tasmania's PhotoBlog

Weather

2008-02-28T06:00:43Z

I'm really loving the weather here. Last week, it was really hot, but there was usually a nice breeze. Eventually it rained and cooled down. This weeks has been much cooler in general, and last weekend we had a snowball fight from snow borrowed off of Mt. Wellington. We learned a little about the climate in Tasmanian Fauna today. Apparently the climate of Australia in general is moderated by the fact that there is ocean all around; I guess a lot of extreme weather in the Northern Hemisphere comes from the large amount of landmass. Most of the weather patterns here come from the prevailing Westerlies, which also are known as the roaring 40's (because we are at about 40 degrees South latitude). During the summer, the warm air from the mainland keeps most of the cold air masses out of at least the northern part of Tasmania. The weather changes almost constantly. In New England, if it's raining, it'll probably be raining most of the day; we hardly ever get large amounts of rain in short periods of time, except in summer. This morning was perfectly nice even though it rained early, and it's nice out now, even though it was raining during the afternoon.

First day of uni!

2008-02-25T12:30:51Z

NB: I'm going to avoid posting a million photos every day in order not to clutter up Planet Olin, so if you want to see more photos, ead over to my Flickr page. Today was the first day of classes. It was very, very long, but went pretty fast overall. My first Astronomy lecture was at 9am, and the professor is American, so I shouldn't have too much trouble understanding him (though that hasn't been too much of an issue, overall). I just finished reading Coming of Age in the Milky Way, which was very good, and covering briefly just about everything we're going to talk about. We mainly discussed the search for "intelligent" life in the universe, which in this context generally means some sort of being that sends out radio signals that we might be able to pick up. I was kind of disappointed because we just kept talking about the Drake equation, which is pretty much just conjecture. Equations that we don't really know the parameters to and can't be verified are pretty useless all around (just ask the Systems class!). The professor also spent some time assuring people that nothing really can move faster than light and yes, there really wasn't much going on before the big bang. I'm sure there is going to be a good amount of that over the course of the term, so I'm just not going to worry about it :). I sat around for two hours, ate my skimpy cut lunch (=bag lunch) from the dining hall, and managed to check a book out of the library. I'm trying to get back into reading Godel, Escher, Bach. It's kind of esoteric and makes you think really hard, but in a good way. The Australian Environmental History lecture was nothing special, just an outline of what we're doing in the class, and I guess we have to write a big essay by May 20th, but he gave us a list of a lot of topics and readings, so it shouldn't be a big deal as long as I stay on top of it. I skipped out of that lecture so I could catch the bus to go down to the city to make my photography lecture. The bus came on time and was really fast, so I made it in plenty of time. The lecture was a set of slides about photograms, which are pictures made directly on photo paper without a camera. I made them when I was a kid from some science kit that I got for Christmas. The practical session was mainly a stressful period of time when people figured out what session they needed to be in and found that they needed to be in the two that had already filled up. It ended up working out, though. It's really good that I brought my 35mm camera with me, because it turns out I will need it. Black and white film is incredibly expensive; I paid about $11 for a roll with 36 exposures. That's like 4 times the price of regular color film at home. And we're supposed to shoot at least one roll a week, so the cost is going to add up.

Market Day!

2008-02-23T05:59:55Z

Saturday is market day in Hobart; every Saturday morning down at Salamanca (pronounced differently than I first thought: it's sort of like "salamander", actually). There's several long aisles of lots of stalls selling ("busking") different items and food. A lot of it was pretty touristy, but there was plenty of nice stuff that was locally made. There were a lot of people selling hats and socks made from Australian wool, and there were nice bowls and clocks and other things from native wood. Most of that was pretty expensive. I did end up getting some postcards (bought for 60 cents each, when I found the same ones for 45 cents later on!), a small pewter figure of a Tasmanian tiger, and a floaty pen with a Tasmanian Devil for Dr. Furey, one of my favorite teachers in high school. It's been raining a bit over last few days, and we got caught in it on the way back from Salamanca. I dragged my friends Paul and Jess around to find the Fine Arts building, where I have to go for Photography class, which happens to be rather far from the main campus. I'm actually going to have to take a bus to get there, but as long as the professor doesn't mind me coming to lecture late, it should be all right.

