What a surprisingly good weekend. I never would have thought that it would have been as good as it was, but that's what life does to you sometimes; hands you the lemons. We went up to the Naracoorte Caves, coupled with somewhere else in Australia as one of the UN's World Heritage sites. The actual caves weren't anywhere as impressive as the ones from planet earth, but that would be understandable being how amazing everything from those movies are. But, it was really cool to get to know some of my classmates a lot better. Obviously these weekend trips force you into that chance, but I'm certainly glad it did. I met quite a few Aussies, one specifically that loves hockey and I'm supposed to go Tuesday to his house to watch a game (his house pays $80/month for FoxTel, which has ESPN and other American sports channels) - just amazing to talk about hockey again - and another girl that actually just got back from doing the first semester of university at Guelph, and also a guy from Japan and another from Chile. Really cool to meet people from other cultures and have some very enlightening conversations, but they mostly always end with "You've gotta go to Denmark/Germany/South America". Its good to get to know people in class in general though as I've got the other two field trips approaching and will need some other people to talk to other than myself.
Thylacoleo carnifex (Marsuipial lion) and Proctoptodon goliah (Giant short-faced kangaroo)
The actual field trip was kind of good, and kind of boring. Some parts were great, the walking through the caves and seeing the fossils, as is shown above in the pictures taken by yours truly, and then the boring, demonstrated in the photos before. We were giving these boxes that you can see on the table in the background, and they were filled with dirt, rocks and bones from a scientist's recent excavations. Our jobs were to go through it, which if we actually did completely and wasn't time constraint would take forever, and seperate all the bones and dirt/rocks, and then move onto seperating the bones via classifications. There were a lot more pictures to put up but I really couldn't bore everyone that much. The bones are from a kangaroo, obviously, but we also found three bones that showed evidence of the marsuipial lion above being present in our sample. Well, the batteries dying now so I'm on my way out of here, but hopefully the week will provide more words to my fingers.
Sunday evening - good swim workout, frustrating but after being pushed to sprint a 100m and try to impress, I posted one of my fastest times in Australia, but what that time was exactly I couldn't say. Around/less than 1m30s which I was quite pumped about. But, after the swim workout I had the unfortunate symptoms of drinking way too much water during my swim. It was aweful, I felt bloated, sick and actually full although I hadn't had supper yet. While thinking about how crappy I felt, something dawned on me; if I plan on swimming in open-water and swallow that much salt water, I'll definitely throw up. Yet another thing I have to work on in the pool.
Sunday evening - good swim workout, frustrating but after being pushed to sprint a 100m and try to impress, I posted one of my fastest times in Australia, but what that time was exactly I couldn't say. Around/less than 1m30s which I was quite pumped about. But, after the swim workout I had the unfortunate symptoms of drinking way too much water during my swim. It was aweful, I felt bloated, sick and actually full although I hadn't had supper yet. While thinking about how crappy I felt, something dawned on me; if I plan on swimming in open-water and swallow that much salt water, I'll definitely throw up. Yet another thing I have to work on in the pool.
