Koalas, Kangaroos, Wombats, and Changes of Major

As I mentioned before, last weekend Nicole and I went to the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary.  Since you can get a pretty good play by play on her blog (click here), and pictures on her Flickr (click here), I'll be a little less detailed here. 

Nonetheless, hanging out with the socialized kangaroos was pretty sweet.  Probably my favorite part of the experiences, as cool as the koalas were.  The roos were just a lot more interactive, especially if you had food in your hand and they weren't already full (it was towards the end of the day, they had already eaten a lot of tourist dollars).  There were some wallabies too, and emus, which I find hilarious.  They're pretty ridiculous looking birds.  After wandering around for a while with the kangaroos and just as we were about to leave the enclosure we came across a mother nursing her joey.  

We then got to cuddle a Koala named Linus and pay another 15 bucks to have our picture taken with him (we have to scan it, it will be online shortly), in the meantime take a look above to see Nicole and our buddy.  We also saw some wombats (Jim...), a bunch of birds, crocodiles, dingoes and echidnas.

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I'm also changing my major again, I kind of missed the business mindset and have pretty much exhausted all of the geography courses of interest to me at DU. I was also kind of steered away by the Urban and Regional Design class I was going to take- it was pretty much an engineering course.  Not my cup of tea.  I'll stick to the hospitality and business side of things thank you. I've always had an interest in marketing and I've done pretty well at it, plus at this point it works out best so that I can still graduate 2 quarters early.  I'll have a BSBA in Marketing with a minor in Geography.

Noosa and the Sunshine Coast

Hell's Gates, Noosa National Park

So this weekend Leslie, Lauryn, Nicole and I went up to Noosa on the Sunshine Coast for a few days away from the city.

Noosa is a small resort town north of Brisbane on the Sunshine Coast, less developed and more natural and local than its counterpart south of the city, the Gold Coast, which is where you find glitzy towns like Surfer's Paradise and stuff.  Noosa is much more laid back.  We did the whole thing for pretty cheap ($9 each way, plus $25 a person a night for accommodations), which was nice.  

The hinterland of the Sunshine Coast is gorgeous, and the Glass House Mountains, huge, isolated pillars of stone about 2000 feet tall, are some of the treats you see along the way from Brisbane.  We stopped and ate lunch in Nambour, a town I guess about the size of Peru.  It was cool to see a bit more rural side of Australia, deep in the heart (well, relatively) of the country.

The first night we were there we decided to go out for dinner and splurge a bit, and justified spending the money by buying groceries to cook dinner for ourselves the next night.  We went to Hastings Street, the main drag in town, and walked around a bit until we decided to go in for drinks and an appetizer at Zachary's, a gourmet pizza place. It had a bit of a low key resort town feel to it, almost like a tropical Telluride, which is what the town sort of was.   The cocktail menu was extensive, I'm not sure I've ever seen more kinds of vodka anywhere.  I had a glass of wine, but it was fun for Nicole to order a snazzy cocktail as her first legal drink. 

We then went to a cafe for dinner and more drinks.  I tried Coopers Pale Ale, hoping it would be something similar to the Pale Ales I'm used to back home.  Sadly, it wasn't.  It was pretty thin and not very bitter, just not a whole lot of flavor at all.  I've been branching out and trying some white wines (still no reds for me) because I'm sort of resigning myself to the the fact that I'm not going to get the quality of brews I'm used to in the states where the microbrew movement is 20 years old compared to Australia where its still in its infancy.  I figure if I can't have good beer, I might as well learn to enjoy something they do well here, and white wines definitely fit that bill.  The  Chardonnays I've had were great, as was the Sauvingon Blanc, but the Verdelho, (which I had never heard of, especially since I don't know wine), was a little to sweet for my liking.   The cocktails at the cafe mentioned much earlier in this monster of a paragraph were fanciful too, again fun for Nicole considering she doesn't like wine or beer.  The meal was fantastic, I had a chicken special with Tomato Risotto Cakes that was very well presented and tasted great.

