University of Queensland

Since I'm taking classes with UQ faculty, I've been spending a lot of my first week here for orientation. UQ has a beautiful campus that reminds me of Stanford in certain places, and although like the rest of Brisbane, its buildings are much more modern.

This is the main building with a huge courtyard in the middle. The buildings remind me of the quad in many ways, and student often picnic on the grass here. I would like to do that when it gets sunnier, but we were warned that ants in the grass bite! Picture from wikipedia.

There's also a huge lake on campus as well, which has a lot of ducks and other birds I've never seen, as well as fish and TURTLES!! The other day, I was walking with some people from my program when we saw a turtle laying its eggs! It was pretty awesome. I wish Lake Lag at Stanford had the same lake-ness. (Lake Lagunita at Stanford hasn't been a real lake since the 70s or something, except for a few days in the spring when enough rain has filled it up. The only animals who inhabit that area are endangered salamanders that one of my Humbio professors often does research on. It's still a really nice and foresty area though, but it's not a lake.) Here's a picture of UQ's lake:

Birds here are not scared of people at all, however. I was right in assuming that the birds I've seen here that look different from those in the states are just the local pigeons. The only difference is that they don't care if you are eating your food when they see it. Today, I was sitting eating my lunch and reading a book when a bird flew into my head, literally. Afterwards, I put my bowl down for a second and another bird swooped by and grabbed part of my lunch! Then after that, just as I was contemplating never eating outside again, a bird plopped onto my table and grabbed for the scrappings from my almost empty bowl!

The other day, the people in my program split into groups of six to go on a scavenger hunt throughout campus. We had an hour and a half to hit everything, and while the campus is nowhere near as large at Stanford's, I got pretty sore from running around in the sun. We passed some UC students on their abroad program at UQ (similar to ours) who told us that the prize for the scavenger hunt was t-shirts. That night, however, we found out that the prize for the first and second place team was first class tickets on an overnight train we'll be taking in about a month!! My team got second place, probably due to our creative photos, so I'm SUPER excited to be traveling first class and also thankful to my group member who kept forcing everyone to run. I wasn't so thankful DURING the scavenger hunt, but now I am.

UQ is a beautiful campus next to the river, and I'm excited to see what it's like when the sun comes out. I love napping on the grass (sans evil ants) so I hope I can do that when the weather clears up.