Exploring and the 1st few days of Class

On Sunday I went to the Melbourne Zoo with Alysha. It always makes me sad when I go to a zoo to see animals enclosed in such small, mostly synthetic spaces. I was hoping that this zoo would have a good collection of native Australian animals. It had a fair number but it also had a large number of animals from all over the world; your standard zoo fare of gorillas, orangutans, elephants, zebras, lions, bears, etc. I think my favorite animal out of the whole trip was the platypus. I don’t have any pictures of them, unfortunately, because you are not allowed to take pictures in their area because they are more or less nocturnal. I also really enjoyed seeing the different species of wombats. The Great Flight Aviary was one of my favorite exhibits. It had a lot of different birds representing the Australian rainforest, wetlands, and bushland including the Royal Spoonbill, Eclectus Parrot, Red-tailed Black Cockatoo, and Brolga (a type of crane).

Kangaroos are really lazy.

A Spoonbill!

A Red-tailed Black Cockatoo I believe.

Aren't they pretty?

Here are a few pictures of Melbourne Uni that I took this weekend:

The Old Arts building across South Lawn

The 1888 Building

Union House

One of the newer buildings on campus

The Botany building I believe.

My first day of class at the Uni went really well. I only had one class, Historical Performance Practice, from 9-11am. The class is about 20 students and has a good distribution of vocalists, pianists, and other instrumentalists. One of the things that I really liked from the lecture is that we talked about how Baroque musicians played almost exclusively “modern” music: the music of the moment. Today, many musicians tend to play music from the last hundred to two hundred years rather than music written within the last two, three, or even ten years.

We also talked about how modern players have a preoccupation with musical notation and do not tend to add their own musical ideas (as far as notes and ornamentation or improvisation) to the music. Not that there is anything wrong with music being played just exactly the same every time, but I feel like that is part of the reason that I get so frustrated with “classical” music sometimes. When every performance is slightly different, it also encourages audiences to come back and encourages performers to be creative and really understand the music that they are playing. I am not sure what to think about recordings of music. I think those have to be considered separately from live performance.

We talked about beat hierarchy as well; how music comes from movement and dance and how important it is when playing Baroque music to play with that in mind. For me, dance is really something that draws me to a lot of music; even vocal music. I appreciate music by moving, even if it is just my toes, but I much prefer dancing or clapping or joining in with my own voice or instrument. I feel like music really should be community based instead of purely art based.

To celebrate the first day of class, I went out to a nice Italian dinner with some friends on Lygon Street (the Italian district). We had a lovely time and stopped in at the pub next door to our apartments on the way home for a glass of their Monday night special of AU$1 champagne.

Since I have no classes on Tuesday, Jamie and I decided to take our luggage that had been damaged on the flight from Cairns to Melbourne over to the repair shop. Mine really wasn’t that broken, but they decided just to give me a new bag (the airline paid for the repairs). So I now have a brand new suitcase! I think that it is kind of funny that the airline will pay for a new suitcase but won’t have complimentary drinks on the flight.

After dropping the bag off back at home, we decided to go on an adventure to the Royal Botanic Gardens. The weather was actually very nice today and got up to about 60oF so we walked there and back. Since Jamie gets out of class at 11am and I never have class on Tuesdays, we have decided that we will take Tuesday Expeditions to a new part of the city each week. Next week we are planning on going to St. Kilda down by Port Phillip.

We started of with some very delicious sushi (AU$2.50 for a roll) to snack on in the Queen Victoria Gardens. Then we continued on to the King’s Domain and to see the Sidney Myer Music Bowl (an outdoor performance space opened in 1959). It seems like it has great acoustics and I hope that I get to see a performance there while I am here!

Royal Botanic Gardens were beautiful, quiet and free. I know that I have said this before, but I really like how much open space there is in Melbourne. There are plants there from all over the world. We wandered around there for probably around two hours and I would guess that we saw about a third of the whole garden. My conducting class on Thursdays is right near there so maybe once it gets a little warmer I will go study in the garden for a few hours before my class.

Some cactuses and aloes.

A monkey tree?

It is very swollen, that one.

A fuzzy looking tree.

The first meeting for the semester of the Mountaineering Club was tonight. They are doing a bunch of trips that I am not very interested in (skiing and rock climbing) over the next few weeks, but hopefully once it warms up a little there will be some more bushwalking (hiking and backpacking). One trip that I signed up for in late August sounds like a ton of fun: it is called Midnight Ascent. The club owns a hut at the top of a mountain (I don’t remember which one), so on Friday we drive over to the base and at midnight we start hiking up to the top. People generally reach the top in 3-6 hours and then either sleep or watch the sunrise. Sometimes there is a short hike or two that day and then that night everyone helps cook a three-course meal from scratch and dresses up in formal attire for dinner. Sounds like a great trip, huh?

