Barrack

I spent Friday at work calling people all day. We're still working our way through the brigade captains. It's taking us much longer than we had anticipated. James and John spoke to us briefly about the possibility of hiring some temps to make phone calls for us. That would cut our work load in half and hasten the project quite a bit. Hopefully this actually happens. I wonder if I'll have to teach them to ride a bike like Ben's temp.

When I got home everyone else was already getting ready to go out. Steve had a list of clubs that he had been given by his surfing instructor last week. We picked one that was close by and decided to check it out. It was called CQ. We left early and got there around 9:30. There was already a very long line. We waited for about 20 minutes when a limo pulled up to the club. Two huge body guards stepped out followed by none other than Dennis Rodman. Yes, Dennis with the crazy hair and 50 piercings; part of the Chicago Bulls dynasty in the 90's. He was escourted swiftly into the club. I was able to snap some pictures though. We got in about 15 minutes after that. This place was absolutely packed. However I think we hit the wrong type of crowd. Most of the people there were wear clothes way more expensive than ours and were about 5-10 years older than us. We were in the young buisness crowd. But there was good music and there were about 8 of us so we decided to stay and enjoy ourselves. While we were hanging out we saw Dennis Rodman leaving the club. He was walking through the dance floor normally and then Flo Rida came on and he threw up his arms and shouted and then just started dancing. It was hilarious. We went home around 1 am. It was a great time.

We woke up Saturday morning and went to the market to shop for souveniors. I didn't buy much but the market has just about everything you could possibly want and at really reasonable prices. I'll definately have to stop there again and stock up on souveniors before I leave. I had a sweet chilli chicken roll for brunch and on the way back I noticed a fishing shop and stopped in for some tackle and some info. I grabbed some hooks and sinkers and a free size and regulations book. Red snapper is the main fish around here. I have some small poles that the front desk had laying around, I'll have to give it a try sometime. Spent the rest of the day relaxing/cleaning and watching footy and Uncle Buck on TV.

After dinner, we picked out another club on Steve's list. This one was in St. Kilda on the infamous Chapel St. Given it's reputation we knew we'd need to get there early. On the website for the club it said there was no cover before 9. St. Kilda was about 30-45 mins away via tram or train so we left around 7:30. We ended up getting there around 8:45 to find no one at the door. We went inside and found employees setting up. Apparently, they don't even open until 9pm when they start charging a 20$ cover. So we walked around for a while and came back only to find that it was a members only club on every night except Thursdays. We asked the bouncers where else we should go and he reccomended the Revolver. We walked around Chapel St. stopping at clubs here and there but they were all either members only or empty. We stopped in a sports bar and asked the bartender what the deal was. Apparently clubs are either really exclusive or they don't start up until late, like midnight or later. So we decided we would wait for the clubs to get going. We got a pitcher of Carlton and sat watching footy at the sports bar till around midnight. We decided we'd try the Revolver. We found that some people had started to come in but it was still relatively empty. The stage featured a DJ wearing a red sox hat and just about the whitest australian girl you could imagine trying to rap. She was absolutely awful and we got out of there before our ears started to bleed. We tried club after club and it was the same things every time. They were either full, members only, or empty. There really was no way we were going to benefit from the situation so we caught the absolute last tram out of St. Kilda and admitted defeat. I guess we need to plan thing.s out better the next time we decided to take on Chapel St.

I slept in pretty late on Sunday. I spent the day doing some serious cleaning and finally got everything unpacked and washed from Adelaide. I did some work on the writing for our project as well. We left at 3:30 to see our first footy game at the Melbourne Cricket Grounds. We saw the North Melbourne Kangaroos defeat the Richmond Tigers pretty handily. The tickets were relatively cheap and footy isn't that hard to get the hang of. It was a pretty fun time. I'm sure we'll go back at some point. I spent the rest of the night working on my project and getting ready to head back to work the next day. In all, it was a pretty quiet weekend but it was nice to kick back and relax a little after the last busy weekend in Adelaide. We're going to be spending the entire week at work calling people and conducting our phone survey. It's gonna be pretty monotonous and I'm not exactly looking forward to it, but at least I'm not counting trees or something.

Flat Out Like a Lizard Drinking

Ok, I've been holding out for the camera cable but I haven't been able to get it. I should be around this weekend so I'll try and put some pictures up for the past posts if I get to it. These entries were getting old so I had to put them up.

So Tuesday, back to work. I woke up tired and slept most of the way to work on the tram. As I got off I realized something horrible. I either had my wallet stolen or it had fallen out of my pocket on the tram ride. My wallet had absolutely everything in it. My license, student ID, money, credit cards, tram pass, and an ems gift card were all in there. So I ran inside and called the tram company and they said they'd look for it and to check again after lunch. It was difficult to concentrate but the rest of the morning I made some last minute formatting and corrections on the surveys and integrated the target samples that both Max and I had selected.

After lunch, I called the tram company and luckily they had found my wallet and it had just fallen out of my pocket. They gave me an address and tram stop I needed to go to so I could pick it up. Luckily, it was on my tram route and on the way home. The rest of the day at work kinda flew by. I made some more pivot charts which linked our sample selections to their brigades and their brigades to their captains. The first step in conducting the survey would be to call the brigade captains and ask permission to talk to the volunteers within their brigades. I also talked to internet services and sent them a link and a press release (which I wrote) to post up on the members only, brigades online website. Max spent the day talking to the regional training managers to let them know what was going on and to spread publicity for our online survey.

On the way home I stopped at the address I was given to pick up my wallet and of course, they were closed. I decided I would pick it up tomorrow on the way to work. In the meantime, I had no money and no way to get any. As a result I spent the rest of the night just chilling in the apartment and washing clothes from the Adelaide trip. It's not like I could go out anyways because it absolutely poured. Some of the hardest rain this region has recieved in years. It just came down in buckets. It was funny watching the Asians get caught on the tennis court in the middle of the monsoon. They were all huddled underneath a tiny overhang which offered almost no protection and took the rain for like 30 minutes. I guess they thought it would stop...nope.

I went to bed early Tuesday night and woke up refreshed on Wednesday. It was still raining pretty hard. On the way into work I was able to get my wallet no problem. Luckily, everything was there and nothing had been taken. In the morning I secured a 100$ gift certificate to the CFA shop as incentive to volunteers to take our online survey. I also worked out the details with one of the online managers to have a link to our survey put in one of their weekly online newsletters. The newsletters are open to the public to view but the link takes you to Brigades Online where you need a password to get in which all members have. So once the newsletter is released with our link in it, I'll send it to you guys to check out. But don't even try to take the survey because you won't be able to. If there is interest I can send out a link for a dummy survey for you guys to check it out. Spent the rest of the day calling Brigade Captains. This signified a change in focus for the project. For the next couple of weeks we will be doing little else except making phone calls. Over 400 of them. We even got cool little telemarketer headsets. We found that a decent amount of people did think we were telemarketers. Apparently that's what a random American voice on the phone means to most people. So the next couple of weeks could be difficult.

I went home and had dinner. The rain cleared up and it was nice outside but I had another meeting with my useless advisers at 7:30. I kinda just tune them out now and stare at them like they're speaking Arabic when they talk to me. I have never experienced professors so technically stupid and just culturally inept at WPI. I'm glad that they teach civil and CS because I'll never have to see them again after this project. I thought our advisers were going to be Professor Ault and Barnett when I was interviewing. Then things changed, Professor Barnett stopped working at WPI and Professor Ault got more classes and responsibilities to attend to in Worcester. Had I interviewed with Professor Lemone and Salazar for this trip I would have turned down the invitation to come. They are that bad.

