The wild in wilderness

G'day mates! 

I’m writing to you now from Sydney, which has been exciting to say the least (the largest parade in Australia, the Gay and lesbian mardi gras parade, was held a few days ago so thousands of people from all over came down to participate, watch, or just enjoy the afterparties) but first I want to catch you all up on the last of my adventures in the Australian wilderness!  This is another long one (maybe I should just combine all these emails together and call it a thesis?  Just kidding- but thanks to Pablo for the suggestion.) so read or skim it if and when you have time.

summary: After our stay on Heron Island, we hopped on a bus and each day drove 5 or more hours up the Queensland coast- our final destination was the Daintree Forest (located about 100km north of Cairns), where we studied mangroves and other wetlands, before a short snorkeling adventure in the northern great barrier reef.

The best part about the drive up the coast (besides some fun swimming and diving in a crater lake), was that we went to a Crocodile farm and I even got to eat Crocodile meat pie!  It was delicious, and the guy who took us around feeding the crocodiles was fearless- he’d stomp around and even hit the crocs with a stick to get them to come out of the water and eat their food.  The biggest croc was something like 200 kilos- huge!- but the ones we got to hold and touch were much smaller (and seemed nicer).  The guy was missing most of his middle finger because a croc bit it off!

On our first day in the Daintree, our professor had never been to this one hiking place before, but decided to try it out.  Within five minutes of hiking, we’d seen a yellow water snake, he’d gotten stung on the lip by some flying bug, and the TA had gotten caught in this really spiky plant called a wait-a-while bush.  It was pretty ridiculous, but for some reason we kept hiking.  We had a few bad falls on the slippery rocks and routes, and were basically hacking our way through dense rainforest, and halfway out he said he was lost!  We got back to the road about an hour later than was on the schedule, and the two other groups (the Stanford program split into three groups of 10 that day- only my group went on this hike) just sat around and swam in the river rather than even attempt that hike again.  We felt pretty hard core with all of our scars and being covered in mud and stuff, it was great group bonding through mutual pain.

After that long day in the Daintree, they took us to this place where they make fruit flavoured ice cream, it was really good, and the flavours were very exotic, like “sour sop” and “wattleseed” and “black sapote”.. all these fruits that I’d never heard of before.  And then they had mango, too, which was just as good but not as exciting. 

The next day was a free day, and a few of us arranged to go horseback riding on the beach. This was, of course, wonderful!  I got to ride this great horse named Teddy, who had just recovered from an injury, but was super well trained and cantered gorgeously.  My legs were sore afterward but I think we got a whole group of us cantering along the water’s edge at least 4 different times for a good solid minute each time.  Those horses were in good shape!  After the beach, they led us through the rainforest, and it was actually quite sad to see our horses getting eaten by soo many mosquitoes no matter how hard we tried to brush them off.  And then WE started getting eaten by mosquitoes and that was even more sad.  Hehe.  Gotta love the tropics.  One guy on the program got more than 50 bites on one arm, they were driving him crazy during the presentations yesterday.  Poor guy.

The last few days in the mangroves were crazy and intense and difficult and wonderful all at the same time.  I ended up in a great group of people for our research project, but we spent the entire first day from dusk til dawn looking for a saltmarsh to do our transects and were completely unsuccessful.  It was quite the adventure.  First, trekked through the mud for an hour before realizing that we were on private property and that the saltmarsh we thought we saw on the aerial photo had been overgrown since the photo was taken.   We got the GPS coordinates for another site (we thought that would guarantee we’d find it) and it turns out it was across a banana farm from the road, and our GPS couldn’t get a reading through the thick clouds.  And why were there thick clouds?  Because Cyclone Kate was headed right for us!  So we ended up driving around in the rain in our little refugee van for a long while (enjoying ourselves, no doubt, but not being productive) and decided the best and only way to get to the site would be by boat and then by foot. 