My Home in Melbourne

So a little about my new home: The RMIT Village Old Melbourne is a renovated hotel that has been modified into student housing. They are still doing some modifications to the old ballrooms to turn them into study spaces. There is also a swimming pool in the courtyard, a café, a patio, a small computer lab, and a “glass house” that has a TV and a pool table. The rooms are mostly two person rooms with a sliding divider wall between the two halves. I have covered my wall with a bunch of maps of the city (I love maps!) and I also put up an Australian flag (sorry, not in this set of pictures). The rooms each have a bathroom and a very small kitchen with a two-burner stove, sink, fridge, and microwave. They also have a balcony at the end. Mine looks out into the courtyard:

My roommate is also a study abroad student. She is studying commerce in Boston and is taking a bunch of gen-ed courses while she is here.

I finally registered for classes after some confusion with the newly adopted online registration system. Here is my schedule for this semester:

Monday: 9:00-11:00 Historical Performance Practice

Tuesday: No Class

Wednesday: 11:00-1:00 Baroque Ensemble

3:15-5:15 The Ethnography of Music

Thursday: 3:30-4:30 Conducting

Friday: 2:15-4:15 Music and Health

Classes run July 26-Oct 29 with a Spring Break Sept 18-Oct 3. There is SWOT Vac (study without teaching vacation) Oct 30-Nov 7 and then Exams Nov 8-Nov 26. So hopefully I will have a decent amount of time to travel around and get all of my studying done :).

I was planning on taking some more pictures of the city and the market and the uni today but it was drizzling again and so I decided against it. It has drizzled a bit almost every day so far. It is nothing like the rain we get in Charleston that is made up of these huge, fat raindrops that pelt down from the sky for about 30 minutes and then stop. It is much more like the rain I have experienced in Oregon and the Netherlands that mists on and off all day and is not even enough to require an umbrella. Often you don’t even need a raincoat but it is still enough when it is cold to make it annoying to walk around.

I have done some pretty exciting things the last few days. Yesterday, Katy Motsinger and I met up and got some delicious brekky at the Queen Vic Market. We wandered around there for a while and looked at a bunch of the stalls and I finally found an Australian flag that I now have hanging on my wall. Next, we went to Tim Burton Exhibition at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. It was a very well designed exhibit and had a bunch of his sketches, paintings and sculptures alongside his cinema projects. It is amazing how much he has done! We also got a delicious lunch in Chinatown and got a bit lost in the Arts district. We also came across some pretty incredible street musicians outside of Flinders Street Station.

Today I went back to the market for some groceries and then took myself on an adventure to Brunswick to see a folk music concert put on by the Melbourne Folk Club. The performers this week were Tonchi McIntosh and Sooty Hawk. I also discovered a bunch of Jam sessions around the city. Now I just have to work out how to get to them. It also looks like there are dances every Wednesday and some Saturdays. I am hoping to discover some more through going to the ones that I have found. I also found a couple of music festivals in other places in Victoria over the next couple of months. Hopefully I can find a way out to one of them.

So for tomorrow, it is off to the Zoo! Hopefully I will get some good pictures over the next few days. I have mostly just been absorbing the sites and sounds of the city so far but I would like to get some documentation to share!

Environmentally Conscious Australia

In the two weeks that I have been in this country so far, one thing that really struck me is that Australians are very environmentally conscious. This makes me really happy and feel a bit more at home than I do in the States a lot of the time. It is not a fad like it is in most places in the USA. People are genuinely concerned about the environment. Plastic bags are practically forbidden. Everyone has reusable bags and as part of our Uni orientations, a bunch of organizations have given us free ones so I have about six now.

The toilets flush with grey water (rainwater or recycled from the sink) and almost all of them have low-flow and high-flow flush options for #1 and #2. They are very worried about running out of water (likely by 2050) so there is a huge campaign to take 4-minute showers. There are 4-minute hourglass timers in all of the showers. Since a 4-minute shower is a bit of a challenge for me, my solution is taking an 8-10 minute shower every two-three days.

They don’t allow many kinds of pesticides on crops because they know that they will eventually wash out to sea and harm the life in the Great Barrier Reef. Most produce is organic even if it is not market as such. Many home products like dish and laundry detergent are made up of readily biodegradable chemicals and are grey water safe.

They recently introduced a bike share program in Melbourne (this May I believe) where you can rent a bike by the day, week, or year and take it for up to 30-minute trips from one bike rack to another without additional charge. You do have to own a bicycle helmet in order to use them however.

http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/on-your-bike-public-hire-scheme-hits-cbd-20100531-wp4k.html

First Week in Melbourne

So I’ve been in Melbourne for a week now. I absolutely love it!!

