Currently: Sitting on my back patio in the late afternoon, streaming The Peak, looking at all the big green plants, and the tall buildings of the Brisbane business district behind me.

This week, classes started at my exchange university, the University of Queensland. A school surrounded by water on three sides (kind of like UBC, except it’s the Brisbane river), with a lot of sandstone buildings and no textbooks in need of being purchased. After attending UBC for three years it is really interesting going to another university where every class has a tutorial (I think I’ve only had one tutorial at UBC), lectures are usually video taped and put up online, and readings are hardly mandatory (that’s probably why I have no textbooks).

The cool things about Brisbane are as follows:
– Busways, like having a subway or Sky Train, but with buses. Brisbane has dedicated bus highways throughout the city to guarantee few interruptions and have created elaborate bus stations almost like a stop on the Canada Line. For example, I know I need to take a bus to Woolloongabba Station to get home and I just need to cat something along the busway to get there.

– Limes are as cheap as in Canada! Where they were $5 for two in New Zealand, here I pay around 40 cents each. Important for a girl who’s residence floor made her fall in love with guacamole and you now make it once a day as a replacement for real dinner.

– Boost Juice Bars, the Booster Juice of Australia. I’ve been learning how to stick to a budget now that I’m paying rent and buying groceries (goodbye to my safe 3 years in Totem Park with a dinning hall). Just trying to justify $6.50 AUS a day in the budget for an original sized strawberry, watermelon, and pineapple juice with lots of lemon.

Other updates:
– Everyone thinks I’m American. One restaurant identified me as Canadian, only because he watches How I Met Your Mother, he told me. He’s in the know.
– My new Australian debit card sparkles. Shannon Sterling would like that detail.
– My house is the loveliest summer home. Here’s a photo of part of my room: