Welcome to the country, mate

Let me just start out by saying, there was the most enormous spider napping above my bed tonight.  Nasty thing!  The Australians (which is how we refer to Lou and Jo) said they think its the same one they tried to kill two years ago when the last group of Americans were staying with them.  Usually, I don't have a problem with spiders, or any bugs for that matter, but I was not going to bed with this one sitting above me waiting for the perfect opportunity to jump on me and attack the second I nodded off to sleep.  Luckily, Alina is quite fascinated by insects and caught the spider in a tupper ware so we could move it somewhere less near to my bed... and me.

I've started working on one of my first assignments, which is to observe a native animal and record & write about its behavior.  I went into uni a couple hours early the other day so I could wander around and sort of shop for an animal to observe.  I decided to watch a flock of cockatoos, called corrella by those aussies, for about an hour and a half.  I still have to go back for a bit more observation.  One of the ladies in the programs office, Steph, said that it's actually very unusual to see flocks of corrella in the city, but the recent drought has brought them here in search of water.

After lecture today, Alina, Amanda and I headed over to the Brisbane city botanical gardens.  On our way out, we saw some sort of mammal digging in the fallen leaves under some bushes near a man sitting on a park bench.  We walked over to investigate only to have the man look at us for a few moments before informing us that the mammal was his dog.  A second later, a little scruffy dog came jumping out of the leaves.  We had a good laugh about it.  We also signed up for the UQ dive club tonight, so now we can go on discounted dive trips through the uni.  We were planning on going out after dinner tonight to meet up with other EAP kids, but home was too comfy and the Australian tv shows were too entertaining... and then there was the whole spider incident, so we just decided to stay in.

There will be pictures to come; as soon as I can figure out how to load a bunch up at once on the blog.

Good night!
Jessie