Noooosaaaaa

I spontaneously went on a trip up the Sunshine Coast to Noosa this past weekend with some new international kids (3 American girls and 3 Italian girls). It was only for one night, but we packed lots of activities into the hours we had there, and it was a sweet couple days. We took the train up (with bus transfers on either end), which only cost $9, and it took about 3 hours to get up there, not a bad deal. We arrived about 11AM on Saturday and I went jogging while the others were shopping around for stuff. I went through this community hang out park area that is along the water, and it was such a nice environment. All these families were there having barbecues and kids were running around and it just seemed like a really nice place to live. They have a weird futuristic park course set up too, they have machines like arm and leg presses where it uses your own weight as the resistance, kinda a step up from the Menlo Park wooden sit up benches. There were also some huge pelicans on the footpath that were intimidating, I ran past one of them and it looked like it was going to take a lunge at me, and it's a really big bird, just a bit scary. But I somehow survived, thank the heavens.

We met up after that and went hiking in the national park down the road from the hostel. It was really beautiful, the track goes out on this hill/cliff along the ocean where you can go down to different beaches or climb around on rocks. The views are amazing and it goes all the way around a point if you do the whole thing, but we only had a few hours, so we took the return loop that went through the eucalyptus forest. There are supposed to be koalas there, but we didn't spot any. We saw some huge spiders and a lizard, and a lot of bush turkeys that one of the girls was seriously afraid of and would scream every time they crossed the path, which was often. It was a good walk, probably about 14 kilometers total and all the surroundings were awesome.

I had one of the best kebabs ever for dinner, and was really really glad I didn't wait to eat with the rest of the group. They took over an hour to pick a restaurant (one frustrating thing about traveling with girls.. they are usually so indecisive and nobody will just choose something), and all the choices were crazy expensive. Noosa is a town that caters to more cashed up older tourists, and there is one food court with Subway and kebabs and stuff like that, and the rest of the area is super fancy restaurants. Somehow all the rest of them really wanted to eat at one of these places, and it really did not work out very well for them I thought. We ended up at this Italian place and they ordered weird stuff like a plate of mussels (literally a plate of shells and a piece of bread) or calamari (literally three small steamed squids and a piece of bread) for about $30 a pop, and they were still starving afterwards and wanted to go get kebabs, hilarious.

The next day we had a surf lesson that we signed up for through the hostel, and it reinforced my previous experiences with surfing, meaning that I still suck a lot at it. It was a lot of fun, I definitely always am up for being in the ocean, but wow, I'm terrible and just can't seem to get up. I can catch waves, but the standing up part really isn't happening, I think boogie boarding is the way to go, just a lot more fun in my opinion. It was a really nice day out, and after a couple hours of being tossed around in the surf, we hung out on the beach a bit and then went kayaking. The kayak hire came free with the surf lessons, and it was sweet. There are a lot of estuaries around Noosa that you can paddle around in. I saw a lot of resorts around, I didn't know the place had so many of them. It really is a huge tourist place, but it still seems like a small Aussie beach town. It was probably one of the more expensive places I've been through, but you can also hang out there cheaply. There were a few backpackers, but definitely not as much as other places I've visited. It was nice to get out of Brisbane and hang at the beach, I'm really looking forward to it heating up here so that we can at least go to the fake beach at South Bank (It's this pool with sand next to the Brisbane River) on weekends and hang out in the sun.

One last thing about the trip: the train ride home was epic, it even rivaled some of the experiences I have had on LA public transit (conversations with heroin guys, recently released prisoner substitute teachers, really loud gay people...), which is saying something. I went to go sit with my friends Dave and Sarah, because they had been at home in Noosa for the weekend and were coming back to Brisbane on the same train. There was a family right across from us that was just going off, pretty much the most dysfunctional group of people ever. The mom had no front four teeth on top or bottom, and she had two small kids and an older girl with her who was probably 16. The kids took turns having shrieking tantrums for the first half hour of the 2.5 hour trip, and she pretty much ignored them, but then the older girl got in on it. The mom refused to give her a cigarette, so she started screaming and saying things like, "I hate you! I hope you get hit by a train and die! You're a sadistic bitch!" She then called her dad and said she was getting off and coming back to where he lived. The mom then wanted the mobile phone back, because it was hers, and the daughter flipped out. They then got into an epic battle about whose SIM card it was, and the girl was punching her. The mom then went, "I don't hit any of you, but if you don't stop right now I'ma deck ya!" This all went on for the entire trip, everyone in our car was silent for awhile, but then just started talking again because these people clearly were not going to simmer and we all just sorta got used to it. The little boy was tapping on the mom at one point, and she didn't even look over, she just put her arm out and shoved him away to the next seat. It was crazy, there are for sure white trash people everywhere! It made my family's arguments seem very weak sauce.