Spent the rest of the night relaxing and hanging out with the roommates. It seems we've gained a 5th roommate. Katie hung out with us all night and actually ended up sleeping on the couch. Zan is her project partner and she's definately got a thing for Putnam. She stayed with us for one night in Adelaide because the other girls had left. So she was the 5th person in our 4 bed room. She said she'd stay on the floor but when it came time to go to bed she wound up sleeping in Putnam's bed. So anyways it's kinda weird but at least she hangs out unlike some of the girls.

Thursday morning I woke up and took the tram to work. It was raining again, it kinda sucks but this region desperately needs it. I had an early meeting with my advisers and sponsors at 10am. Everytime we have one of these meetings Lemone says something borderline racist or at best totally culturally inept right to my sponsors. They kinda just look at her like she has bugs crawling out of her head. She might as well, nothing useful comes out of it. So when Lemone says something stupid/racist then it's Salazar's turn. I was saying in the meeting that firefighters had expressed wanting more hands-on practical training like if you can put up a ladder, show it to me. Everyone understood except Salazar who said "Like a picture?, They want more pictures in their training books?" I swear he was that kid in middle or high school who asked the dumbest questions and it would take the class forever to do anything. One of those people you just want to smack when they open their mouths. It was because of people like him (Lenon, stupid jocks, etc.) that I didn't care senior year of high school. Anyways our sponsors just kinda looked at us with a look that said, "Is this guy seriously that dumb?" and we moved on. Later Salazar would say something dumb again and I'm sure they were like "Wow, he really is that dumb." I now understand why the civil major is such a joke at our school. So in summary, the morning meeting was again totally useless.

We spent the rest of the day calling Brigade Captians. We don't have much else to do. On the bright side our online survey is doing very well. In just 24 hours it managed to get 28 responses. We're pretty excited it has been so popular. We expected to get around 200 responses but it may end up being a lot more than that. We caught an early tram back because we had a practice presentation at Vicdeaf near our apartment. Again it was an idiotic waste of time thought up by our all-knowing advisers. We were supposed to take 15 minutes to talk about our results so far. Barely anyone had real results. We had by far the most with the responses to our online survey. So what it ended up being was just a BS-fest. No one wanted to make a 5 minute presentation when we were allotted 15 minutes. It was flat out painful. We didn't get out of there until 8pm by which time we were all starving. It was too late to cook much so I made myself and egg and ham sandwich. Again we just hung out because it was kinda too late to do anything cool. Again, Katie hung out all night with us and ended up sleeping on the couch again. Well weekend soon. I don't have many plans but we'll see what happens. Possibly clubing on Friday and a footy game on Sunday.

Mallee

Mt. Lofty

On Saturday we woke up around 8am. Our bus for Mt. Lofty left at 9:30. We had plenty of time to catch the bus but we didn't because the only girl left in the group, Katie, was late. So we ended up taking another bus that ended at the eastern foot of Mt. Lofty where there are no trails. on the bus ride up, I noticed that Dahlberg was reading "A Walk in the Woods" by Bill Bryson. I remembered from reading Ben's blog last year that it was a good book. He was just finishing up with it so I took it when he was finished and started reading it. We hiked up the road to the summit, which is barely a mountain at 2,360 ft of elevation. At the top was a large visitor center/restaurant and a fantastic view of Adelaide. What Mt. Dandenong was for Melbourne, Mt. Lofty was for Adelaide. On the west side of the mountain there were a bunch of trails including one that apparently featured several water falls, which, if you ask Steve, are my favorite. It was a great walk down the mountain with lots of unique fauna I had never seen before. It was a pretty easy hike, however having slow and inexperienced hikers we didn't move too fast (and none of us went a half mile ahead like Ben woud have).

About half way down we came to the spot where the first waterfall was supposed to be and I was not surprised to see it was all dried up, a dust fall. We continued down the mountain and finally began to see some water and a stream. With that came a lot more wildlife including colorful parrot-like birds, grey tounged skinks, many insects, and even a few small fish. Right before we came to the second falls I was able to catch a grey tounge, which are much smaller and faster than blue tounges. It was extremely small perhaps an inch or two in length. We saw some as big as about 6 inches but I only caught the one small one. They're really quick. At the second falls there was actually a waterfall about 10-12ft high. I took off my boots and stuck my head in the water. Just another 800 meters down the trail we found the 3rd and last falls. The drop had to have been maybe 80-100 ft. The volume of water wasn't much but it was impressive. At the bottom of the falls there was another restaurant as well as a concession stand. We got some ice cream and headed quickly back up the mountain because it was getting late. The hike up was annoying at best. Katie probably hadn't walked let alone hike this distance (approx. 10km) at any time in her life before and it showed. She was hurting and we had to wait for her every couple hundred meters.

When we finally made it to the top in was nearly 6pm and the sun was sinking low. We decided that even though the restaurant at the top was expensive, it had kangaroo on the menu and the view was fantastic. Matt and I shared some gnnoci as an appetizer and we each had the kangaroo for dinner. All of the food was excedeingly delicious and it definately matched it's prize tag in flavor. Kangaroo is a very tough meat to cook because it has almost no fat. However the restaurant did a really good job cooking it. The flavor was good but mild and the meat was very tender. I have to say I prefer a big, juicy beef steak to a kangaroo one but it was pretty good and definately worth the experience. As an added bonus we watched the sun go down on top of the mountain which was really pretty.

We walked down the mountain to our bus stop in darkness. We got a pretty good look at the stars. On the southern half of the sky there are stars we had never seen before which was pretty cool. On the northern hemisphere there were the stars we're used to but slightly different and during the wrong season. For example, down here Orien is sideways and is coming into view just as we would be losing sight of him in New England. The bus ride back was uneventful but I got some more time to read "A Walk in the Woods" and I found that Ben was right about the book. It was an awesome book and I couldn't take my eyes off of it. It is a true story describing the author's attempt at the Appalacian Trail. I ended up finishing it before I left Adelaide. It was very well written and very funny. I'd reccommend it to anyone, particulary hikers.

When we got back to the hostel everyone was tired but I knew that Saturday would be our only chance to go out because of Easter weekend. Matt was the only other taker so we got cleaned up and went downstairs to the bar in the hostel. We asked him where the good clubs were in Adelaide and it turns out they were only three blocks directly behind the hostel. He told us that the best place in town was a place called "The Dog and Duck." Matt and I found it relatively easily but the line was around the corner. It was almost 10:30 so we decided to go to the place next door "The Red Square" figuring it would fill up with over flow from the Dog and Duck. It was pretty empty at first but an hour later you almost couldn't walk in the place. It had two dance floors with several DJs, professional dancers, and young people everywhere. It really was a lot of fun and I'm glad I went.

The next day we woke up very early 6:00 am; we were told to be at the bus stop at 6:15 am to check in for our bus to Kangaroo Island which left at 6:45 am. Thanks to good planning the hostel was right across the street from the bus station so we had no problem making it. The bus ride to the ferry was about an hour and a half long and featured exquiste landscape views. Even though I was very tired, between the views and the book I didn't sleep much. The ferry ride to the island was 45 minutes long and again the views were fantastic. The water was shockingly clear and I saw several fish on the way over. After we got off the ferry we made our way onto the bus. It then drove us across the island, about an hours drive, for lunch. Lunch was a barbeque and was pretty good. After lunch we got up and walked around for a bit and saw some wallabies and koalas. After lunch the bus took us to a place known as Remarkable Rocks. They were located on the South side of the island and were formed from thousands of years of waves pounding them and washing away the softer materials. They were really and awesome sight. In fact the entire Southern coast line was quite impressive. It jutted out of the ocean straight up several hundred feet in to the air. The vegetation was impressive also because it grew on almost entirely bald rock. It was scragly but yet colorful green. There were many shear cliffs and unique formations that dotted the coast line. I saw some of the most scenic views I've ever seen there.