The next day we went up to the National Park in Noosa Heads for some hiking.  When we got to the park there was a Koala (how fittingly Australian) perched in the eucalyptus tree right outside the park entrance.  We hiked the Tanglewood route through some deep rainforest with lush vegetation and impressive ravines and gorges.  No Koala sightings, but we did see and hear some interesting birds.  We got to the other end of the trail where it met up with the coastal route, and explored a remote beach and some rocks to one side with snails and tide pools everywhere.  The water here is really beautiful in the sense that it changes from a deep blue to a bright turquoise as it gets closer to shore. 

We then saw Hells Gates, pictured above.   We tried to take lots of pictures but like when skiing in the mountains, the scale and depth of this gorge were impossible to capture.  There wasn't a good place to take a picture of the sheer rock wall that drops at your feet.  We even saw a sea turtle swimming towards the front of it.  It was the defining experience of the trip for me.  We walked back along the Coastal Trail to finish off our hike back into town, where we ate lunch and got some magnificent ice cream from a place called Massimo's I had read about on our way there.  Massimo himself is from Italy and the ice cream is about as authentic as you get.  All in all we walked about 9 miles, on top of the 2 miles we had jogged in the morning along the river.  The next morning we played tennis, or tried to at least, before we left.  It was a pretty active trip for Nicole and I, and I'm pretty sore but it was worth it.

Check out pictures on Nicole's Flickr- links to the left, especially later today or tomorrow after we visit the Koala Sanctuary.

I'm finding that titles for posts aren't always easy to come up with...

Just a quick update:

We were going to go to the Koala sanctuary and play with some Koalas, Kangaroos, etc. today, but it was rainy so we're going to save it for another day.  

Tomorrow through Saturday we're going up to Noosa on the Sunshine Coast to hang out, do some kayaking, see some wildlife, see the beaches, and hopefully eat some good Mod-Oz (Modern Australian) food.  

Oh and I forgot to let you know how the Kangaroo turned out.  It was really lean, so kind of hard to cook, but the flavor wasn't all that different from beef or bison.  A little gamey, so if you've had Elk or Venison its sort of similar to that.  It has some definite possibilities, though.  I'll post recipes here and on the Grilling Society's website after we do some more experimentation.

More updates next week after the trip and as classes start.

Orientation and Registration

Went to orientation yesterday.  Was kind of long, and I didn't really learn a ton of new stuff, but I got a free lunch out of it, so who am I to complain?  It was Subway.  There are seriously more Subways here than there are Starbucks in an American city.  Who knew?

Registered for classes, got what I wanted, and it appears as if I'll have no Friday classes.  Tuesdays will be really busy though.  I'm taking Tourism Marketing, Marketing Planning and Management, Urban Design Practice, and either French or German.

Just waiting for Nicole to get here, pictures to come.

More adventures as a bewildered Yank

So now that I've gotten my student ID and computer registered at QUT, I'll be able to be online at more regular intervals. Of course the blog posts can't be guaranteed to always be so long either...

QUT (Queensland University of Technology) is where I'll be spending the next few months as a student. It is a pretty awesome campus, right next to the Queensland Botanical Gardens. Its an interesting combination of old (original Parliament House), sorta new (60/70's box like buildings), and new. Very urban, and much larger than DU. More about classes as time goes on.

Being on such a big winding river is really cool, it adds a lot of ambiance to the city. I'm kind of into that sort of thing as a geographer/developer...

I went to the grocery store this morning. It was a mildly traumatizing experience. Most of the produce and meat was the same, and similarly price, if not a bit more expensive. The carrots were nearly the size of my forearm. Its interesting that certain things like a candy bar or coke are A$2, where as they're about a buck back home. Lamb is only about A$5 a pound here, much more expensive back home. Deals are harder to figure out though since everything is in kilo's. I actually bought a little under a pound of Kangaroo Steak for dinner for about A$6. I'm not joking. Its supposed to be good for you (high in protein and 98% fat free) and have less impact on the environment (kangaroos need less food, water, and fart a whole lot less, which means less disruption and methane prodcution). I'll let you know how it goes tomorrow.

