Lessons

I've seen loads of lizards lately. This one was at South Bank. Me and Ryan also went to the city botanical gardens and saw 7! I was very pleased as I had been looking forward to seeing lizards. We also saw 2 little ones in the front garden and a tiny one on the living room wall!

I started lessons last week and they all seem quite good. The learning style is pretty different from at home though, it seems a lot more group work and communication based and fewer labs. Also the courses are open to pretty much anyone at the uni so although they go into detail they also spend some time reiterating the basics. Although I'm finding this quite helpful as obviously I havn't taken the same courses that the standard student in my class would have. My microbes and human health module seems really similar to content that I've already done at Edinburgh so far, but I figure it may focus on things I havn't done yet later in the term. But so far it has been mainly revision. My physiology and pathophysiology course seems the most difficult, and goes into a lot more detail on really specific areas than what I did last year. At the moment where doing the angiotensin and renin system and its mainly based on recent research papers, with a lot of graphs and figures involved- not my fave! My biomedical science course is quite strange as it is supposed to be the "capstone" course for biomed majors. This means that it is supposed to help with the expected graduate atributes other than knowledge of the subject area. There's no exam for this course but we have to do 3 group projects then individual essays based on ethics, communication and data handling. This one is mainly tutorial based and the lectures occur for a few weeks and then we have a few weeks off from them. My other course is Australia's terrestrial environment which I am taking mainly for the field trips. At the moment we are learning about the history of australia's plant and animal life, so have had lectures on things such as dinosaurs and other extinct animals.

In other news, I have managed to get a job. It's working for the uni social science research department and involves phoning people up and questioning on whatever research study is going on at the time. Examples of topics are the publics' view of police or on racism, so might be interesting. I think I'm going to get hung up on a lot :s The pay is very good though, it's over $24 which is like £14-15 in the UK! I have my training tomorrow then can start doing shifts so I will let you know how it goes.



We went to surfer's paradise on Sunday. I sunbathed and swam in the sea and then went to a hot tub party at Hollie's (from Burtons). It was a good, good day!

An unattractive pic of me and Louisa in the hot tub!

Surfer's paradise is really built up and there are loads of skyscrapers right by the beach, which seems a little wierd when you're sat on the beach! The sea wasn't too cold at all and it was definately warm enough to sunbathe. I'm not very brown yet though. Ryan is a bit brown, but not enough to be jealous of yet. And he gets to be outside all day so its okay. He is planning to move to Surfer's Paradise because it's so good, and it is also conveniently close to Brisbane, only an hour and a bit on the train.

Ryan burried me in the sand at South Bank, he made me tall :)
I also got buried at Surfer's Paradise but Ryan and Guy made me into something a bit different...

Miss you all lots!
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