Spontaneous update from AU

This post was updated throughout March. Brisbane is now more or less like my home, so I don't have much new stuff to talk about, as everything was said and done before. Nevertheless, here are some new stories:

On Friday (9.3.) was the regular dinner meeting of the Christianity club. But this time it was more special. At first, we had dinner as usual. Then we played games, some of them were really funny. