School Has Begun!

I am now on my second tuesday of school. I have figured out where everything is on the small campus. It is tucked into the rainforest with hills covered in lush green going up on three sides. The rainforest extends down through the campus along a couple of creek beds which fill with water when it rains.

When it rains, oh man does it ever rain. If you feel a drop, then another drop you seem to have about 20 seconds to get under cover before the deluge begins. It rains so hard here that it takes about 30 seconds for a shirt to get completely soaking wet as if you have jumped in a pool.

Luckily for us students, there are covered walkways between all the buildings on campus. All of them except the bus shelter. That is a thirty meter dash away. The good thing is that while they are madly intense, they rain showers are usually brief.

I have developed a bit of a routine for school. I wake up early with the sun, sometime around six thirty usually. I walk down to the beach and read around seven or seven thirty. There are very few people about, just a few joggers usually. I am back by about nine, and before jumping on the bus at about nine thirty, I jump in the pool for a quick swim. Some days I have lots of classes, others not so many, but I have been staying at school most of the day, hanging with friends and doing homework.

Today in my geomorphology practical we played with dirt. We played with dirt from four or five places around Cairns. When I say we played with it, I kinda do mean just that. There was no assignment for the exercise, and all we had to do was get a little bit of it wet on a little dish, then match up the color of it to a color palate. We then added a little bit of this dye stuff, then some other stuff to see what the pH was. Again that is just holding up a little color pallet to match the color the stuff turns.

The most fun thing was the last one. Finding out the texture. You take a big bunch of it in your hand, and slowly add water to it until it sticks together. You then squish it out of your hand until it falls off a bunch of times, and the average size of the piece that falls off tells you how much sand vs clay is in that sample. It was a lot of fun.

Now that I am settling in, and I am a little bit more into the rhythm of school I think I will start finishing off writing posts about my travels. I still have the latter half of Switzerland, as well as Wollongong and surrounds, The Kangaroo Valley, and Byron Bay. After that I think I will have done some more exciting stuff here, so I will write about that!