So we went and loaded up this tiny little boat and braved the intense rains until we found what we thought was a good landing place, got off, traipsed through the mangroves following our compass needle.  Again, we found nothing.  At this point, we’re all soaked through our clothes with water and mud, the mosquitoes were coming out because it was dusk, so we turned around and traipsed all hour and a half back out the boat, got back to be late for dinner… still no site, still no data.  And we were only given 3 days to collect and analyse the data and prepare for a presentation and a test on all of the mangrove species!! 

Day 2 was more successful- we found a site, but it was somewhat flooded (from all the cyclone rain), so all day we sloshed around in knee deep water (and sometimes rain, too) collecting all of our soil and water and vegetation samples for our project.  We got back just in time for dinner, and that dinner we all sat at our own table because we were smothered in mud and I’m sure we smelled delightful, but the cook insisted that we eat right away, so we did (we were starving and dehydrated, anyway). 

Those three crazy days felt like a few weeks of Stanford academics packed into a few days. 

After all of the papers and presentations were over, we had a special dinner that night and our TA gave out silly awards (they called them “rotten pig” awards?  I’d never heard of that before) but I won this little pin that says “No Wucking Furries” for being the most optimistic and best morale-booster in the group!  :)

No Wucking Furries is what our TA told us to say to practice our Aussie accents while we were on the bus.  Switch the first letters of wucking and forries and you get what it means… he said when he worked at Deer Valley ski resort, lots of people would see on his nametag that he was from Australia and say stuff like “g’day mate” in horribly fake accents, so he would just stick them on the ski lift and say “yeah, no wucking furries, mate” and before they could ask what it meant they’d be halfway up the hill.  Funny story, and now I have a pin to put on my backpack!  I already have a pin from Barcelona, so it will be a nice touch to complement the other one.

After that, we switched back into Marine Biology mode and had a day of snorkeling in the Low Isles just north of Cairns.  The coral here was much different- a lot more soft spongy coral rather than the hard stuff that was at Heron Island, and a lot more colorful since soft coral doesn’t seem to be susceptible to bleaching!

The most entertaining part of the day of snorkeling was the full-body blue lycra suits we wore as protection against box jellyfish and urukanji jellyfish.  The risk is pretty low out there, but a bad sting can easily kill you in a half hour, so we wore them anyway… and had a ball!!  We definitely looked like aliens in those suits, but nevertheless some of us wanted to steal them and wear them forever because they were so comfortable and we’d never have to put on sunscreen or bug spray ever again!  Hehe.  Obviously that plan didn’t work out, but they did protect us all day and we got some great funny photos.

Well it's late here so I must go, but I hope you're all doing well and I'll have tons to write about Sydney in a week (and then three weeks in Brisbane after that), so you can look for that email!

take care all, thanks for reading :), and hit reply and tell me how things are back in the states!

much love,

Em

p.s. for those at stanford- I found out I'm living in Serra next quarter, which I am very happy about!  Come visit!

Welcome to Paradise

Hello again everyone!  It’s been quite a while since I last wrote, I
apologize, but I have some amazing stories and have done some amazing
things in these last two weeks that I’m just itching to tell you about!

I spent the last two weeks on Heron Island, which is part of a group of
islands located on the Tropic of Capricorn and are basically the
southernmost part of the Great Barrier Reef.  You can walk around the sand
part of the island in 15-20 minutes, but the reef around it extends several
kilometers in each direction!  The island has only two things on it: the UQ
research station and an upscale beach resort (which we were basically
forbidden to go to, except for a couple pre-scheduled nights at the bar).

We arrived by boat (a two hour long very bumpy one- it’s a good thing I like
rollercoasters) and even just pulling into the harbor we could see several
rays and sea turtles from the boat!  The sand is impossibly white, the
water very clear and blue and the trees “rainforest green” (That’s a color-
just check a Crayola box).
The next thing that we quickly noticed walking into the research station was
the BIRDS!!  Oh my goodness the island is practically overrun with birds.
Three distinct species of birds are common on the island, each with their
own quirky personality and certainly worth telling you about.