Continued

2008-02-21T23:47:07Z

I have to keep posting to make up for the fact that I didn't have internet for about a week... As expected, my luggage did NOT come the next day. I pretty much had to survive with one set of clothes until it did show up on Monday. On Saturday I got an awful sunburn walking around Sandy Bay, which is sort of the suburb of Hobart that the university is situated in. On the way down the massive hill that John Fisher College is on (college=dorm) I looked up in the trees and actually saw a kookaburra, which was very exciting. I can hear them sometimes during the day; they sound like the monkey sound effect that is always used in jungle cartoons. Here's a link to what they sound like, if you're interested. While I was staring at this bird from across the street, I ended up meeting another American, and we ended up walking around together for the morning, exploring Woolworth's mainly. My sunscreen was in my luggage, so over the course of four hours in the sun I managed to get the worst sunburn I have ever had, which seems to be healing all right. I never go out without sunscreen anymore, because even though the mornings are often cloudy, it gets quite sunny by the afternoon. Saturday night I met some of the other people from the college and we played Articulate, which is sort of a cross between Taboo and Trivial Pursuit. I was pretty good at it, because I could get the American things, and I'm just pretty practiced in trivia in general. The other people who were playing were drinking beer out of bottles ("stubbies") but got told off for it. At Olin, the drinking in a common space would have been the problem, but apparently here that isn't a problem, it's just that like five years ago there was a very heated tennis match on TV and someone broke a beer bottle and threatened someone else with it, and since then you aren't allowed to drink from stubbies anywhere in the dorm except your own room. I've gotten through all of the orientation that the university planned; most of it was really boring and not particularly useful. They did provide some free barbeques, which I had to get used to. They were supposedly relatively traditional for Australia. They consisted of sausages, which weren't much like bratwurst or any sausages that we might serve here. I guess they weren't really flavored at all, they were just meat. And the vegetarian option were deep fried, breaded patties with peas and corn and carrots inside, and some white filler, which seemed strange but tasted okay. The only condiment is ketchup ("tomato sauce") and they only have slices of bread, no buns. On Wednesday there was a college trip to the beach, which was more like just going to a park. It was too cold to actually spend any time near the water. A lot of people were playing cricket, and I got a lecture on how to play, although it didn't make a whole lot of sense. We had another barbeque, which also included burgers and pork chops and there was barbeque sauce as another condiment. I mention it because I read in a book that there wasn't very good barbeque sauce in Australia, and it seems to be true; it tastes a lot like the ketchup. This trip was also notable because there were cockatoos just flying around. You know, the ones you see in pet stores and zoos; they're huge and white and have a yellow crest on their heads. There were also some smaller, rainbow-colored parrots, but I couldn't actually figure out what they were called. The other night I saw a brush-tail possum, but it was pretty dark and I couldn't see it very clearly. Last night we went on a boat cruise around the river, which was okay because it gave more time to just sit around and talk to people. Much of the conversation revolved around how expensive the drinks were and how bad they were. The views were nice, at least.

Greetings

2008-02-21T05:34:00Z

So I promised my parents that I would try to blog, and I'm sure some other people might be the least bit interested in what is going on, so I have finally found some time to sit down and post. They've shown us a weird happiness curve having to do with culture shock, where you start to worry about whether or not you should have come to a foreign country at all. I hit that the first morning here, but since then I've felt much better and am getting along well. The plane ride and everything was pretty much what I expected, but I was a lot more nervous and spent more time being worried than I thought I would. The weather was not very good last Wednesday when I left. The night before, it snowed in Boston, and the day of my flight was quite rainy. Because of this, my flight from Boston was delayed by a bit, but then they figured out that the plane we were supposed to take had a door that just wouldn't open. So I had to wait quite a bit longer and change gates before the plane came. All in all, there was about two and a half hours of delay that ate up my layover time at LAX. Once I got to LAX, the people on the plane said there would a shuttle to the other terminal for those departing from Melbourne, but that was ridiculous. First of all, the shuttle was nowhere to be found, and second, Tom Bradley (not Tom Brady!) International Terminal was only like 50 feet away. I ran, and managed to find some guys who had been on my flight and were taking the next one as well. The security line was probably a mile long, but we managed to get a Qantas rep to get us in front. No problems there, and we managed to get to the gate right as the flight started boarding. The thirteen or so hours went pretty quickly. I tried to sleep some, and the Qantas food was actually edible. The trouble came when I got to Melbourne. In Boston, the person who checked me in said that my luggage would go all the way to Hobart. Of course, this wasn't the case because I had to go through customs in Melbourne. So I waited over an hour for my bag, which didn't come. I gave an address to the Qantas baggage people, who assured me that I would probably get it the following day. I waited for a while in various Qantas check in lines for my final flight. Probably the worst part was being cut in line by a very obnoxious old couple who kept flashing some fancy card and insisting that they would *not* miss their flight. Finally I was told that I was in the wrong place altogether because my flight was operated by Jetstar (which is apparently a joke). But everything worked out; the people from UTAS were actually there to meet me at the Hobart airport, which was what I was perhaps worried about most. The Hobart airport is so small that they actually made us get out on the tarmac... Also, I somehow managed to not have to go through immigration. If I get deported, that will probably be why.

