My Travels in Australia

The crazy-looking new library is actually pretty cool. It's somewhat "interesting" in terms of finding something, because of weird shapes and staircases inside (which mean the shelves and stuff are all split up and move in and out around study rooms and stuff). Luckily, I don't have to find books, I have to find journals, and in reality I don't even have to find those because they're all online. So I'm perfectly okay with just thinking it looks cool haha. There's also a big courtyard at the back with benches and tables and stuff built-in, so it's a good place to go if you want to work outside, which I can only assume happens a lot down here!

I also met my first Australian snake today. It was a southern shovel-nosed snake, which was a couple of feet long. I'm guessing it'll get bigger. It seems from what I've found that they're technically poisonous, but they don't really bother people. I read on one site that it's because their mouths are too small to actual bite people. I guess that's comforting? Haha. I have still avoided meeting this guy, this guy and this guy, which are apparently the ones to avoid in this area...especially the first...as its name would suggest...at first I thought the name was a little extreme, but apparently it's fairly effective at making people not try to catch them, which I guess is good. I have yet to see cute looking geckos.

I'm up to 26 pages of writing on my thesis proposal. It'll obviously have to be edited, but at least I can just copy what I want to use out, and keep the rest for using for the full thing. Because it's somewhat of a new technology, or at least it is for what we want to use it for, my profs think we'll probably get between 2-4 separate journal articles out of it, so I'm sort of writing in chapters almost so that it's at least a little easier to transfer it between styles.

Some other things that are a little different here:

1. Everything seems to close relatively early at 6pm. I mean everything. It's even hard to find a restaurant that is solely a restaurant (and not attached to a hotel or whatever) in the city! And nothing in Perth is open on Sunday's. The moral of the story is make sure you do all of your shopping during business hours, and don't forget that Sunday = a day off for everyone.
2. Raspberry ginger ale tastes like Tahiti Treat. That's sort of okay, but not exactly what you're looking for with raspberry ginger ale. It's more like carbonated raspberry and fruit flavouring with lots of red colouring.
   
3. If you take any word and either add "ie" or subtitute its last syllable or last large section with "ie", chances are it's actually a real Australian short-form (sometimes with some minor spelling alterations)! For example, boardies are board shorts and mozzies are mosquitos.
   
4. Never call something football without at least a sentence explaining what you're talking about, or figure out what it's called here. Because football (footie haha) can mean football, soccer, rugby or Australian rules football, which doesn't seem to actually be football at all. P.S. Footie means rugby...which doesn't have the word foot in its name, but that's beside the point.
5. Eventually you have to succumb to the fact that daddy-long-legs spiders are an everyday part of where you live. They always show up, no matter what you do. In the end, they are not poisonous, and actually eat the spiders that are poinonous, so as long as they decide to stick to the ceiling you give up on trying to get rid of them all. Or you at least give them a good half hour before you decide you'll try getting rid of them. Apparently these tiny spiders actually eat huntsman spiders (the big one I said I saw before) and redback spiders (highly poisonous - it's related to the black widow, but smaller)...who knew? That actually led to a myth that they are the most poisonous spiders in the world, but just can't bite humans...it's just a myth...although I don't see how they test that really...it's not like they injected some poor person with lots of daddy-long-legs saliva or anything. Do spiders have saliva? Probably not. Anyways...
   
6. You have to adjust to the flavour of meat. When you first arrive, I highly suggest chicken over beef. Hamburgers do not taste the same at all...and it's not because of the beet and fried egg that are traditional toppings here!
7. You will never see the big dipper in Australia. But Orion is here most of the time. And the Southern Cross takes the big dipper's place.
8. Western Australia decided to use daylight savings time for the first time ever this year. Do not trust clocks in public. And do not trust computer operating systems to give you the right time when you select your time zone. None of those things know about daylight savings time. Wear a watch.

Labels: ECU, Miscellaneous, Research, Wildlife