Getting settled in and exploring Adelaide

G’day everyone,

7/25: I’ve settled into my apartment and organized my pictures on my cork boards and my clothes in the closet and drawers. Today I had orientation for my program, viticulture, and enology, at the Waite campus. This campus is located southeast of the city, and I commute by bus there for classes every day. The university is also situated at the foothills of the Adelaide Hills so I have to walk up a rather steep incline to reach some classes and the cellar. During orientation, we had a tour of the campus, and lunch was provided. LOL, the pizza was from Dominos. We saw the winery building where I’ll have introductory winemaking and in future semesters, where I’ll be making and fermenting wine. I can’t wait to make my own wine next semester!!!! This semester we will be in the winery for fermentation weeks and labs. Then we walked down the hill to one of the vineyards on the campus. We will also be working in the vineyards quite a lot this semester during viticultural methods and procedures practicals (labs). After orientation, I went back into the city and walked around Rundle Mall and the shops.

7/26: During Orientation Week (O’week), there are many activities, trips, and sessions for students to attend. Some sessions include International Student Essentials or Settling into Adelaide; one of the activities was Meeting Aussie Animals (which I missed because of my delayed flight😭), and the trips were to Victor Harbor or the Botanic Gardens. I woke up early for the Victor Harbor trip and walked to the area for check-in only to find out I had to sign up for the trip. I figured that would be the case, but I didn’t know about signing up since I missed half of O’Week. I was bummed out, but they offer this trip each semester, so I still have three more opportunities. The Botanic Garden tour was the same day, so I signed up for that, and I’m thrilled I went. The tour guide was Aboriginal, and he showed us some of the trees that they used to make spears, tools, bowls, and boomerangs. There was one tree he called the “supermarket tree” because they could make a variety of tools and equipment from it.

Next, he showed us how to make a fire with just wood. He told us the wood can be soft and soft, or soft and hard; but not hard and hard. In the demonstration, he had cut the softwood in half horizontally and laid it on the ground. The hardwood was long like a rod. He held the hardwood vertical and rubbed his hands together on the wood while applying pressure to the softwood. He continued doing this until smoke appeared and we were all amazed.

We walked to another tree, and he told us this tree produces enormous pine cones every 2-3 years with around 150 smaller nutshells that have a similar size to a quarter. It is not recommended to use this tree as shelter as the giant pine cones can be deadly if they fell on your head, and the branches are sharp and spikey.

Pictures from the garden will be uploaded in my next post.

Enjoy 🙂