In between each stop on the tour, there was a 30 minute to an hour bus ride. The scenery was nice but almost exactly the same everywhere. We saw several Kangaroo Island kangaroos, which are there own species. They're smaller and darker then their mainland cousins. Eventually we got bored of the bus rides and started talking to the other passengers. Our group ended up meeting two German girls, Michaela and Julia, who were roughly our age (19 and 20). They were traveling after graduating from high school (which ends when you're 19 in Germany). They hung out with our group for pretty much the rest of the tour. They were just generally nice people and we ended up learning a lot about Germany and I'm sure they learned a lot about the States.

Next we were taken further down the coast to a large rock overhang which seals used for shelter from the sun and waves. Kangaroo Island is home to some of the only remaining Australian Seals. Apparently several hundred years ago Americans sailed to Australia and slaughtered nearly all of them for their skins and oil. Figures as much. Anyways the seals were pretty cool even though they smelled awful (they eat fish), but what was really impressive was the rock structure that they used for shelter. Also where there are seals, there are sharks. Our tour guide said that Kangaroo Island does support a reasonably sized great white shark population. I saw advertisements for shark tours but it was very expensive and we would have had to book ahead of time. That's too bad because if I had known I definately would have booked a tour and gotten in that cage. Finally the tour guide took us to a beach where sea lions were living. We could actually walk on the beach with the sea lions as long as we didn't get with in 10 meters of them (ya ok). It was very cool. After that we got on the bus, hit up the gift shop, and then boarded the ferry home. We left on the ferry just as the sun was going down. It was quite a site to see. However none of us could get a good picture because of the rolling of the boat. By the time we got back to the mainland it was dark.

On the hour and a half ride back into Adelaide, we chatted with the German girls more and we ended up inviting them to hang out with us at the bar in our hostel. It was Sunday night and even though we knew Monday was a public holiday, we also knew that it was Easter and all the clubs would be dead. We had a pretty fun time just chilling and chatting at the hostel bar with Michaela and Julia. We didn't have any plans for the next day and we had an early afternoon flight (3:00pm) so we decided we'd sleep in and then meet the German girls for lunch. So the next day we all had pizza with the Germans and we all ended up exchanging addresses and emails. They said they'd send us post cards from Ayer's Rock, which we wouldn't have time to see. We also all got invited to go to Germany next summer. Guess I better start working on my German, haha. So after lunch, we caught a cab to the airport and boarded our flight back to Melbourne. We got back to the apartments right as dinner was ready. Didn't do much except clean up and do some laundry the rest of the night because I was pretty tired.

So in summary, Adelaide was not nearly as boring as everyone said it was and I had a great time. I guess you just have to know where to go and plan ahead. It was probably the best weekend I've had here yet.

Schooner

Mt. Dandenong

"Everyone say cancelled!"

The Americans (black shorts) defeating the Australians

Thursday morning we left for the MTD meeting. It was being held at someplace in the country called The Country Place. As the name suggests it was in the boonies. It was a pretty cool drive though. At the meeting we presented our survey to the managers and they were impressed. There were a few minor language issues and they also wanted to add a question about online learning materials but that was it. As we were leaving one of the managers told us that if we took the scenic route we could pay a small fee to drive our car up to the summit of Mt. Dandenong. The mountain overlooks the entire city. It was an absolutely awesome view. I snapped a couple of pictures and we continued on our way back to work. The drive back was pretty awesome, very scenic. When we got back we found that the entire ofice had moved outside to the parking lot. The company's Christmas party had been moved to right before Easter weekend because there was a flood before the orginal one. Anyways the theme was Salsabration and people were wearing sombreros and nachos. One guy even home brewed beer for the entire company. The Mexican food over here is pretty bad because of the lack of corn and proximity to Mexico. So it was about the equivalent of freezer snacks but free food is good food. I headed home early to get packed for Adelaide.

There were seven of us leaving for Adelaide. Me, Putnam, Dahlberg, Murdy, Katie, Elyssa, and Cara arrived at the airport an hour early and got in line to check in. Fifteen minutes later, an announcer gets on the PA and tells us that our flight has been cancelled. Apparently, our plane got into a fender bender on the runway in Sydney and wouldn't make it to pick us up in time since the Adelaide airport closed at midnight. This was a problem because our tour was booked for the following morning at 6 am. Our replacement flight was scheduled to take off at 7:00. We called our tour company and at first it looked like we would lose all of our 400 dollar tour. After about 45 mins of negociating we were finally able to get a small refund and we switched from a two day tour of Kangaroo Island to a one day tour. The hotel provided us with some pretty nice accomatations at a near by hotel and we slept for a couple of hours before we had to go back to the airport.

When we landed in Adelaide the pilot announced what the local time was and it confused me because it was 30 minutes off of what I had. Apparently they have half hour time zones here. We took a cab from the airport to our hostel which was in the middle of Adelaide. The hostel was unique compared to any other type of accomadation I had ever stayed at. It cost 22$ per night for a four bed room. There were communal bathrooms, kitchen, game room, etc. Everything inch was painted a bright color. The closest that comes to it would probably be a dorm.

We dropped our stuff and decided we should go to the beach because they were supposedly pristine in Adelaide. The trams were shut down for Good Friday so we took the bus. When we got to the beach we saw that there was some sort of event going on. There were lots of vendors and bleachers set up. We soon found out that the Australian volleyball championships were going on this weekend. We hit the beach first and it was pretty nice. No garbage, not too many people, fine white sand. We walked down the beach some and it didn't take long for me to find some nice shells. When we got back from our walk it was getting near lunch time, so we hit the boardwalk to find some grub. We ended up going to another greek/mediterrean falafel/gyro place. The lamb gyros are quickly becoming a favorite of mine.

With food in hand, we decided to check out the volleyball championships. I gotta say, it was really cool. Most of the people competing would be in the Olympics this summer. We watched the top ranked US team vs. the top ranked Aussie team (which was number one in the world) and the Americans were able to not only pull an upset but simply dominate the Aussies. It's a unique feeling rooting for your country while in a foriegn country. There were a few other American fans there so we weren't alone. We ended up staying there for the rest of our time at the beach. It was top level play and it was exciting, the competitors hit really hard and there were some crazy digs. We watched 3 more matches, one mens and two womens, including the match up of the top ranked womens German team vs. the top ranked womens Aussie team (also number one in the world). The Australians won in an exciting and close third set. After spending all day in the sun and dealing with our airplane fiasco the night before we were all really tired so we headed back to the hostel.

When we got back, we said bye to the girls because they were staying at a different, nicer, more expensive hotel. They also had a different tour than us with the exception of Katie. So we didn't expect to see them again the rest of the trip. We cleaned up and headed down to the bar in the hostel to get a few beers. We met a group of guys from Melbourne who had come down to Adelaide to see their footy (Australian Rules Football) team begin the season, which started on Thursday. We played a couple rounds of pool and chatted about cultural differences and one of the Australian's experiences studying abroad in New Hampshire. We went to bed early because we wanted to get up early to hike Mt. Lofty.