Monies

2008-01-24T20:37:46Z

I went to Bank of America and got my currency today. Since it is so different from American currency, I thought I would talk a little bit about it. First of all, the "paper" money is actually made of polymer. It's shiny and smooth and seems to resist being folded. The $20 note has a picture of Reverend John Flynn, who apparently started the Royal Flying Doctor Service, and Mary Reibey, who was a convict who arrived in 1792, made money in shipping, and became a noted philanthropist. The $10 bill has a poet, A. B. "Banjo" Paterson and Dame Mary Gilmore. One the $5 is Queen Elizabeth and the Parliamentary house in Canberra. I guess you're not allowed to have a person equal The Queen, but an awkwardly design capitol is okay. It's too bad that I don't have any coins yet; they have platypuses and echidnas and emus on them! It's also too bad that American currency is not quite as interesting. Australia has gone out of its way to put women and indigenous people and animals and singers and poets and doctors on its currency instead of dead presidents we hardly care about any more and that weird pyramid thing (on the one dollar bill anyway). On another note, I am bored out of my mind. And, of course, insanely jealous of the people who have already left. I've got a free trial of Netflix to keep me going for a while, and I'll be going to Olin next week for various events. Only three weeks left...

big update

2007-11-19T18:50:46Z

People have been bothering me for a while now to update, so I guess I will. I tried last week, but the site wasn't working... Hopefully, I'll have more luck now. Things have been progressing pretty fast. I submitted my application to the Olin people in the middle of October. I technically haven't heard back officially, but they let me know that my program was accepted. Now I just have to hear back about the specific courses I wanted to get credit for. UTAS didn't want to let me into the upper level Mechatronics course or the writing course I wanted, but they did let me into the animals one (which I was most worried about) and Australian Environmental History. They haven't said anything about Photography or the other technical course I ended up requesting, but I guess I should hear soon. I applied for (and was offered) housing at John Fisher college, which looks really amazing. It is smaller and perhaps less WASPy than Christ College, but I didn't have much to go on. Their mascot is the hellfish... I have no idea what that is. It seems that John Fisher's claim to fame is that he was beheaded after not acknowledging Henry IIX's first divorce. I'm sure I learned that at some point in 9th grade but promptly forgot it. So I just have to send them payment for the housing, but of course that is rather complicated and I haven't gotten around to it yet. I also applied for and was granted a visa, which was so easy that for a few minutes we all thought it might have been a scam... Dad and I went down to the American Express travel agency in Acton and ended up buying the plane tickets. I got window seats (yay!)! It looks like I can change the return date if I want to for an extra $150, plus the difference in fare if it has gone up, and an extra trip to the Hobart Airport.

I am to be congratulated

2007-07-31T01:56:46Z

I just got my acceptance to UTAS tonight by e-mail! It's nice to be accepted to things, even though it was not the most arduous application process (by far!). The e-mail I got pretty much said that they just mailed ("posted") me more information but I can ask if I have any more questions ("queries"). I can already tell that this is going to be fun. :)

First Pictures

2007-07-26T03:15:02Z

I've been playing around with my new camera. Here's a wide angle shot of the boys playing Super Smash Brothers. Not exactly a masterpiece, but I like the camera. Now I just have to wait for the memory card to ship.

Presents

2007-07-21T15:17:36Z

When my mom and dad were on vacation last week, my mom got me a few travely presents, including the passport holder in the picture. She also got be some neon-green luggage tags. I'm sure all the green accessories will go great with my bright red duffel bag...