So I've had the first two weeks of classes at the University of Queensland (located in the Brisbane suburb of St. Lucia) and I can honestly say that I'm super excited about all of the classes that I am taking. I'm fufilling a couple of my general education requirements with Indigenous Art History and Torres Strait Islander Studies. Before I arrived here, I didn't realize that Australia had 2 groups of indigenous peoples: the Aborigines and the Torres Strait Islanders. So far both of my indigenous study courses have been really interesting. In the Torres Strait class, we had one of the leaders of the Erub people come to talk to us about the challenges he faced growing up in a country that only recently granted the indigenous peoples citizenship in 1967. We also had a member of the Aboriginal community come to my Indigenous art history course to speak to us about Aboriginal identity. I feel like I've already learned a lot about their amazing culture just in the past two weeks.
The other two classes that I'm taking are Australia's Marine Environment and Australia's Terrestrial Environment. Both of which have some fun research-based field trips all over Queensland, including one 5 day trip to the Great Barrier Reef! So basically with all of my Australian studies courses, I'm going to learn a lot about this country.
I've also gotten to explore the area a little bit more (thanks to no Friday classes in my schedule). Last weekend, I had dragon boat training again on Saturday and then ventured out to the beautiful Gold Coast for a beach day on Sunday. Yesterday, I went to Brisbane's Science Center to check out their dinosaur exhibit which was pretty cool, especially since we recently learned about all of Australia's flora from that period that still exists today in my terrestrial environment class. Afterwards we went to see the Brisbane Broncos play the Canterbury-Bankston Bulldogs in a rugby match. Unfortunately, the Broncos lost by 2 points, but the game was still exciting to watch (even though I didn't really figure out what was going on until the last 10 minutes of the game). Today (Saturday) was a lazy day that just mostly consisted of grocery shopping and such and then tomorrow is the final training session for dragon boat before race day next weekend! Hopefully, I won't be as sore after practice as last week.