Bush (Tuesday 3/18)

We went into work on Tuesday an hour late since we had been out so late the night before working. It took us only about 45 mins to drive out to the CFA from the city. We spent the morning working on the drafts of sections that would be due this coming morning. We started to work survey around 11 and by lunch we had gotten access to surveymonkey which is an online tool for making and distributing surveys and collecting responses. I spent the most of the rest of the day working on setting up the online survey which we would begin distributing next week. I input all the questions and formatting including section divisions, path logic for different sections, and coloring and schemes. Towards the end of the day I had produced a very professional looking survey that I was sure the volunteers would understand and appreciate. I had a little bit of time left so went down to human resources and negotiated the terms with them for giving me information from their volunteer database which was quite difficult because of privacy issues and the scale of the data (approximately 40,000 volunteers). In exchange for agreeing to contact brigade heads for permission along with agreeing that the data wouldn't leave the building I was able to get all the necessary demographics that I needed ordered. I should have them before the end of the week. The demographics I was able to get include: age bracket, gender, region, position/rank, brigade, and name along with their buisiness and after hours phone numbers. After wrapping that up, we left to go visit the rural brigade in Parkenham Upper.

We noticed very quickly the definition of rural here was quite a bit more extreme than our definition in the states. There was no town center in this place. Just farms and woods everywhere. It wasn't as dry as Ballarat, it was more like temperate forest. In between the woods we saw plenty of cows; they most definately out numbered people here. In between cow fields there were large sections of forest including wildlife and fauna reserves. We saw many signs for kangaroo and wombat crossing as the road switched between paved and dirt. As we drove on we were able spot some kangaroos bounding away from the car through the dense forest. It was pretty weird to see because I always thought that kangaroos were more grassland dwelling. Apparently that's not the case. We didn't have an address for the brigade but we did know what road it was on. Unfortunately that road is about 20km long. We were getting pretty worried but eventually we found the brigade at the very end of the road.

The brigade was much smaller than the previous urban brigade. It was a simple metal garage. It was basically meant to store the trucks and nothing else. We met in the captain's small office in the back of the brigade. We met with 4 of the 20 members in the brigade. Again we administered the survey and then facilitated discussion about it and the issues we were investigating. These guys were much more laid back the then previous group, however they still had a lot issues with their training that they had strong opinions about. Issues included skills maintainence, learning materials not matching standards, a lack of a learning materials repository and much more. It was much more a discussion with a bunch of guys than a focus group. We had a couple beers (not Max who was driving) and shot the ****. It was really relaxed and fun but it also was very informative. As we were leaving, they gave us some CFA Volunteer baseball caps which was awesome.

On our way home, Max almost killed us by driving on the wrong side of the road almost immeadiately after leaving the brigade. It took a pair of headlights and a horn ahead to remind him so it was pretty scary even though we weren't that close to a collision. When I got home, I ate dinner (some pretty good stir-fry), put in a load of laundry, and went to bed early.

Roo Bar (Wednesday 3/19)

This morning we went into work early to turn in the car by 8:30. We didn't make it until 9am because traffic was horrendous. We spent the morning working on condensing notes from the instructor interviews and focus groups. We then started working on the final draft of our survey. At lunch, we went to the diner across the street again. I had spinach risotto-stuffed chicken with scalloped potatoes. It was really good, probably the best meal I've had there yet.

After lunch, I fooled around with excel for a while trying to figure out pivot tables so I could use them to compare demographics next week and easily select people to interview this week. By the time I figured it out, I got an email from HR and to my surprise they had finished compiling the data I had asked for early. I worked on selecting samples using a combination of pivot tables and the random number generator function. Basically, with a sample size of approximately 250-260 people and 20 regions there needs to be 13 samples per a region. The percentages we got from HR about gender and age give 2 females and 11 males per a region and from there it's broken down into how many people per an age group. The first thing I did was make a table representing the age group distribution. I then used the random number generator function to pick two age groups that I would take the females for. Then using the pivot table I seperated all the females in those age groups and using the random number function I was able to select one femal from each group. I then filled the rest of the age group quotas with males using the same random number generator function. This created a relatively random, stratified sample. After I did this for several regions it was getting late, so we did a final run through and review of our survey, made sure we had all the materials we would need for our meeting the next day with the MTDs, and we took the car home.

When I got home, I had some dinner (just some pasta). I had a meeting at 7:30 with my advisers. They are so useless. They have no clue what our project is about and they have no idea what they're doing. It's so frustrating because they're the ones who are grading us. We've been writing our methodology by the book according to the examples posted online. They tell us at the meeting that our methodology just isn't right and it needs to be totally re-written. We absolutely do not have the time for that. We're getting behind just doing the project let alone writing the paper. We're a short handed group and yet our project requires some of the most work of any project at this center. I don't know what we're going to do. Some how we're going to have to revise it or they'll flip. It's really frustrating, I have no idea when we're going to do it.

I spent the rest of the night working on sample selection and doing laundry in preparation for my trip this weekend to Adeliade and Kangaroo Island. At least tomorrow is the last day of the week and I have a four day weekend coming. Apparently Adeliade is dead zone when it comes to social life, which is ok with me because I'm mostly going there to hike. Well I've got to go, you'll prolly hear from me again on Monday or Tuesday.

Good on ya

This morning I woke up probably the most tired I've been since getting over the jet lag. We tried to work the bus/train system and improve upon our transit time again. It didn't work, we ended up spending and hour and a half getting to work. Even if I have to do it myself, I'm taking the tram next time.

We spent the morning working on our survey and making a second draft of it. Becky made the first draft when we were in Worcester so it needed heavy editing. We finished that up shortly after lunch and got to work on the plan for our focus group. We spent pretty much the rest of the day finishing that and gathering materials in preparation of our focus group. Come 5:30 we grabbed the Tom Tom (or Steve Steve?) and hopped in the CFA mobile. Driving on the right side certainly was an interesting experience. It's not that much different surprisingly. I only went on the wrong side of the road once, and that was in the CFA parking lot pulling out. I didn't kill us both surprisingly enough. Even when we encountered several rotaries (roundabouts, we got laughed at when we called them rotaries) we made it through unscathed. We drove for an hour out to a little po-dunk town called Hastings. The center of town consisted of two streets with a couple store fronts and that's about it. It was right on the east coast (the one with waves) on the eastern peninsula of the bay that Melbourne sits in. We found the brigade really easily because it was on one of the two at the center of town. We got there an hour early so we decided to grab some dinner. Got some fish and chips at a small cafe down by the water. After dinner we went into the brigade and met the firefighters in person for the first time.

We found out that even though Hastings is so small, the brigade is considered an urban brigade. It seems Hastings was only small by our standards. They did have a steel mill and an industrial shipping port that the brigad have to look after as well. The volunteers were amazingly dedicated. They were a bunch of very normal looking people. They trained extensively within the brigade and out at training centers (several hours of work). The officers had to manage an amazing amount of work for being volunteers. All of these people had full time jobs and families. There were about 40 members in the brigade and we got to meet with approximately 15 of them. HQ had arranged the focus group and they knew we were coming. We explained our project and who we were and then we administered our survey. We timed them without their knowledge to see how long it would take them to complete the survey. It took them between 10 and 15 minutes to complete the survey, which is right around our target area. Then we had a discussion about our survey with them. There wasn't much that they said we needed to change or remove but when we got around to what we should add we had a lot of input. When it came to their training, the volunteers had a lot to say. There were many complaints and flaws that were revealed to us by the volunteers. Many issues were corroborated by other members with in the brigade. The spectrum of issues was widespread from issues with learning materials to the lack of practical assessments. The focus group by far was the best resource for gaining insight we've come across so far. We finished by 9:00pm and drove home.