Anyways, photos are: kayaking, friends, and extreme shots on our bushwalk through the park.

Semester 2 Beginnings

I've been back to uni for about 4 weeks now, and it has been really busy. I have class, work, and my internship all during the week, they keep me occupied pretty much all day and often into the night. It's good though, I am definitely never bored. This past week, I got to go to the awards show for the Q Song contest (songwriting contest that is put on by the company where I intern), and it was really cool to finally see the end product of something that we had been working on for months. People came from all over Queensland that had been chosen as finalists for the show, and all the winners for the different categories were announced, such as rock, pop, new music/experimental, folk, blues & roots, etc. There were also performances between awards by some of the nominated groups, and I was very impressed by their musicianship. The groups were mostly all unsigned bands, but some of them really blew me away. The first one was a group that was nominated for hip hop, and it was made up of kids from all around Brisbane. There was every race imaginable represented, and at one point I counted 16 people on the stage. They worked together so well though! Everyone had a job, whether it was doing a rap at one point, or background singing, or break dancing on the side, it reminded me of 'School of Rock', but more urban. There was also a guy called 8 Ball Aitken, one of the folk musicians, that had a giant red beard and red hair and played a mean blues guitar. He had a cordless setup for his guitar, and did 15 minute solos while walking around the audience and harassing them. The Gin Club also played, they were at Splendour too. They are a cool group with a bunch of musicians that keep switching instruments between them and have really nice melodic songs. Sorta folky, with other influences, but they are all really talented and fun to watch. They won the 'Song of the Year' award too, it was a good choice I would say.

Life at res college is good too, I somehow got nominated to be on the squash team (I seriously just got a call on my phone one day, being like, hey you're playing squash), even though I have never played the sport. It's lots of fun though, I won my first game against Duchense College (Douche for short, haha! It never gets old...). It was an epic battle of the two most novice players on each team that ended in a really long tiebreaker rally where my opponent collapsed on the last shot she tried to make, it was pretty dramatic. The rest of my team lost their matches, so I was glad to at least get us a few points. I also got on the tennis team somehow, even though I havent played since grade 9. I was very rusty, but the skills seems to be coming back a little. Very fun though, it's cool to just go play tennis one day a week. College sports are pretty relaxed, and free to play, so it's a pretty optimal situation. I also signed up for a capoiera class that starts next week. It's a Brazilian martial art, I went to the free trial class and it was a lot of fun, so maybe I'll learn some new skills! They wanted us to do cartwheels and it was very embarrassing, I have never been able to do those, it just turns into a weird side-hop thing. We'll see.

I had a field trip to the Brisbane Forest Park this week for my Australian Terrestrial Environment class. I learned some cool stuff, but I really think it could have been completed in half the time. We spent forever talking about rocks on this patio, and it got really dull. Rocks are pretty boring in my opinion, but we did learn some cool stuff about the rainforest and the sclerophyll forest (made of gum trees and eucalyptus). There were some cool strangler fig trees in the rainforest area (epiphytes - woah crazy science terms!) that grow up on a host tree and then strangle it to death and steal its sunlight. I also thought it was cool that the way the two forests are separated is through the spread of fire when it breaks out every few years. Rainforest can't handle fire and will all die, while the sclerophyll plants are designed to coexist with fire and regenerate quickly after a blaze goes through. The whole trip was mostly to get us to see how different plants grow up in each forest, because the two forest types are meshed together in varying compositions throughout the park. It was mostly about plants taking advantage of gaps in the canopy when a big tree falls down. Rainforest plants grow quickly to take in the sun and reproduce as fast as they can to spread throughout the forest, while the others grow slow and steadily to eventually fill in the gap. Birds and wasps also help to spread seeds and cross pollinate different plant species, which also determine where the different plants end up. I might not be explaining this extremely well, but I thought it was pretty interesting stuff and actually felt like I was learning something, so I thought I would share, hope it was with some level of clarity.

