An Anecdote. Or fever dream...

Well, since this is a blog about being in Australia, I suppose that this update should be about Easter, which I spent sailing around the Whitsunday Islands, or about last weekend, when my Rainforest Ecology class went to Paluma (and ate good old-fashioned Ozzie food, which was great). I should do these things soon, because I'm leaving for Boulia (about 15 hours inland) on Saturday and won't be back until Thursday (it's our mid-semester break), so that will be yet another thing to update you on.

But I'm feeling a little tired. Maybe it's that my schedule has been/will be travel, essay, travel, essay, travel, essay for a month, which gives me precious little time to just recover, let alone write blog updates.

So instead of writing about things that this blog Is Ostensibly About, I want to tell you about my Tuesday.

Tuesday is my shopping day, because I get out of class at 10:00, and since I bothered to wake up and walk 1/2 hour, I might as well buy food.

This Tuesday I was feeling a little under-the-weather. I was tired from my weekend, plus I'm coming down with a cold. Class was fine- we talked about extinct Australian megafauna... so really big marsupials. But it went over, and then they kept us to talk about the field trip...

So at 11:00 my two Ecology lab partners and I met with a woman who was supposed to help us with moss. So she had us seperating our moss samples (from the Paluma trip). My single sample took me 3 hours. THREE HOURS.

So now it's 1:00. I give up on the moss and decide to catch a bus to the grocery store. The bus schedule was completely changed this month, and the bus I was going to catch didn't show up. The one that did finally show as late, almost completely full, and broke down two blocks from the grocery store. So I walked... only to have the bus get back on its feet and pass me about a minute later.

Grocery store itself was average... better even, because two types of cookies and candy bars were all on sale.

Then it started raining. Torrential downpour. So I waited for 20 minutes for it to die down before walking to the bus stop (which is across a 4-lane road from the store). Got there right after my bus had left. Next bus was in 30 minutes.

I was waiting there, miserable and tired, when two guys in my Rainforest Ecology class stopped by, sat next to me, and started singing a Greenday song with the lyrics replaced with "Epiphyte."
If that wasn't bizarre enough, there was a guy waiting for the bus in a smiley-face ski mask. He came over to me and gestured that he wanted to know the time, and when I showed him my watch, he handed me a sticky note that said "Do something different. Smile."

So I smiled. And then my bus came (late). I'm keeping the sticky note... I'm going to tape it to my laptop.

Dear Smile Guy: You are the coolest person on earth. If I didn't hallucinate you...

Reef Head Quarters pics

As promised, pictures from the aquarium.

The Whitsundays were great- I'll have a full post about them, coming up.

Not so great was getting back to the 2,500 word paper I had only kinda started, so I'm not running on too much sleep. Miraculously, we were given an extension on the paper that was due this Friday that I haven't really done much on, so I get to sleep tonight for the first time in a while.

This weekend we go back to Paluma to do individual research projects. My group is looking at mosses.

My housemate got me some Cadbury creme eggs for Easter. I'm very excited about them. Also, I went shopping on Tuesday and picked up an Easter bunny and some more Cadbury creme eggs (I love them), plus some hot cross buns, all on sale, so that was my Easter Basket this year. In case you were worried.

Candy bar of the week:
Cherry Ripe: This is dried cherries with coconut, covered in dark chocolate. Tastes kind of like eating a large, chewy chocolate-covered cherry. I like them, but not quite as much as Bubbles.

The place was, naturally, full of little kids shouting "Look! A Nemo!" or "DORY!" (Fun fact: Finding Nemo has Nemo fished out of the water off the Great Barrier Reef, but he ends up in Sydney. This is a huge geography fail.)



Inside the smaller tanks:


And the giant one that the building sort-of wraps around (as far as I can tell), so you walk by different views of it as you go:

Some fish (most of which I can't identify.)
Mangrove Fish:



Crown-of-thorns starfish:



Giant Clam:

Nautilus (one of the ever-awesome cephelapod family)

Parrot Fish:

This shrimp looks like a muppet.

Really Big Starfish:

From the Big Fish tank:



You can see how big this one is. And friendly, too.

The seasnake. I really wish that the pictures had come out better, because I was quite smitten with it. It's maybe 4 feet long?


And a picture of me in the children's area, because I know you all haven't seen my face for a while: