3 units...nearly done

Greetings from St. Leo's college at the University of Queensland! We're here all day giving and watching group presentations for our first course - Coastal Resource Management. We've been super busy all week with our new friend and professor Ron Johnstone, having lectures and traveling around Brisbane and Bribie Island learning about flood mitigation, canal estates and how best to manage our valuable coastal resources. Between 9-5 class, packed lunches with juice boxes and rowdy bus behavior (Batlle *cough*) this week has felt almost like a flashback to middle school. But add in some hard work and group stress-outs over this project and it feels like college again. The only shame is that the first time it rained since us getting here happened to be the day we were supposed to have lunch on the beach at Bribie Island. Largely unprepared clothing wise, we huddled in a little chip shop for our break until making a run for it back to the bus. Apart from that, days have been a little blustery but gorgeous and sunny on the whole - the big green quad at UQ makes a beautiful spot to have a lunch break.

Thanks to Sammy, we got a live stream going of the Stanford vs. UCLA football game yesterday in our lecture room during our lunch break (7:30pm on Saturday in CA was lunchtime for us on Sunday). So we haven't totally been missing out on the Cardinal football glory, although seeing friends in the stands definitely made us a little homesick.

I think we were all pleasantly surprised to find that our morning tea ritual from orientation week has lived on. Every morning at 11am the admin staff pop up magically with a spread of potato chips, cookies, fruit and drinks. This morning we were set up by the lake outside St. Leo's when two people approached us awkwardly...turns out that they had come all the way from Melbourne to visit a bench that was placed as a memorial for their grandfather...that bench happened to be the one that we'd laid a picnic blanket out on and was surrounded by 50 hungry Stanford kids. Oops. Awkward moment.

CRM Exam tomorrow and then we're off to Cairns first thing Wednesday morning. Stay posted!

Also, HAPPY BIRTHDAY Sasha Najera :)