The most conspicuous species is the Noddy Terns, who have lived on Heron
Island for hundreds of years with no predators and are thus fearless and
seem to be pretty stupid.  They make two contributions to the island: a
whole lot of noise all day long and a whole lot of bird poop falling from
the sky.  You haven’t truly been at Heron Island until you receive the
initiation process of getting shat on by a Noddy Tern.  I think we all got
our share of Nitrogen and Phosphorus!  Haha
The second type of bird we see a lot in the daytime is the Rail, a
‘scavenger’ bird that we only really see around mealtimes when they come
pick up whatever crumbs or bits of food have fallen around the dining
tables.  There was a nest of these birds right outside our bunk rooms, so a
few mornings we had the pleasure of watching fuzzy baby rails walk around
our patio with us as we got on our snorkel gear.  They were adorable!
The third type of bird (my favorite) is the Shearwater, that fly around all
day long (thus we only see them at night).  But when we see them, boy do we
see them AND hear them.  They haven’t seemed to evolve any sort of adequate
“landing gear” for when they come down from a full day of flying, so they
essentially just fly downward till they hit something… and then they just
recover and waddle away.  Their clumsy landings are great entertainment
when we’d all be studying outside at night, but we had to be careful or
else we’d get hit, too!  Many of the students ended up serving as stopping
posts, as did just about every wall and table and chair around the lecture
hall.  After settling down for the night, they’d make the weirdest night
noises.  The females moan in the early evening and then later the males
sound eerily like babies crying.  Sleeping on the top bunk of the second
floor room positioned me perfectly for listening to them in the treetops!
Hehe.
There are a few other birds around that tend to keep to themselves- they are
the white and black herons (technically they’re egrits) after which the
island is named, and a few seagulls like the ones we have back home.

Besides the reef fish and sharks, the most spectacular wildlife on the
island are the sea turtles.  Turtle nesting season goes from late October
through April, and during this time mother turtles come onshore to make a
hole and bury 30-40 of their eggs about once a month, and 6 weeks later the
nest hatches and those 30-40 baby turtles push their way out of the sand and
follow the moonlight’s reflection on the water down to the beach.  Both
nesting and hatching happens in the evening or at night, and due to the
small size of the island and the large number/frequency of nesting, just a
half hour walk on the beach anytime after 5pm guarantees seeing at least
one of these spectacular events happening right before your eyes.  Thus our
favorite nighttime activity was just hanging out on the beach and either
watching a mother turtle labor through nesting, or counting the babies as
they scuttle down the sand.  It was pretty incredible, and now our evenings
back on the mainland seem so placid compared to any night on the island.

After a week and a half of all-day lab activities and lectures (neither of
which was unenjoyable, considering the subject matter), the last four days
were devoted to research.  Everyone had been preparing for their project
since applying to the Australia program way back last March, and for my
project, these were four pretty intense days.  My project was focused
around the fish communities that depend on coral species for their habitat.
 A lot of coral bleaching has been occurring on the Great Barrier Reef
(bleaching is where the coral starts losing its pastel coloring and
becoming increasingly pale and white, because it loses its photosynthetic
microalgae symbionts) and the head professor for the entire
Stanford-Australia program became famous when he published a paper about
this bleaching and its implications for global warming and the impending
doom of the planet’s coral reefs in the near future (it’s a little
overdramatized if you ask me)!  Needless to say, a lot of our labs and
lectures revolved around the controversy over global warming as well as the
physiology of corals and the other marine organisms.  But back to my
project- my responsibilities over those 4 days was to go out to the same 20
colonies of coral (we tagged them with fluorescent pink tape) and just sit
and watch and observe how many and what kinds of fish swam around those
corals.  It was HEAVEN!  Haha- I enjoyed it very much, got very sunburned
from so much time in the sun, but really made friends with the fishies
(especially the ones that were there every time I went out) and though I
don’t think we got any significant trend (there seemed to be just as many
fish around corals that were bleached as there were at unbleached ones), I
had the time of my life out there.