Later this afternoon I'm planning on taking the ferry for kicks and giggles, moving into my room room, and we're planning on doing something like going to a bar or bowling tonight. I'll probably do laundry too cause all I'll have to do is put in a pair of jeans which got soaked with detergent when my bagged and taped shut bottle of detergent slipped its plastic bonds on the flight over here. I guess I can't complain if thats the only thing that burst.

Pictures and more remarks will come on Nicole's blog once she gets here in 3 days. (she has a camera)

First Post from Australia!

Ok, so I'm finally able to update my blog. Its been a long 2 (3?) days to say the least.

I started out leaving for the airport in Indy at 10am, and arrived at the airport in brisbane at about 4:30pm the next day. Sort of weird that I flew out of one airport in Indianapolis and I'll fly back into the shiny new one.

I flew through Denver to get to LAX, where I had about a 7 hour layover. So after lugging my bags to check in for my Qantas flight, I took a free shuttle to the Crowne Plaza, right next to 24hr Fitness to work out. Then I walked to the ATM to deposit some money, and on the way back I had to stop at In n' Out Burger, due to its reference in the Big Lebowski, and praise from anyone who has lived in California. It was good, I must say, but not the best burger I've ever had. I saw a British Airways 747 land overhead when I was walking back, and it was so close I could see the vortices coming off of the wings.

I got back to LAX, which was a complete zoo at this point in the International Terminal because of all the departures to Pacific destinations at night. Plus the gate was packed with a bunch of groups. World Youth Day is in Sydney this year, and half a million people are going to see the Pope. I think flights were so hard to come by many people were flying through Brisbane. Adding the basketball teams into the fold, I think my other DU traveling companions and I were the only travelers not on a team or in a prayer group.

The flight was shorter (13 hours) and much less stressful than I was expecting. They served supper right after we got on (I had Seared Salmon with caper butter and green beans), and sort of left you alone until breakfast time. The pillows and blankets were freshly cleaned and plastic wrapped, and the biggest and best I've ever had on an airplane. I slept, not always deeply, but slept nonetheless for a solid 9 hours of the flight, which made it really tolerable.

After clearing immigration and customs (very friendly but very serious about their restrictions), we met our driver and went to our apartments. It was so weird being on the left side of the road, even though I had done it before. Upon arrival they hadn't had time to move out the people in the apartment I'm moving into, so for the night I'm on a rollaway in the living room of someone I know.

We then walked around downtown, in the rain at first but it cleared later. I think we were ok with the rain cause it kept temperatures down. The driver remarked that we'd miss the summer because we're leaving in November, as if we would be sorry to miss the 40 degree (thats 100's in Fahrenheit) humid weather. This is a very clean, sleek, beautiful city. I purchased a cell phone and calling card, and walked around so we could gain our bearings.

Its really weird not to be constantly connected like I am in the states- I'm used to having my phone, and getting my email and checking facebook, and never losing touch with the world. Its pretty different here. No internet in the apartments (I don't feel like paying 60 bucks a month for only 5GB of transfer), and my cell phone is very spartan.

As I said before, I'm having some issues dealing with everything defaulting to the left. Its not just driving, its walking, crossing streets, and I even absent mindedly tried to go down the up escalator before seeing the people coming towards me. Its sort of odd.

But so far everyone we've met has been very friendly, so what they say about Australians being laid back and friendly is true. Despite everything being expensive and level 6 water restrictions (Queensland is in its worst dry spell in over a century. 4 minute showers are suggested), this seems like a pretty happy city and an interesting place to spend the next few months.