We finally got home from work around 10:15pm on St. Patty's Day. Of course, no one was in the apartments. They had all gone out for the holiday. I tried to find out where they were but the club they were in was so loud that I couldn't hear what they were saying. Text messaging didn't work either because the street they thought they were on didn't exist. So I ended up spending a quiet St. Patty's day evening doing laundry and going to bed early.

Roo

My plans changed a lot this past weekend but I still had a lot of fun. Friday night most everyone was beat from the first work week and a lot of people had plans for early in the morning. So we skipped the clubs in favor of something a little bit more tame. We grabbed the football and headed out to find a park to play catch. When we got to the park finally figured out why we hadn't seen any squirrels or mammals during the day. It's because they come out at night. They're called possums and they're the size of a small cat (like a third the size of Steve's cat). They're not afraid of people at all because Asian tourist are always feeding them. They're kinda creepy cause they'll sneak right up on ya, especially if they think you have food. We must have looked like a bunch of fools yelling out where they were and taking pictures of Australia's squirrel equivalent. It was really fun though. We kept walking and of course we got lost. So we ended up exploring parts of Melbourne we hadn't seen yet for about an hour until we realized where we were and made our way back home. We went to bed pretty early with big plans in the morning.

No one wanted to wake up early enough the next day to go fishing. We decided instead to head to the wildlife preserve at Ballarat. We took the noon train to Ballarat, which is about an hour long trip. On the way there we finally got to see some of the country outside the city. It's desolate. Red colored earth with scattered trees and dry grass. Every so often it would be interrupted by a bulbous looking hill covered in trees or a valley/dry river bed. Victoria has been in a decade long drought and it shows. Water was scarce and we only saw it in cultivated areas of which there weren't many. When we arrived in Ballarat we took a cab to the wildlife preserve. The preserve was really cool. It was a large caged in area, kangaroos and emus roamed in the open. They were almost completely domesticated and used to people. You could buy bags of feed and feed and pet them like in a petting zoo. It was really hot again (in the 100s), so many of the animals were pretty inactive. There was also several caged in exhibits within the park. We saw koalas, wombats, echinads, wallabies, crocs, and many other reptiles and smaller marsupials. I was dissapointed in the reptile house because they didn't have any skinks. Emus are just about the scariest thing ever. They're pretty much velociraptors without teeth. They make this ridiculous thumping sound which is just creepy and it freaks you out. Anyways as a whole, the experience was awesome and made me feel like I really was in Australia.

We walked back to the train station and stopped in a little hole in the wall pizza place. The type of place we would hit on the way home from a Beaver Fever trip. Australian pizza....not so great. Good enough though cause we were beat and starving. The heat pretty much wiped us out. We got back to the apartment around 7:30. Another group of people got back from surfing that day as well so pretty much noone wanted to go out. We just stuck around the apartment building and watched rugby and cricket.

The next morning Putnam, Dahlberg, Morgan, Adam, and I went to the F1 Races. The event was enormous, well over 100,000 people in attendance. It was probably the hottest day yet as well. I drank probably 5 liters of water and didn't need to go to the bathroom once. We were sweating bullets all day. The sun was brutal as well, there was very little cover from the sun and we spent most of our time walking or standing. We all had heat exhaustion (headaces,nausea etc.) by the end of the day. The races themselves were awesome. They had one race with all Porches (Carrera), a V8 Super Car race, and a celebrity challenge race as a warm up. There was a rollover in the celebrity challenge which was pretty funny. Also saw a motorcycle trick rider eat it big time. We bought ear plugs at the beginning of the day and we definately needed them once the real race started. On the first turn there was a crash that knocked one racer out of the race. This would become a trend as only 6 out 16 cars would finish the race. The sun was really sapping my energy but the race was exciting so I was able to make it through the full 58 laps. BMW Mclearn won the race in an exciting finish. All the Mercedes cars didn't finish. I bought myself a BMW Mclearn jersey that makes me look like I really know my stuff. By the end of the races we were all hot and dehydrated to a pretty bad extent. I still wanted to see the complimentary Kiss (the guys with face paint, hair, and big tounges) concert but no one else was willing to stay. I was pretty exhausted myself so I decided I didn't want to go to the concert by myself. So we went home and crashed like out of control F1 cars (hard).

After not wanting to move for several hours, I finally got up and got to work on my methodology since Max refused to work on it this weekend. Even though I was exhausted, I stayed up until 2am working on it. The draft was due Monday morning at 9am. After that I went straight to bed.

It's not my turn to shout

Last night was pretty awesome. First off when I got home Putnam made some awesome lemon and pepper chicken with coconut rice. Pretty good. After dinner we got a call from one of the guys in one of the other rooms. They went out and found a bar that had 4$ jugs which is amazing around here. The pictures are of the some of the group having fun there. Aparently it was a one time thing, a celebration for the upcoming grand prix. It was in the basement of this hotel and it definately had a fraternity feel but I like that anyways. It took forever to get some beer and predictably it was pretty bad but at least it was really cheap. Eventually the most of the WPI group made their way over to the bar and even though this was about the first time we had gone somewhere with a ton of people our age, we all hung out together and we had a really good time. It was the first time we had all hung out socially as a cohesive group. What was funny was the birthday girl was the only one not hanging out, she was off talking to guys and scamming free drinks. One guy ordered her a shot that consisted of absinth,tequila, and tabasco sauce. I was not jealous of her for that one. We finally made it home pretty late but it was worth cause we had an awesome time.

Woke up in the morning really tired. Slept an extra 10 mins instead of eating breakfast. We decided to try another route to work that consisted of taking the tram to the train station, a train to the train station, and a bus to work. I thought it was a stupid complicated idea but I went along with it anyways. Long story short, we took the wrong bus for about 20 mins and by the time we caught another one and found our way to work the whole commute took about 2 hours. So ya, my vote is for the tram.

Spent the first half of the day interviewing training instructors over the phone. They were all really cool and eager to give input for the project. We asked them mainly about the volunteers' opinions that they had heard. Some of them were too eager and ended up giving us their point of view but most of them gave us some really good insight that we can use to further refine our survey. Went to a new place for lunch today, it was ok. It was called Nando's, it's like one of those fast food nice place hybrids. Had some chili (as in pepper) chicken sandwhich and chips. It was just ok. It was another scorcher today. Up around 40 degrees centigrade. We got back to work around 1 and we finished up the instructor interviews by about 2:30. We started to work on an updated methodology, which a draft of is due on Monday. Worked on that for the rest of the day. Talked to Steve a bit (5mins) on AIM Express which I finally got to work on my computer. I made fun of him for Brett Farve retiring. He made fun of me for the blog. The usual Steve conversation. I heard Uconn lost, which means Ben's grumpy. Anyways we made ok progress on our draft due Monday but by 5pm we hadn't gotten to nearly the level at which I wanted it to be. Max kinda frustrated me because he wanted to leave but was unwilling to work on it at all this weekend. He basically refused. I mean I can understand why but still the work has to get done some how and I don't wanna do the entire thing. I'll figure something out this weekend I guess. In summary, a productive though frustrating day.

I've got some pretty big plans for this weekend. If it all works out we'll be going down to St. Kilda tonight where there are apparently some awesome clubs, I'm going charter fishing tomorrow morning, and I'll be going to the F1 Melbourne Grand Prix/Kiss concert on Sunday. Should be tons of fun even if I have to squeeze some writing in between everything. Cheers.