During those observation sessions and other snorkels we took as a group
(including one at night and several on the outer reef where the
biodiversity is tremendous), I got to swim with a giant loggerhead sea
turtle, a manta ray, a whip ray, a cowtail ray, 3 different kinds of
sharks, and a bajillion types of gorgeous butterflyfish, damselfish, and
clownfish.  My morning runs were difficult on the sand but always worth it
because the morning low tide is when the sharks and rays tend to congregate
on the shallow part of “Shark Bay” on the northern part of the island and
one morning I saw more than 25 rays practically on TOP of each other in the
shallow water as the tide came in.

In addition to the great natural surroundings, the Stanford students I’m
here with continued to bond as a group and we made some great new friends
as well.  For example, there was a group of study abroad students from a
college in Idaho staying in the other set of bunks at the research station,
and the two groups got along marvelously: they arrived about a week before
us and were happy to pass on the expertise they had about when to go
looking for turtles, watching out for divebombing shearwater birds, and how
to get the DVD player to work on the big lecture screen.  It was a sad day
when they boarded the boat to return home to the US, and the island felt a
little emptier for the week after that.
Additionally, Heron Island is a hot spot for researchers and press at the
moment, and many Stanford professors took advantage of us being there to
come and “visit” us, give a guest lecture, and basically have a two week
long vacation and/or contribute to some of the research going on at the
station.  Four different Stanford faculty members showed up, only two of
which were originally scheduled to come with us… and three film crews (one
Australian, one American and one Japanese), a radio announcer, and several
of the researcher friends of the main professor came to “visit” as well!
This was good for us because we got to hear some great guest lectures and
meet people with a diversity of stories to tell, and they all got a little
piece of paradise for themselves, too.  :)

With such exotic and beautiful sights also comes exotic and not-so-beautiful
risks and injuries!  During our first snorkel in the outer reef I came back
with red welts all over my shoulder and back from what we assume is a
jellyfish or hydra, I never saw it but felt it and swam away as quick as
possible!  A colony of baby “blue bottle” jellyfish (also known as
Portuguese man-of-war) floated in with the tide one day and 4 out of 5
students who were collecting coral samples ended up getting stung.  Also,
one side of the island is lined with rocks and little colonies of coral
that, at low tide, make for great tidepooling, but are exceedingly slippery
and I managed to bang up both hands, a knee and my feet pretty badly by the
end of the two weeks.

Well hopefully that’s satiated your need for info. about my wonderful
Australian island life, now we’re back to the very different life of
trampling through rainforest (currently I have mud and bug bites all up and
down both legs- it feels excellent). Haha
Until next time (which will be about our looong bus trip up the coast and
the tropical rainforest a.k.a. crocodile-infested wetland I’m currently
in), I send you my love and best wishes,
Emily

Once again, greetings from Australia!

This email is a bit of a composite of things I wrote while they were happening and other things I’m now straining my memory to recover.  Hope you like it…

I’m quite settled in, wishing I could live the life of a traveling Biology student forever!! Let’s just say I’ve gotten used to the bus driver being on the right side of the bus.  J

Australia is awesome.  This program has had us running around, milking everyday for what it’s worth!  So let’s recap a bit:

First week: Brisbane at University of Queensland (my last email)

Second week: North Stradbroke Island for ‘coastal resource management’

Third week: Lamington National Park for ‘coastal forest ecosystems’

Now: a few days to regroup in Brisbane before heading to Heron Island for the next two weeks for a class and research on the Great Barrier Reef!

North Stradbroke Island:

This is a huge, completely sand island that we have learned to affectionately call “Straddie.”  We were here for almost a week and a half, and though the accommodations were sparse (8 bunks to each little room), I think we all fell in love a little bit with the island.  The research station is right on the water, and the dining/study hall is 2^nd story and open air (with netting, thank goodness) such that we can see across the bay as we eat and study!  We thus learned to tell time by the tide (because it’s a sand island, the beach extends a good 200m out before dropping off, and thus the water moves a good distance up or down the bar within a half hour or so!  On the eastern side are some of the greatest surf beaches in all of Queensland!  We made some pretty incredible sand castles and even got to see sea turtles, dolphins and manta rays from a rocky overlook!

