Missed Buses, Ultimate Frisbee, and Australians

So I started off this week with a fairly busy Monday morning. So it all begins around 7am when my alarm goes off (typical on the weekdays), but the alarm clock is only in collboration with the sunrising directly through my window and into my bed at approximately the same time. But I was up and stirring and noticed it was a little bit colder in my room than usual, and that my heater had stopped working. This is of course was not that far fetched since I paid $6 for that heater, and only half of it worked... but the thought that I would 1) spend the following nights in my 20 degree sleeping bag unless I found a new heater 2) need to figure out how to buy another heater for less than $20, crossed my mind, and I just didn't want that kind of stress to start my day off. But luckily, the heater, the lights, and the computer all had lost power. So luckily, my junk heater was not the culprit.

My first item of business of the day was a trip downtown to the Executive Annex of Queensland Government to watch a presentation about urban design in Ireland... turns out the presentation had very little Urban Design content, but was somewhat interesting nonethless. The best part of that 1.5 hours was when I actually got to chat with the Office of Urban Managment lady who has a good deal of knowledge of what goes on in city planning in Brisbane. After that meeting, I headed down to the BCC Library to catch a bit of the NY Times before heading down to Griffith Uni for some afternoon meetings.

So being the clever transportation student that I am, I saw that the next bus didn't leave for Griffith until 12:40, so trying to overcome this system, I decided it would be in my best interest to catch a different bus, heading for a different part of town, somehow thinking that I would take me to where I needed to go. So to put things into Metro-Atlanta perspectives, imagine you were trying to get to Kennesaw State, and all of the sudden, you see Six Flags pass out of the corner of your window, with the only bus stops around being signposts with a little patch of matted down grass where a person probably stood a week prior.

So back to Brisbane, once I realized that I was on the brink of rural Australia, I hopped out of the bus, and headed back in the other direction. Through this confusion, I actually managed to make it back to Griffith and only cost me $1.10 more and 40 minutes. Of course this was 30 minutes past when I was supposed to meet my contact at Griffith, but he's a laidback guy, most Aussies are, and he was content meeting up at 1:30pm. At 2pm, I had another meeting with a gentleman who is originally from Florida but had a bit to speak about on land pricing.

Zooming forward, I had yet another meeting at 4pm back downtown with a lady that does network planning for the transportation network of regional brisbane. Whew, so my workday ended around 5:10pm, and I hopped back on the train for Indooroopilly.

I managed to squeeze in a trip to the gym that literally lasted 20 minutes, then went back to the lodge to suit up for my cross-town bike adventure to try to find the Yeronga Football Club, where I had message passed to me, I could find an ultimate frisbee league there.

The first 20 minutes of the bike ride went pretty smoothly, which took me back to the UQ campus at St. Lucia. Once there, the new and unknown journey began by crossing the river via bridge, and then passing a large cemetary (this is all at night btw), So I'm sitting there cruising on my $0 bike that weighs probably 80 pounds, along a dark road, with water on my right, gravestones on my left, and no friends for miles. After about 7 minutes of that, I finally started to see life and civilization again. And in approximately the location I expected, I saw bright field lights. But upon closer inspection, I realized no one there was playing frisbee, I waited around a bit, but became more convinced that this was the wrong field. After asking for directions, and getting miserable results, I pointed south and started biking. By looking at my map, there are only so many large swaths of green which would be worth of playing frisbee in this town. So I headed to the next one, about 10 mins away. Upon arriving there (the Yeronga High Schoo), I found no lights, not people, and no frisbee. Luckily, there was a scout troop which was holding some kind of meeting next door, and of course. You can't go wrong asking a boy scout. So they were able to point me in the right direction (which naturally was only 3 minutes from the first field), and I finally found little white discs floating through the air, just as I'd imagined. I met up with a girl named Maylin who was my contact, and jumped on their team called the Chimmichungas (sp?). The group was mostly guys of varying ages, and a few gals. Played some intense disc for the course of an hour. The team was a great group of people, and I found out that most of these individuals were somehow involved with the Australian National Team., Wow, cool. When the game is over, both teams circle up arm in arm, and the captains from both teams speak and talk about the game and compliment the other team etc..., it's really a cool sight, very Rugby-esk.

After the match, I was invited over to one of the guy's house for a team dinner, which consisted of lasagna, salad, desert, literally the entire works. They were fantastically friendly, and I will be playing on their team every Monday night until I leave now. In addition to the pickup frisbee on Wednesay nights.

After the whole dinner thing, I started on my bike ride home which lasts about 40 minutes back to Indooroopilly, passing all of the same solemn sights as I saw on the way in. Made it back around 10:30pm, and did some odds and ends.

Today (Tuesday) has been really boring to be honest. I've been in the office and working about 30% of the time. I'm waiting on some contacts to get back to me about property values and real estate, and I have very little motivation to start writing my report. In actualilty, I'm still at the office, it's 3pm, and I'll probably be here for another 30 minutes, unless I have some kind of breakthrough. Let's hope that happens. But things are great otherwise!