P.S. This is an old post; I wrote it on Friday but I'm posting it now. But I got a camera cable so enjoy the pictures.

Sunnies

Wow, today was a hot one. The sun was intense. Up over 100 degrees at one point. Even most of the Australians were complaining about the heat. James Stitz, one of my sponsors, said the weather is very rare for this time of year. Remember it's supposed to be fall over here. Global warming strikes again I guess. Better get Al Gore on that...or Steve, one or the other.

Spent the first part of the day doing more demographics targeting. Finished expected target numbers before noon. The region and gender demographics we should have no problem with but the age demographics might have been hard to reach with out knowlege of the subjects age before contact. I made sure to ask James about it later in the day. Spent the rest of the time before lunch preparing for our sponsor and adviser meeting. Also created a calendar to outline our when we planned to do each of the tasks that needed to be completed before we launched our survey.

For lunch, Max and I headed to that cafe we had lunch at the day before. I had some spinach and feta lasagne thing which was really good. After lunch we headed back to our office and printed out agendas and other papers for our meeting. Our meeting began at 1:30 and lasted about an hour. Again our advisers are completely useless however James helped to refine our instructor interview plan and our objectives for our methodology. We spent most of the time trying to explain our plan to our advisers who don't understand anything the first time they see it for some reason.

After the meeting we spent the rest of the day making revisions to our interview plan, typing up minutes from our meeting, and creating an actual script from our interview plan to use for tomorrow. We also got all the contact information for the instructors we would interview tomorrow. All in all it was a pretty productive day, however I am kinda worried that we hadn't made much progress on actually typing up our methodology, of which a draft is due on Monday. Hopefully the interviews won't take long tomorrow and we'll have a lot of time to work on it.

Well I'm on the tram now, on my way home. It's pretty miserable. It's packed and really hot. Hopefully it will cool down this evening. Anyways it's one of the girls birthday tonight, Nicky (the one I hate, she's a real b****), so we're prolly all going out to celebrate. I'll prolly go since we all are going, hopefully it'll be somewhere cool.

On a Good Wicket

When I last left off on Monday night we were cooking chili. The chili didn't really turn out as good as we expected. It tasted really good but the texture was awful. We bought dehydrated beans at the market and didn't realize until it was much too late that we were supposed to soak them for like 24 hours or something. It turned our pretty crunchy. The rest of the night was pretty boring. We didn't go out like we had planned because we were all too tired. So we just stayed in and watched some rugby.

The next day I woke up around 7am, had some nutella on toast (which is awesome hazelnut spread, try it if you haven't already), and left around 8am. The five of us tried an alternate route by taking the train to Box Hill and then a bus to Burrville. It really wasn't worth it. Took about the same amount of time except with more waiting and running around. I think I'm just going to take the tram from now on even if it's slow.

When we got to our office we continued our work on the interview plan for the training instructor interviews we have planned for Friday. By mid-day we had finished that and scheduled an appointment for after lunch to review it with John Butler, one of our sponsors. We headed out to a near by cafe for lunch and I had some tortellini with bacon which was really good.

So it's been brought to my attention that some of you don't know what my project is about. I'm going to take a little break in my story here to tell you. Basically, the CFA or Country Fire Authority is the largest fire protection agency in the state of Victoria. It's government and corporately funded and it has a work force of approximately 60,000 volunteer firefighters. Wildfires are a big problem here, sorta like in California. Recently the CFA has had a lot of complaints from the volunteers about their training. Our project is to somehow evaluate those concerns and complaints; determining approximately how widespread they are, what exactly are the concerns and complaints, and what the sources of the problems are. In order to complete this task we'll be using several different methods. The first couple of weeks will be spent interviewing training instructors, conducting volunteer firefighter focus groups, and meeting with the CFA's Managers of Training and Development. The data collected from those methods will be used to create a phone and online survey of volunteer firefighters. From there we'll analyze the data, draw conclusions, and present a report to the CFA detailing our research and results.

After lunch, we met with John Butler and he gave us some useful insight to edit our interview plan with. For example, instead of asking the instructors which brigades do they train; John gave us a memo detailing what's called risk categories of brigades and we can get more useful information by asking them which risk categories of brigades they train. He also suggested that instead of asking about what the instructors knew of the volunteers' opinions during and after training, we ask about what the instructors knew of the volunteers' opinions during training and during assessment. After our meeting with John we spent another hour or so editing the plan and adding the privacy statement to it.

After we completed the interview plan we began working on our demographics targeting plan for our phone survey. Even though the phone survey is a couple of weeks off we need to begin working on the targeting plan right away because it's a crucial part of our project. Basically, for those of you who have taken statistics it's what is known as a stratified random sample. For those of you who haven't it creates a crossection of the sample being studied. For example if the CFA consists of 25% women then our sample should contain 25% women. The demographics we're targeting are gender, age, and region. Our targeted sample size is 250 people. We made a really cool table outlining how we plan obtain our target with all of the demographics represented. We got a report from human resources detailing the percentages of our demographics and from there it was just math.

The ride home was long and boring as usual. However did see some like 14 year old kids drinking SoCo and Cola cans. When we got back, Max and I had a meeting with our advisers to talk about methodology and our paper. It was boring and definately not useful. I swear Lemone and Salazar have to be the dumbest professors on campus and we end up with them as our advisers. After the meeting ended (7:30-8:00pmish) I went to finally get something to eat. We ran out of food for meals so it was everyone for themselves. I made ham and eggs which was ok. The best part about it was I didn't burn it or the food. A couple of us went out around 9pm to get some ice cream and explore a little. We got some ice cream and hit up china town. Lots of restaurants and live tanks. The china town aquarium was pretty cool. It made our bass tank this past summer look like a mansion. Fish we absolutely packed into tanks. Pretty funny. Went to bed early, around 11. I'm hoping to do more demographic targeting in work today and we have our first Sponsor and Adviser meeting today, which should be awful. Anyways I'll write more tomorrow, later.

p.s. I'll try to get pictures up soon but I don't have a cable for the camera so I'll have to buy one.

Make a Quid

Sorry for the long posts recently but I've been doing two days per post trying to catch up. I finally got my laptop today from work and I have an hour long commute each way so I'll plenty of time to write my posts. Once I catch up and start writing posts daily they'll get much shorter.

So I had previously finished up till Friday so I'll start there. Friday morning each group set out to find their work places and get set up. There are two groups with a total of five WPI students working at the CFA headquarters in Burrville, which is about an hour long tram ride. We found the place with minimumal difficulty and arrived at 9am. Our sponsors, John Butler and James Stitz, weren't in on Friday so we were led on a tour by one of their secretaries. The CFA headquarters is pretty much like any typical office. Cubicles, coffee stations, and water coolers etc. The only real exception is that they have this really cool command center for when crazy bush fires breakout. If you've ever seen the movie Apollo 13, which if you ask Steve is my favorite movie, it looks like their command center where everyone has a headset on, looks really tense, and everyone is looking at a really big screen. It was empty at the time but I could totally see people sitting there trying to make an oxygen filter out of duct tape and some coffee filters. Our office space is pretty nice. Luckily it's not a cubicle. It has big windows along with two desktops and two fancy telephones. The big dissapointment, however, was that they had nothing ready for us. We didn't have access cards, user names or passwords, laptops, or even our tram passes ready for us. We went to a nearby cafe for some lunch, where I had some sort of italian stuffed croissant, and we headed home.