Other things on Straddie:

We swam across a big lake surrounded by tea trees such that the water is brown, and tastes and smells like tea! 

One of our excursions took us to a steep hillside thick with vegetation, and to our initial horror, our professor put on his best hiking shoes and just started blazing a trail up the side of the mountain the best he could (slipping every once in a while).. near the top, just about when you can’t see more than 3m ahead or above you because of dense greenery, the greenery simply stops, and you emerge on this giant sand dune!  It was unreal!  Hopefully you’ll check out those pictures, I left a message in the sand for you J (see attached).

Stradbroke is also well-known for one of the longest and strongest traditional Aboriginal communities in Australia.  A man from the Quandamooka tribe came to our class and taught us all how to throw boomerangs, and make fire with sticks and coconut husk.

On to Lamington:

Now we’re at Lamington National Park, a little south and inland of Brisbane.  It’s a rainforest park formed on top of an inactive volcano.  We’re sleeping in a little resort called O’Reilly’s that’s got some great touristy things as well as all of the natural splendor.  We spent about 3 hours yesterday feeding these purple and red birds, and then we did a canopy walk, with walkways suspended up way above the ground, and a platform more than 60m above the forest floor.  Our professors are the typical, eccentric, outdoor loving people I expected and we’re learning so much just over sitting and listening to their cryptic conversations about this or that species of rainforest bird, or spider, or tree.

The stars out here are amazing- though it’s the coldest place we’re ever going to be on this trip, we’ve been out stargazing and nightwalking every night we’ve been here.

All 33 of us are piled into one house with many rooms, and many, many bugs.  My room of 6 girls spent almost 45 minutes last night trying to set free (OUTSIDE) the multitude of strange and (luckily) harmless bugs that had made their way through the open window during the evening.  The worst was one black-spotted beetle that had burrowed into someone’s bathtowel as it lay on the floor and when she picked it up to use it, it started crawling on the back of her upper thigh.  That image gave us nightmares for a bit, (and maybe it will give you some, too!  Hehe)

The group continues to get along well, and every new activity puts people into different groups so everyone is getting to know pretty much everyone else!

Today (jan. 29) we hiked for more than 6 hours, to the very tip of the rim of the volcano that this park is built around.  The rim of the volcano also makes up the border between Queensland and New South Wales (the state that Sydney is in).  It rained (in the rainforest) pretty much the whole way there and the whole way back.  We took a long way up to the edge in the morning, which involved more than 16 river/creek crossings, none of which had particularly favorably spaced stepping stones (which made it even better!)  In our course guide the teacher included a timetable of how long it took the last few years’ Stanford and Cal groups to make the big loop, and thanks to us jogging back in the mud, we beat them all by a half hour.  And then quickly washed off the mud and all jumped in the pool and hot tub at the resort to enjoy the last of the rain.

The main activity on these all-day hikes (other than enjoying/learning about the gorgeous rainforest scenery) is singing.  There are three or four singers in the group (as in, they perform with a Stanford acappella or choral group), and just about everyone else enjoys singing along, so we make quite a ruckus as a group everywhere we go, and are never bored, even on the long and strenuous hikes we’ve been taking lately.  Each hike also leads to a site where we’ve been collecting data on the leaves and animal diversity there.

The other ‘pastime’ we’ve acquired is playing ultimate Frisbee.  The only time we really have complete freedom to decide what to do is after dinner, and thanks to it being summer, it’s just light enough to convince us to head out to the field around 7:15pm, but by 8 or so it’s quite dark, and yet, we’ve created a new sport called low-visibility ultimate Frisbee and everyone just has a ball!

Well there’s some anecdotes about my Aussie life, I bet you’re all just ready to buy your plane tickets out here to join me! Haha

Hope all is well back at home, please write back to me about what’s going on!

Just a few things:

-         Great job to Alliance for performing at the Stanford Basketball Game!

-         Great job to my dad for getting his National Referee Badge this weekend!

-         Congrats and many big hugs and kisses to Meg and Tom as they get married this weekend! I’ll be thinking of you!!

Australia update One

G’day mate!

