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.