

Yes, something large and exciting has been accomplished. I finished setting up my room! And it cost me almost no money to decorate, because I'm a genius. Observe:

And yes, that's pretty much all I did today. I also bought some awesome earrings that look like cupcakes at the UQ market (which happens every Wednesday, apparently). Tomorrow I have a safety information session. I'm hoping I will gain important knowledge from this one. If not, though, maybe I'll make a new friend instead. That would also be okay.

Much love,
Morgan

Day 13: Orientating

Orientations are lame. I feel like I'm a freshman again, being told a lot of really useless information in really corny ways designed to try to make it sound interesting. On the bright side, though, getting lumped in with a bunch of other equally bored students is a great way to bond and make friends.

I got to campus around 11.15, which had me there in plenty of time for the 11.30 lunch. I spotted Emil entirely by accident across the field (his hair is hard to miss), so I joined him and some German girls hanging out on the lawn. This is when I discovered that there had actually been an earlier orientation session as well as the one we were about to go in to, which I had apparently totally missed the memo on. Scarlett (from Winnipeg, Canada) assured me that they hadn't said anything useful at all, and this turned out to be the theme for the day.

We went in to the session, which lasted an hour and a half. The most useful thing I learned there? If you bite off both ends of a TimTam chocolate bar and use it as a straw in your coffee, the chocolate inside will melt and then you can eat it all really fast and it's delicious and they call it a TimTam Orgasm (or, for the more PC crowd, a TimTam Slam). Although I did learn that they have a student blogging position specifically for international students that I may volunteer for (haven't decided yet), and I did meet a pretty cool dude named Gavin, from Toronto, Canada, with whom I traded phone numbers before heading off to the student welcome session for the English, Media Studies and Art History department.

I arrived at the session about five minutes early and struck up a conversation with a girl from Perth named Simone, and a guy from Edinburgh named Aran. Fifteen minutes later, the lecturer still hadn't shown up, so I went to the front office on behalf of everybody waiting patiently in that room and asked what the heck was going on. Turned out, they hadn't told anybody in the department that the welcome was happening. The lady at the desk made some frantic phone calls, and the vice-dean of the department came huffing into the room twenty minutes late and apologizing profusely. We got no useful information from her, either, but she was really cool and chill anyway.

Once she'd finished her hurried presentation, Aran mentioned that he was going to an information session for Arts students in general, so I tagged along because I had nothing better to do. It was also pretty useless, but the lady running it was nice and gave us chips (I'm sorry--she gave us crisps), and I met a dude named Richard from China.

I traded facebook information with Richard and Aran, then headed out to West End to wander about for a while in search of things to cover my blank walls. I had little success, though, because most of the shops were closed. I'll have to go back earlier tomorrow, which should be easy enough, especially if the library tour turns out to be as useless and dull as the rest of the orientating has been thus far.

Just as I arrived home, I got a call from Gavin inviting me over for a beer. He lives about a 1/2 hour walk away, so I went over and hung out with him and his roommate Nick for about three hours, during which time we talked about a million things and watched an episode of Top Gear. Gavin expressed great disappointment with the fact that I have a boyfriend (something I made very clear before agreeing to the beer), so I said better luck next time, and gave him a statistic I heard recently that says that Brisbane has one of the highest female-to-male ratios in the world. I have no idea if it's true or not, having heard it second hand, but either way it seemed to cheer him up.

The route to Gavin's house is creepy, by the way. Especially in the dark, like when I was walking home. It's creepy because the main landmark necessary for navigating it is a cemetery. A huge, dark, old cemetery. I found it delightfully inspiring. Perhaps I'll try my hand at supernatural horror fiction. It would be something new for me.

Just before I arrived home, a sudden movement in the bushes startled me. I turned to look, expecting a bird or maybe a squirrel (what it would have been if I were at UW), and instead I saw what looked like a bush baby. Having googled it, I now realize that it was actually a brush-tailed possum. It stared me down. The experience was rather unnerving (though I still snapped a picture), so I hurried away down the street to my house, where I discovered that my key didn't seem to like the lock on the front door much. Luckily, Troy, my basement-living Aussie roommate, was still up and he helped me get it open.


And now that it's midnight, I'm going to sleep. It's been a loooooong day. Hopefully tomorrow I'll find something to make my blank walls less bleak.

Much love,
Morgan

Day 12: Nightlife, Baby

Alright, it's official. Brisbane is the most gorgeous city ever. Seattle, eat your heart out:



That bridge is called "the Story Bridge." I don't know if that's the official name for it, but that's what I'm told it's called. We drove across it at night on the way home from Ngungun a few days ago, and when he saw the city lights through the beams of the bridge, Emil exclaimed, "it looks just like Star Wars! All you need is some flying sausages!" Of course, I laughed hysterically, and he couldn't figure out what was so funny until I finally regained my composure enough to explain. "Saucers, dear. It's flying saucers."



Spent the day/night with Emil, traipsing around Brisbane, taking gorgeous pictures (as you can probably tell). We went to a bar for a little while, where Emil was delighted to realize that he had the opportunity to buy me my first legal drink.



I then introduced him to the concept of light graffiti, which he had never heard of, but wanted to try immediately. Luckily my new phone has a flashlight mode, so we spent about an hour in a dark park, drawing things in the bushes. Unfortunately, all of the pictures are on his camera. So, once again, you'll all have to wait on those. :)

All the best,
Morgan

P.S. New pictures on the photodump.