Well I am safe and sound here in the land of Oz!

So let’s just “dive in,” shall we?

I arrived in Brisbane about a week ago after two full days of traveling (thanks to crossing the date line).  Brisbane is 18 hours ahead of the US West Coast (so right now it’s noon on January 16^th in Brisbane but only 6pm on January 15^th back at Stanford).

It might be good to orient you all geographically to where in Australia Brisbane is, and where the program will take me in the next three months.

The program is a joint operation between Stanford and the University of Queensland.  Queensland is one of 6 Australian states, and is located in the northeastern corner.  Despite so much of Australia being dry desert, the majority of what I’ll be seeing is on the (eastern) Queensland coast, where the humidity hits 90% on a regular basis (as in.. 4 of the 9 days I’ve been here).  Some locals said that we were lucky to arrive right now because Brisbane’s been having a rainy spell and that would ease us into the heat to come, especially starting next week when we begin our travels up the Coast and closer to the equator.

There are 34 Stanford students on the program and we’ve all been getting along wonderfully, and it’s a good thing since we’ll be living in close quarters and traveling together for such a long period of time.  The female:male ratio is 3:1, which is somewhat typical of study abroad programs, but still a little disappointing for us girls… hehe

Besides the humidity and lack of males, so far the program has been somewhat of a paradise.  The trees I see and birds I hear just walking down the street are like those seen in movies about tropical paradise- large green fronds hanging over every path, bright red and yellow (and green and purple) birds making a myriad of calls, pure white sand on uncrowded beaches, huge waves to please all the surfers, and, well, lots of attractive and fit people with sexy accents!

A flip side to the attractive and rugged Australian image that I’ve just mentioned, racism (against anyone who looks like they might be of Aboriginal descent, against middle easterners, anyone not participating in the vision of a ‘white Australia’) is subtle but certainly present.  It feels as if all race tensions in America (whether against African-Americans, Native American, or more recently Middle Easterners) were combined into one here- all against Aboriginals.   Though this is a sad state of affairs, like many race issues it’s a big improvement even from just a half century ago.

Everyone in the program takes the same four classes while in Australia: Australian Studies, Coastal Forest Ecosystems, Coastal Resource Management, and Coral Reef Ecosystems.  Due to the fact that this is a traveling program (we never stay at any one location longer than two weeks), the classes tend to be in chunks, where we have the same class all day everyday for a week and a half, and then a free day, a travel day, and a week and a half of another class.  It’s a great program because these locations are ideal for teaching these classes; for example, we’ll be on North Stradbroke Island for Coastal Resource Management, but then right across from that island is Moreton Bay with Lamington National Forest which is great for learning about Coastal Forest Ecosystems, and for the Coral Reef Ecosystems we’ll be on Heron Island (which has a sand circumference of 1 mile but is fringed by a part of the Great Barrier Reef that is incredibly extensive! 

Also due to the way this is structured, the amount and reliability of internet access varies significantly from site to site, so these emails might be a bit more sporadic than usual, please bear with me!

Anyways, back to what I’ve been doing.  We are currently stationed at the University of Queensland, St. Lucia campus, which is on a bend in the Brisbane river, just a short ferry or bus ride away from the main part of town.  Brisbane reminds me quite a lot of Venice in that the easiest way to get around is by boat on the Brisbane river which conveniently winds through most of the interesting parts of town.

We took a 'field trip' a few days ago to the Gold Coast, defined by our professor as "a cross between Florida and Las Vegas."  It's got incredible waves with skyscrapers right along the beach, and its biggest tourist attraction is a place called Surfer's Paradise, where we spent an afternoon.  The day was wonderful, sunny, and we had a great time trying to stay afloat in the gigantic waves as well as having a leisurely lunch while overlooking one of the main streets.

Yesterday we had the opportunity to go to the famous Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary, where we cuddled koalas, watched echidnas and emus, howled with the dingoes, and (my favorite) fed and pet kangaroos.  This park was truly amazing and as soon as I can hook up my computer I’ll send out more of the pictures from this great trip.  For now (and perhaps as a substitute for those pet koalas I jokingly promised many of you), check out my koala picture at http://www.koala.net/photo/1401030990.htm  The koala’s name was Squid!