I got off at the library stop and set up the blog. I checked my email and found out what my MQP will be. For those of you who don't know an MQP is sorta like your senior project at WPI. You sign up for a selection process and professors pick you. I ended up getting my second choice. I'll be working from WPI with the Army Airborne Division in Maryland on the design of a new transforming canopy parachute. I don't know much about the project yet but I assume the different canopies will be for high altitude and low altitude with some piloting capability. I'll have a project team of four people. I know all of them and I'm pretty excited to work on it next year. By the time I left the library it was time for dinner. Luckily, Putnam can cook and he made this delicious italian sun dried tomato chicken and ravioli meal.

Friday night we decided to try and find a bar that we had heard about called the Trader Bar. Jim, you'll like this concept. Basically each drink has a base price which fluctuates through out the night based upon demand. If you buy an American beer, the price of American beer will go up and the price of other beers will go down. So if you buy your drinks at the right time you can get a cheaper price. We got lost once, but after 30 mins of searching we eventually found it. The stock gag was kinda fun but definately would have been cooler if it were a bigger bar. American beer was down when we first got there but predictably sky rocketed after we brought 15 Americans to the bar. After the price of American beer went up I tried some New Zealand beer which wasn't bad. Anyways the gag was fun but the bar was much smaller than we expected so we still hadn't found the scale of nightlife we were looking for. We got home relatively early and watched Charlie's Angels (awful movie to watch with a bunch of engineers) with the girls on TV.

Saturday morning we woke up and went to the market to grab some breakfast. Our plan for the day was to go to the Yarra River in Melbourne where the Moomba festival was happening all weekend. Apparently it's a festival celebrating the diversity of the city. We got there and found the river banks packed with people. There were carnival rides and games, world championship water sking and wakeboarding on the river, skateparks, food and much more. We spent a good 4-5 hours there and it was a great time. We went back to the room and had some dinner and got ready to go out again. We were going to try a bar called The Joint on Saturday. The bouncer from the Trader Bar had told us about it. Apparently it was a hot spot for young people like us. We found it relatively easy. It was a pretty nice place. We found some of the cheapest beer prices we'd seen since arriving and there were a decent amount of people our age hanging out. We found a pool table and had a few rounds over some games of pool. The girls dragged us out to the dance floor, which was tiny. Danced for a little bit and met some Irish girls who were also studying abroad. They had been in Melbourne since January and we asked them where to go clubbing in the city. They said the best place in town is the region around St. Kilda where we had gone to the beach earlier. On the way back to the apartment we decided that we would plan a trip to St. Kilda for next weekend to check it out. Even though Monday is a holiday it would most likely be deserted on a Sunday based on what we'd seen earlier in the week.

We had Monday off, it was the Australian Veterans Day. So we decided to go to the beach. We wanted to try something different so we left for Williamstown Beach. It's about 45 mins away from Melbourne by train, it's a suburb of Melbourne. It was obsenely hot, about 37 degrees centigrade. When we got there the sun was oppressive and most of us were already burnt so we made sure to put on an excessive amount of sunscreen. Williamstown was a much cleaner beach and it was packed. We couldn't stay out of the water for more than 30 mins at a time because it was so hot. We spent about 3-4 hours there and headed back to the apartments for another boring orientation meeting. The rest of the night we just hung around, cleaned up the apartment, and got ready for our first real day of work. Oh, also I was watching the Australian Basketball finals and I saw some guy wearing a Uconn basketball t-shirt. By the way, Melbourne is up 2 games to 1 in a 5 game series.

Today we made it to work just over an hour, around 9. We found that our sponsors we still totally unprepared and no where to be seen. Throughout the day their secretaries and IT guys slowly fixed our problems. We got our tram passes,our logins,my laptop, and fixed IT issues all before 2. When they first brought me my laptop I just laughed. It was anchient. It ran windows 2000 millenium edition. It even had the little annoying paper clip guy in Word. Anyways, I told them I needed Microsoft Office 2003 and they were able to upgrade me with a much more modern laptop. We didn't have internet access until around 12:30 so we had basically nothing to do except wait for our sponsors. Max and I kicked some minesweeper ass for a couple of hours. Finally our sponsors showed up around 1pm. They seem like really cool guys and they're actually excited about our project. They took us out to lunch at a nearby cafe where I had some kalimari which was really good and we chatted about cultural differences and sports. When we got back to our office we talked about the project and their input will change some of our methodology drastically but it will help the project focus on what it should be which is the opinions of the volunteers. We set up a preliminary time line and got to work creating a interview plan for our first step, which is interviewing CFA training instructors. We finished a basic interview plan by 4pm and headed out around 4:30pm to get home around 5:30-6:00. Right now we're making some chili from stuff we bought at the market and preliminary plans for tonight are to head out to an area we haven't explored yet close to the river and maybe find a bar for a beer or two. Anyways I'm caught up now and now that I've got a laptop keeping up should be easy and the length of my posts will go down. OK, well I have to go help with dinner. Talk to you guys later.

Cozzie

Sorry I haven't posted in a while. It's been a very busy weekend for me and I still don't have internet access, a laptop, or a tram pass (my sponsors are frustratingly unprepared). I start work again tomorrow as today was a holiday (Australian Veterans Day). Hopefully my sponsor will get their act together tomorrow. Until then I'll just have to use the internet cafes/library. So I guess I have to continue my story. I need to catch up so this will probably be a very long post. So here goes.

The three of us (Putnam, Dahlberg, myself) arrived in Melbourne around 8:30 in the morning. We grabbed a cab and headed towards the hotel. Almost immediately I noticed the huge amount of artwork and decoration the city displayed. Large colored steel pillars with no noticable presence other than decoration hung at angles across the highway. On every block corner there is a sculpture or a building that looks like it was designed by Picasso. They seem to be very creative around here. The buildings are all unique and the city is a very basic grid so it's difficult to get lost in Melbourne. After a half an hour of driving, we arrived at the hotel only to find out our rooms weren't ready. We were the first to arrive. So we dumped our luggage and set out to explore even though we were exhausted from our trip.

We went to a 7/11, which isn't hard to find as they're more common here than in the states, and got some basics (toothpaste, soap, etc.). We picked up phone cards at a cellphone store but waited on the cellphones for the group. We found the mall as well and hit up the food court. The food court had stuff of every nationality. I've decided that while I'm here I'm not going to eat anything American when I go out and I'm going to be adventurous. While here, I've already had sushi, mediteranean kebabs, german meat pastries, and much more. Melbourne is a very diverse city and it's cuisine shows that. After grabbing some food, we found a backpack for Dahlberg because he ripped his and we found some sunglasses for me cause I don't own any and it's always sunny in Melbourne. In fact the weather here is very hot and very dry most of the time. Australia is the dryest inhabbited continent. There's a huge drought going on right now actually. Victoria's water reserves are around 30% full which is no where near normal (75-85%). When we got back to the hotel around noon, we met our other roommates coming in the door and found out our rooms were ready and we crashed hard.

Our room is very small but I like it. It consists of a one room kitchen/living room and two bedrooms with a double door bathroom inbetween. It has basic cable, airconditioning, a very small dishwaser, a very small washer/dryer, and other stuff. It's simple but nice. The best part is the balcony. We're on the 13th floor and have a decent view.