Anyways, that's what's up with my life at the moment. I put up some random pictures of friends and life over here, because I don't really have any photos that correlate with what I just wrote about. The first is from my floormates Tom and Olly's birthday night, the second two are on the Ekka raceday in Brisbane, where we all got dressed up to go to the horse races, and the last is me and a couple friends. The one in the green bra is this hilarious girl from up the coast that lives on a dairy farm. She is never seen without makeup, and even insists on wearing it while playing sports, and is really obsessed with clothes and shoes and all these other things that I am pretty much apathetic about, but also cusses more than any other girl I can think of. She's one of my favorite people here, it's very interesting to me because I can't think of any clothes obsessed girly girls that I really get along with amazingly back home, but I guess she really is not the typical American version of that sort of person. Crazy Australians.

Splendour in the Grass Music Festival

Last weekend I went down to Byron Bay for a 2 day music festival at Belongil Fields. I got lucky and got a ticket some months ago (it sold out 4 hours after tix went on sale), and did not really have any concrete plans of how I was going to get down there, or where I was going to stay until a few days before the weekend. I found my friend Kylah a ticket, and she had a friend that lives down in that area in a place out in the country called Mullimbimby, and Kylah has a car, so I got a ride and a place to stay in the same day! It worked out pretty great. We drove down late Friday night and just went to sleep, but the next day was amazing. I woke up at Kylah's friend Kara's house, along with 4 of her mates plus her brother and his mates, and their family had brought home a bunch of groceries and we all made an epic breakfast. I was definitely not expecting to do anything but sleep at the house, but this family was insanely hospitable, and Kara's parents were really cool too. We hung out there for a few hours before heading over to the festival grounds and getting our wristbands for the weekend.

The first day we got there pretty early and walked around the markets that were set up all around. There were lots of cool stands with people selling crazy hats and clothes, crafts, and official merch for the bands. There were also a lot of food stalls with every kind of ethnic food imaginable. They had hare krishna, sushi, mongolian bbq, organic donuts, everything. It was quite the setup. There were three main stages for bands, an area where there were dance workshops, an area for dance music, and then the teepee forest, which was a collection of teepees around a stage where DJs were spinning all day and night.

We started off the day by seeing Bluejuice on the Mix Up Stage. They were pretty great for opening the day at an early time slot. It was dance music/rock, there was a pretty big crowd to see them too. After that I saw a few songs by Tokyo Police Club, they were really mellow in comparison to the first act. They were allright, nothing amazing, but pretty entertaining nontheless. We then went to Lightspeed Champion, The Music, The Gin Club, and Bliss N Eso. Bliss N Eso were really good, they're an Aussie hip hop group that had lots of good songs to jump around to. They got the crowd going pretty well.

Later on in the night I saw MSTRKRFT, Soft Tigers Food Fight (both DJ acts), a bit of Band of Horses (lots of people were crazy about them, but the music was too chilled out for me at that moment, so I went back to the other stage and saw PNAU, which was the best decision of the day. I had heard a bit of them before, but wow, they were an amazing show. They play dance music, and the songs are all really different, which is not always the case with electronic acts. They also have a live drummer and guitarist, but most of the sound comes from electronic beats. The frontman has such a great stage presence, he has periods of extreme calm where he just stands with his arms up and stares out into the crowd, then he goes nuts and empties water bottles over his head and jumps around everywhere. Also, people come out on the stage in giant strawberry suits (and bird suits, sun suits, and a green skull suit) and just dance around during the songs. The drummer also has crazy energy, he stands up and just beats his drums during some songs, and at the end of the set he kicked his kit over and threw the cymbals across the stage. They were awesome.

After PNAU, I headed over to the far stage and saw the Polyphonic Spree, another amazing show. If you have not heard of this group, it is made up of about 30 members that all play orchestral instruments (plus some others that play guitar, etc.) from Texas, and they all wear choir robes. The frontman was really interacting with the crowd and they had an awesome sound. They even played a Nirvana cover, 'Lithium', that had everyone singing along. This random guy I met that I had been hanging out with (Kylah and the other girls wanted to see different bands during the day, so I met a lot of random people throughout the day and made some new friends) put me up on his shoulders and it was awesome to finally see over the heads of all the tall people. Believe it or not, Devo closed after them, and I went over and saw about 2 songs, and it was complete shit. There was such a small crowd for it too, the music was terrible, and the band members looked like they were about to fall over dead. One guy had really white hair, a huge gut, and was all decked out in the Devo uniform of those stupid red hats, a t-shirt with their own band name on it, and kneepads... it was awful. By that time everyone was pretty beat, so we went home and passed out, which was really smart because the next day was packed as well.