Well there’s a glimpse into the busy life we’re leading down under at the moment, I hope that you are all doing well and please reply if you have questions, comments, or there’s something new and exciting happening in your life.  I’d love to hear about it!

Until next time (and cross your fingers the Internet will be more readily available soon)...

Much love,

Emily

P.S.  This side note is for Tiffany and others interested in politics.  The political leadership is constantly under harsh media scrutiny and the kinds of things they ask leaders (or leaders say themselves) would be quite inappropriate in many other countries but are just commonplace language here.  (And we thought “Yo’ mama” jokes were creative...)  My favorite is from the quick-witted former Prime Minister Paul Keating, speaking about debating with a politician from the opposing party:

“(Debating with him) was like being flogged by a piece of warm lettuce.”

More on this phenomenon later, when I have more concrete examples.

P.P.S.  I love Australian slang.  I may throw some into these emails now and then.  Some good, common ones:

Swat= cram (as in, cramming for an exam)

Spruke= speak publicly

She’ll be Right, She’ll be Apples= No Worries, It’ll be alright

Tall Poppy= Overachiever (implying that the tall poppy is about to be cut down to size)

Larrikin= lazy bum

Sandgroper= anyone from Western Australia

Extra stuff I just feel like writing about:

If you rotate Australia 180 degrees and superimpose it ontop of North America (here, let me help:   ) then the Cape York Peninsula matches up pretty well with Baja California and the upper part of the Australian Northern Territory matches up well with Mexico.  In fact, the latitudes of this superimposition are pretty accurate, and so the climates of cities like Los Angeles and Sydney are similar because they’re just about the same distance from the equator!

The biggest cities in Australia are on the East Coast, with Brisbane being the furthest north, (though only just about halfway up the Coast), Sydney 600 miles South of Brisbane, and Melbourne about 600 more miles Southwest of Sydney.  All three of these cities, mind you, are in different states.  Australia’s made up of 6 states and several territories, the most notable territory being the Northern territory, which makes up a sizable portion of the Australian continent and yet is pure desert and has little population or government at all!

The last portion of the “schoolwork” on this trip is the research project- each person has an individual project within a group of two or three people all studying a similar topic.  For example, my group is the effects of Coral Bleaching on Coral Symbionts, and within that topic I’ll be looking at how the number and make-up fish fauna varies between healthy coral and coral that’s been “bleached” (turned white and nearly dead by exposure to temperatures that their color-producing organisms cannot tolerate).  This past November and December have been the hottest on record at Heron Island (where the University of Queensland has a station and where I’ll be conducting my research) and so there may be one of the most severe and/or widespread coral bleaching events in history occurring while I’m on the island studying it.  Both exciting and depressing, huh?

Currently Listening Something to Be By Rob Thomas see related

my dad told me about a week ago that i have unconditional buyer's remorse.  you know, when you buy something and then immediately regret buying it afterwards (because you're sad about what you COULDN'T get as a result of buying that thing)?  wow i really explained that well.

no but seriously i never think about what i have, or what i GOT out of a decision, only what I'm missing.  I chose to go to Australia next quarter, which will be amazing, but it meant that I can't take stanford's multitude of winter quarter classes, I'm missing my aunt's wedding, I am separated longer from many of my friends, I'm going to be totally broke, and had to suffer through fall quarter alone on the farm.

and even last quarter, i was HOME, I was back in good ol' FloMo with two great drawmates still oncampus, with an amazing dance group, and all I could think about was how I wasn't in Europe, how I was separated from so many people that I love, and how I felt so all alone.  When there was so much to be thankful for right there in front of me.

It's pretty bad.  Like right now, I'm complaining about some internal flaw that I have rather than appreciating the things I'm good at and the blessings I have been granted.

hmm.. well i guess that means this rant is over.

good night.  in less than 4 days I leave for australia (see you in 3 months!...)