The city reminds me of a mixture of Boston, Asheville, and Europe. There are a lot of buildings from the Victorian era when a lot of money first came to Melbourne during the Victorian Gold Rush. They are mixed in with a lot of really modern looking buildings in all shapes and sizes. It is actually the State of Design festival this week and there are a lot of buildings open this weekend for special tours about the architecture.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melbourne

There are a lot of open spaces and parks throughout the city that break up the busy city streets. The tram and bus system is very accessible and runs almost everywhere you could want to go. There are a fair number of bicycle lanes and bike paths throughout the city but they don’t appear to be very popular at the moment. That may be because it is winter here and a bit on the chilly side.

The first day I was here, I went through some sticker shock because the prices of a lot of things are pretty high. Now that I have had a chance to explore the city a little more, I have a better sense of where to find reasonably priced things. The Queen Victoria Market, a huge open-air market about a five-minute walk from my apartment, has practically everything you could possibly want from shoes and clothing to crafts and jewelry and a huge amount of fresh fruit and veggies. There is also a portion that is a fish and meat market and a section with delicatessens where you can find cheeses, bread, honey, wine and many other things.

There are a number of grocery stores in the area (a Woolworths, a Safeway, and an Aldi) for things like pasta, yoghurt, and cereal and I am still not quite sure which one is the best. There is also a Big W, which is kind of like a Wal-Mart, and a Target. Target here is a bit different than the ones at home. Here they are much more like a department store and they don’t have sections with office supplies or snacks and their health and beauty department is very limited.

I have also figured out some places to go for a cheap lunch or dinner out.

I have spent at least a portion of every day wandering through the city and figuring out where things are. There are a lot of specialized shopping districts around town. I think that it is a bit funny to walk down a street and come across like four outdoor sports shops and then on the next block you find a collection of shoe shops or vintage clothing stores. There is a Chinatown, a Greek district and an Italian district that I have explored a little bit so far that all have delicious restaurants mixed in with a variety of other shops. I think that starting classes will be a good thing because otherwise I might be tempted to look at all of the amazing shops all day and spend a bunch of money on things that I don't even need.

There is a lot of street art and many sculpture installations around the city. Some of the smaller laneways have been adopted as ever-changing galleries of elaborate graffiti. The Arts precinct surrounding the Yarra river is home to the many museums from Film and Visual Art to Immigration. The Ballet, Symphony, and many Theatre companies also make their home in this area. The new Melbourne Recital Centre opened just this February and is supposed to have some of the best acoustics in the world. Needless to say, I am very excited to see some performances there this year.

Cairns - Soooo Many Trees

Our time in Cairns was amazing. On our second day, we volunteered and planted trees and shrubs at a school and repotted seedlings at a nursery in the rainforest. The plants we planted are all food and shelter for the Cassowary bird. There are only about 1500 left in Australia and they are very important to the health of the rainforest because they digest and move seeds for many trees that are essential to the rainforest.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassowary

http://australian-animals.net/casso.htm

While we helped repot the seedlings, they also told us about a bunch of the plants in the area. We also got to eat a green ant. It is kind of like a wiggly sour candy. We had a really cool bus driver who told us all sorts of interesting things about which trees were introduced and considered pests, the geology of Queensland, and all about sugar cane. There are a bunch of sugar cane fields along the road that were being harvested as we passed. The hills surrounding Cairns I would have guessed were volcanic but they aren't.

a view of the hills surrounding Cairns from the harbor

The next day we went to a wildlife park and took a tour of some of the forest in an old Army Duck (they run on land and in the water). We saw a very large spider, held a koala and got a picture, petted kangaroos and wallabies, saw a huge crocodile, a wombat and a few other animals. (There are a bunch more pictures of everything on Facebook) We had a pretty excellent lunch that included passion fruit and kiwis.

a wallaby!!

passion fruit flower

Later that afternoon when we got back to the hotel, I wandered over to the organic food store around the corner and found some delicious chocolate. On the way back, a bunch of the other students had started a jam session on the sidewalk outside of the hotel so I went and got my violin and joined in. There wasn't much that we could come up with that everyone knew but it was still nice to relax and play some music with other people. Practicing in the room by myself was starting to get kind of boring.

downtown Cairns

Friday was our free day. Most of the other students had signed up for some sort of adventure or another through the travel agency that booked our tickets.After considering a zipline tour of the rainforest that would have been A$200, I decided to opt for renting a bike and riding around Cairns for the day (A$10). I bicycled around town to the Esplanade and to the Botanical Gardens. There were a lot of really different tress. The Tanks Arts center next to the botanical gardens was pretty neat. It reminded me a lot of REDUX in Charleston. I also visited the huge fresh market that sold everything from clothes to fruits and veggies. I went to the KickArts center and a couple of the local galleries. A trip to the Australian Post brought me to the mall where they also had a BiLo and a Target which I found amusing.