After sleeping for a couple hours and cleaning up a bit, we got up and set out to find internet access and explore some more. It's wierd crossing the street here. First of all people drive on the other side of the street so you have to look the other way for cars. Also vehicles don't yeild to pedestrians here. It's the other way around and as a result people drive like maniacs here not to mention you have to watch out for trams every where. It was kinda scary at first but I'm getting the hang of it. We found the library after a couple of blocks and spent some time catching up with the other side of the world. So Brett Farve retired and Randy got resigned. Good news for Ben, bad news for Steve. I guess Steve will have to follow Peyton Manning and the Colts now because he's prolly gonna break all of Farve's records. Cowboys resigned all of their important free agents and haven't done much else but that's fine with me. That's what I wanted them to do. We don't have much cap room but we had 13 pro bowlers(an NFL record) so we can add through the draft and should make another playoff run next year.

Anyways on our way back, we grabbed some basic grocieries including some wine. Wine is extremely cheap (from $4 a 750ml) here because Australia produces a ton of it. Beer is extremely expensive (around 40$ for 24 stubbies which are small bottles) :( because it is taxed heavily to protect the wine industry and most of it is imported. We then went to a boring orientation meeting. We ate some dinner and got ready to go out for the first time with everyone. We bar hopped a couple of places around the university (we spotted it earlier and figured that's where the young people would be). However, like in Sydney, the city was deserted. We enjoyed a couple pints ($6.50 per) over the rugby game and headed home early. People continued to drink when we got back. Of course some people over did it big time. Jason down the hall was the first to ruin his room when booted all over his rug. Tyler blacked out hard and we had a fun time watching him make a fool of himself. All in all a fun first night even though it wasn't what I was expecting.

We woke up early on Thursday and decided to go find the Victoria Market. It's an open air market and it's absolutely huge. It has everything you could possibly want from seafood and delis to clothing and video games. There's awesome food and awesome deals near the end of the day. We explored that for a while and picked up some food for dinner. We got back to the hotel and decided to go to the beach.

We woke up the girls and took the tram to St. Kilda beach. We didn't know it at the time but the St. Kilda district is notorius for partying and adicts. The beach was dirty with lots of trash. Also no waves because Melbourne is in the middle of a big bay. But the weather was nice and the water was cool so it was fun. We were just about the whitest and least attractive people there. Everyone in this city is fit and generally good looking. Obesity really is an American problem. I haven't seen many fat people here at all. Anyways we needed sunsceen badly and none of us had any. I warned the other guys that they were gonna burn bad but they didn't listen to me. I walked back to the city and eventually found some and went back to the beach. By the time I had gotten the sunscreen (30 mins) my neck and face were already burned. By the time I had gotten back the guys I warned were much worse than me. They we cooked lobster red. They were well done. Some of them were almost purple by the end of the day. It was really funny. We spent another couple hours on the beach and I saw some cool blue jellyfish as well as a football sized pufferfish that had washed up on shore. Went shell hunting but the shells really aren't that different or exotic compared to what I was expecting. Also found a hypodermic needle washed up on shore. That was gross.

We headed home burnt, gross, and salty. We cleaned up and had a group wide barbique provided by our adivsers. We applied some aloe and headed out to the bars again. Again the city was deserted and after wandering around for about an hour looking for some place to hang out we ended up at an asian beer garden. If you ever get the chance to try asian beer, don't. I've had several varieties and everytime it tastes like awful keystone light. It's not worth it. So once again we struck out on the night life. The bar closed around midnight and we headed back and turned in early.

Well I've got to be going as it's around 11:45pm here and the internet cafe is closing. I'm hoping to get my laptop today so I can finally catch up. I've finished up to Friday so more about this weekend soon. Talk to you guys soon.

Kangaroos in the Top Paddock

Well it's Friday here and I still don't have my laptop so no pictures or anything cool yet. I went and visited where I'll be working for the next seven weeks, the Country Fire Authority (CFA), for the first time today. My sponsors, Mr. Stitz and Mr. Butler, weren't in but I got a tour around. It's a laid back office environment. I felt kinda overdressed in a polo and slacks even. Seems like it's going to be a fun place to work. Everyone was quite nice. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get a laptop and they only gave me a couple daily tram passes for next week so I won't be able to explore the city as much as I wanted to this weekend. Hopefully by next week they'll have all those things worked out for me.

Anyways, I'll get to some details about my flight in. So the flights to LA were quite boring and uneventful. Tried to stay awake so I'd sleep most of the LA to Sydney flight. When Putnam and I arrived in LA we met up with Dahlberg and grabbed some food. Five hours later we boarded the flight to Sydney, however there was a maintenance issue and we ended up sitting on the runway for about an hour and a half. As we were getting on the plane we noticed an unreasonable amount of hotties on board. Then we realized something strange; they were all wearing the same thing. Come to find out after talking to one of them, we were flying to Sydney with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers Cheerleaders. They were doing some show for troops stationed in Sydney. It was awesome. Haha sorry Steph.

We arrived in Sydney around 9am. We got past customs relatively quickly thanks to a fruit sniffing beagle. Australian customs is weird. So the plan was to check our luggage and roam the city for 24 hours until our flight the next morning. That didn't work out so well. Our flight was at 6:15am and the luggage place opened at 6am. So we'd have to pick it up that night and we decided we'd pick it up around 10:30pm right before it closed at 11:00pm and we'd sleep at the airport. More on this later.

We took the train into the city and decided to do the touristy stuff first. Sydney is a beautiful and clean city. We walked around the entire day and only saw two bums! In Worcester I can see two bums from my window most days. Anyways we went and saw the opera house and bridge that's so famous in Sydney and it's quite a site. We took a ferry to Manly beach and swam in the Pacific for the first time. The water is a lot colder than expected but it's still nice. Sorta like New England during the summer. Awesome waves though, lots of fun. Also Sydney is an extremely expensive city I spent way too much money there. So after Manly beach we walked through the botanical gardens next to the opera house. Awesome wildlife and plants there. We say all kinds of vegetation and wildlife including flying foxes, macaws, other birds, some lizards, a huge eel, and spiders as big as Ryan's ear.

After the gardens we set out to find Lord Nelson's Pub. It's apparently the oldest brewery in Australia and is world famous for its home brews. After a lot of walking, we found it and enjoyed some excellent beer, meat pies, and conversation about the finer parts of cricket. After a couple of beers we decided the crowd was a bit old for our tastes and tried to find another bar. This is when we noticed something weird. Australians are like responsible or something. The city was deserted by about 9:30pm. Bars were mostly empty and no one was partying on a week night. This trend has continued in Melbourne. People just don't go out unless it's a weekend.

So we wandered around a bit more and decided to just head back to the airport. Predictably, we got lost and ended up having to take a cab to the airport. We picked up our luggage as the airport was shutting down and settled in for the night. Unfortunately, we were told we had ten minutes to get out of the airport and that we couldn't sleep there. It would have cost us each about an additional 100$ to get back into the city and find a hostel at that time of night so we decided to sleep outside the airport. We met a couple of German guys our age as well who had been kicked out and we hung out with them for most of the night while napping on the ground, benches, and airport wheelchairs. Absolutely crazy. The next day we arrived in Melbourne without a hitch.

So I have to go but I'll post more details about Melbourne later. Hopefully I'll catch up sometime this weekend. Later guys.

Bob's Your Uncle

Here's my first post. They'll all begin with some Aussie vocab. I'll leave it up to you guys to translate. I don't have my computer yet or internet access at my apartment. I writing this currently from the Victoria State Library (which is huge by the way). I'll keep it short because there is a 15 min. time limit and I have to be going. I am alive and well in Melbourne. Life is expensive here but I'm having fun. I'll be posting a lot more including details about my exciting arrival when I get my laptop from my sponsors which might be tomorrow.