Sunday we got up and made our way over to Belongil Fields a bit later and got there in time to see a group from Brisbane called Yves Klein Blue. They were cool, sorta folk rock, pretty fun guys to listen to. We got some food and just hung out for awhile (They had this area that was in a huge bubble that was filled with pillows and hammocks that we just chilled out in for awhile because there were no bands we were wanting to see at that moment). I then saw a bit of British India before Vampire Weekend. VW was pretty good. They were fun to listen to, but they didn't amp up the crowd too much. The Wombats from the UK came on after that, they were so much fun. Everyone was jumping around and singing along, I got pretty close to the front and had a great time. They have really well written songs too, I'd say they're a pretty solid all-around band.

I went to the Mix Up stage after that and danced around for awhile to the Bag Raiders and Van She, and then saw Lyrics Born all the way from the Bay Area. I was right up at the front for that, he has a lot of people on stage with him playing various instruments, he had a pretty good sound. I'm not a huge fan of his raps, he just talks really really fast and I'm never sure what he's saying except during the hooks, but I guess it's like that for a lot of hip hop artists. But more with him. It was fun though. I went over to check out the Vines after that, I was hoping the lead singer would throw a tantrum, but he was unfortunately mellow. He is famous for freaking out at shows and breaking equipment, but he might be on medication now or something because he was diagnosed as being autistic or having Ausberger's Syndrome or something a few years ago. It's not quite as rock 'n roll as it was when he was having fits, but still a good set.

After that was New Young Pony Club, a dance/rock group from the UK. They were fun and their lead singer had a crazy tutu outfit on, she was a really energetic performer. I went to go find my friends after that to see if they wanted to see the Presets together, but they opted for Sigur Ros instead, so I headed back to the other stage to get a semi decent spot for the Presets. They are probably one of the biggest groups in Australia. They've had the number one played song in clubs since I've been here ('My People') and places just go off when it gets played.
The crowed to see them stretched for so long, way beyond the tent, but I managed to get in through the side to have a pretty good spot. When they started, the place just went nuts. They consist of a guy who sings and deals with the beats and a drummer, and it was for sure one of the best times of the weekend. Note to the people at home: I checked their tour schedule, and they are playing some really small rooms in the US in the next few months (cuz pretty much nobody knows about them), it would be amazing to see them in such a small venue, I can't imagine how jealous most Australians would be to get to go to that. So if you like dance music, you should go see them. They're playing with Cut Copy I believe, another good dance group.

Anyways, that was great, I met up with Kylah again and saw the last few Wolfmother songs at the Supertop Stage, and then headed over to the Teepee forest and danced around until they kicked us out. I was really hyped up still, and would have loved to stay later, but sadly we were booted out and had to go home. The atmosphere at the festival was so great all weekend long though! Everyone was into the music and really happy to be there. There was lots of crazy art around too, like a giant Medusa head, or a bunch of socks stretched out on wires and arranged in formations sticking out of the ground. There was also a tent set up that was the 'Church of Two Hands and a Chicken'. It was a strange place that I really still don't understand, but there was a minister type guy that would occasionally come up and read from 'The Book of Chook', or have fake weddings, it was really just some sort of freak show. People had some really crazy outfits too, really elaborate costumes and eccentric accessories. There was a group dressed up like firemen even, or just people wearing flouro tights. I think there was 17,000 people there in all, which doesn't sound like a huge number in comparison to sports (USC football anyone?), but the place did seem pretty crowded. Everyone was so cool and open to talking or hanging out, I even met a guy that told me I should come visit his farm in New South Wales. I was really happy the way everything turned out, it was one of the best weekends I've had here. I haven't been to too many shows since I've been in Oz, but this definitely should be a fix for me for awhile (although I did go see PNAU again on Thursday because I found out they were playing in Brisbane and just couldn't pass up the opportunity...). In conclusion, everyone go see PNAU and the Presets!

Pictures are: giant disco ball at Mix Up Stage, art made from tires, the Polyphonic Spree, PNAU with Strawberries, PNAU with characters looking at him passed out on the floor (those are from the other show I went to), Bliss N Eso, and the chillout area with a Ganesha statue.