I haven’t been watching much T.V. in the past few months, but every time I have it’s been nothing but terrible news about Queensland – floods, cyclones, people losing just about everything. Beyond the surfing imagery of the Gold Coast, this is all I really know about Queensland – that it’s a beautiful place that’s been hit hard by nature, has world-famous surf beaches, and that QUT (Queensland University of Technology) is Ryan’s university. (For the record, I even had to pull out a map to see where QLD is in relation to the rest of Australia. See map on the left for some context.) We landed in the Brisbane airport on a cloudy, humid morning, and looking outside the plane window I immediately fell in love. Rolling hills, thick with green jungle-looking shrubbery. A wide, snaking river with islands and sand dunes out toward the ocean. Big houses perched at the top of hills, enveloped in dark green vegetation. What a beautiful, beautiful place.
We spent our first day doing campus setup after a driving-on-the-left-side adventure (thank God Jake has done it before so I didn’t have to!!) and taking the long way into the city. (Apparently Brisbane is one of the 3rd largest cities in the world so note to selves – get a GPS with the next rental car.) The University of Queensland is Ground Zero of the flood zone – located virtually on a peninsula into the river, with a water ferry that transports students between campus and the city. Jake and I didn’t fully realize this until we noticed the muddy, silt-brown color of the river, and sediment markings a good 20-30 feet up from where it currently sits, with scatterings of empty stores and apartment buildings along the edge. Beyond that, everything looked perfectly normal – the streets were paved and clean, no obvious signs of water damage or trauma. On our way into the Uni, we saw a scattering of couches, chairs and dingy suitcases at the edge of the street, and I mentally associated it with a frat house getting rid of excessively partied-out furniture. I looked a little closer and noticed that they were all actually new – just covered in mud, soaked through with water, and the house they belonged to was empty. Actually, the whole block of houses was empty. Unbelievably strange.
Two blocks up, the campus buzzed with Orientation week the same way any campus would, with friendly tour guides in collared purple shirts directing lost first-years, and groups of stylish students wearing sandals and “sunnies,” eating lunch in the campus cafes. We hiked our way through sandstone buildings, eyeing out the large lecture halls and strategizing Monday’s plan of attack. The university pathways felt exactly like a walk through the San Diego Wild Animal Park, with trees and plants jutting out into the sidewalk. At one point, we noticed a bunch of red balloons hanging limply in the air under a building, and discovered that 3 spiders nearly the size of my hand had built a web to keep them there. Several hours later, I was bit by some mosquito-esque pest (tiny bites on my wrist and knee), nearly stepped on a giant dead frog (that I later found out is venomous, good thing I didn’t touch it) and Liezl informed me that Bull Sharks hang out in the river. Okay jet lag, you can stop now. I’m pretty sure I’ve realized that I’m in Australia.
