Barb has been very helpful showing me around Brisbane. I went to church with her on Sunday at the beautiful St. John’s Cathedral in downtown Brisbane, and not that I’m one to know much about architecture, but I’ll say it was very Gothic, with huge soaring ceilings and the entire place made of of stone. Very impressive structure, anyway.
I’ve also managed to open up my bank account at NAB finally, since they’re closed all weekend, but I won’t get anything in the mail from them until the end of this week apparently, and I need some mail with Barb’s address on it and my name on it from the bank before I can get my beloved iPhone (snickers from the peanut gallery, love you too family ;)). It’s awesome of Barb to have let me borrow her “disposable” phone that she picked up at the airport, so I can start making some calls about finding a place to live here.
Barb and I took the opportunity this morning to head over to the St. Lucia campus to check out where all our lectures will be. She managed to find a class schedule with room numbers on it, and apparently we’re in the same lecture theatre for the entire semester, and for the most part classes go from 8am – 5pm. Lecture attendance is mandatory I believe, so it looks like my new home away from home will be the lecture hall. Oh, and the best part of all – it’s in the new Hawken Engineering building! So I might get to meet some engineers from down under – always a pleasure since Engineers are always awesome to hang around with :)
Oh, and of course the obligatory… it’s sooooo hot down here! I’m going to love winters down here when it’s about 18C every day, but right now, it’s super humid and super hot and I’m dying! Barb’s in the same boat though, and as long as we’ve got lots of water for the road, we do just fine. Buses down here come often and have A/C, so they’re actually much more pleasurable to ride than back in Edmonton, since the A/C filters out the diesel fumes and makes the trip downright pleasant.
They also have these things down here called “busways”, which as far as I can tell are road entirely reserved for buses that mostly run underground throughout the city, and it makes getting anywhere by bus so fast! We were on one going from Fortitude Valley to Dutton Park today, and it made the trip much shorter than I thought it would otherwise be, with Monday morning rushhour traffic. Good idea from Brisbane Transit!
Two more days until Orientation, and I can’t wait!