I like the leaves on this plant / tree

a pretty cool flower

lots of parasitic plants growing on this tree

a banana tree

a huge fiddlehead from one of the fern trees

Arrival

The Beginning

I managed to pack everything into two bags plus my violin case. I had one suitcase at 49 pounds that included my tent and Thermarest (yay! I was able fit both!); my backpacking backpack with a few clothes, my computer, music and various other miscellaneous things such as chords, adaptors, and toiletries; and lastly my violin case. I was pretty proud of my packing job because I only checked one bag and had two carry-ons until I had to gate check the backpack for every flight because it was either too big or too heavy.

The flights all went smoothly. I met another AustraLearn student at the Charlotte airport and every flight from there on out there were more and more students. The airplane to Brisbane from LA was kind of crazy. It was a double-decker plane. In the seating area I was in there were two isles separating groups of 3, 4, 3 seats. After finally arriving in Cairns (pronounced CANS), we were all bused over to the hotel and after mass chaos, given keys to our rooms. There are three other girls in my room that are also attending the University of Melbourne.

There are soooo many people here right now with AustraLearn that it is overwhelming. There are only about 20 students that are going to the University of Melbourne but there are about 130 students here for our orientation session and about 50 more at the hotel in an overlapping session. This makes for lots of cattle herding from place to place and a fair number of annoyingly loud drunken American kids who are overly excited about being legally allowed to drink. It is almost too many people to handle. I found a bunch of people who are going to be living at the same place in Melbourne that I have mostly been hanging out with.

Great Barrier Reef

I went SCUBA diving twice today! About half of the students at our orientation session got on a boat this morning to go out to the Great Barrier Reef for the whole day. The other half volunteered at a nature conservation place and we will swap tomorrow.

view from the dock

The uncertified divers got to go in groups of three or four. We started out with arms locked with the instructor and after a while got to swim on our own. The first dive was around 40 minutes including an introduction and practice session and the second was around 50. I saw sooo many fish and I got to pet some coral. We didn’t see any sea turtles, which was disappointing. I have a few pictures on a film underwater camera that I probably wont develop for a while. One of the girls in my dive group got a bunch of digital pictures though so I may be able to get some of those soon to share. We had the opportunity to go snorkeling as well. Snorkeling was pretty fun too but the weather was kinda rough and drizzly when I was snorkeling and I was pretty cold even in the wetsuit.

clownfish!

giant purple clam

some happy fellow sailors

It has been funny weather since I arrived. So far it has been warm during the day and cool at night. The funny thing is it is sunny a lot but then all of the sudden it will be overcast and spit water at you for about 10 minutes. I haven’t seen much of the landscape yet but from what I could tell from our bus rides to and from the hotel, the trees here are very interesting and the hills surrounding Cairns are very bloppy (perhaps like the ones in the Dominican Republic?). The town/city of Cairns is very touristy. It reminds me a bit of Folly mixed with Myrtle Beach. The billboards, advertisements and general appearance of the buildings remind me a lot of Europe. Very bright and bold.

Anyway, I am looking forward to the adventures to come and getting to Melbourne; more to come when I get there! I am sure there will be stories to tell!

One Week Left in Charleston!

I can hardly believe that one week from today, I will be flying to Australia to spend the next six months studying and exploring!

I leave Charleston on Friday to drive to Charlotte with some friends. Saturday, I fly out of the Charlotte airport to Chicago and then to LA where I will meet my fellow study abroad students who are studying at the University of Melbourne through AustraLearn. We then fly from LA to Brisbane and on to Cairns where we will spend the next few days getting to know each other, exploring, visiting the Great Barrier Reef, volunteering, and meeting some Australian animals.

I arrive in Melbourne on July 17th and will spend the next week in orientations and registering for classes and finding my way around Melbourne. Classes begin July 26th.

As my musical adventures at home wind down, tonight is my last night of performing at the Village Playhouse in Red, White and Cash: A Musical Tribute to Johnny Cash. I am so glad that I had the opportunity to participate in this show! Last April/May/June the same cast and musicians played during Piccolo Spoleto so it was a lot of fun revisiting the music.

Opening night of Red, White and Cash: A Musical Tribute to Johnny Cash

Some of my violin students gave a recital this afternoon. They all performed beautifully! There were solos and duets, pieces from the Suzuki Method and from the O'Connor Violin Method. Michelle and I even played the first movement of the Bach Double Violin Concerto. I am really going to miss all of them while I am gone!

My goals for the next week are to:

• figure out what I am going to play for my first lesson and possibly for ensemble auditions in Melbourne (and practice!)
• finish packing and cleaning up the disaster that is my room
• make sure that I haven't forgotten anything!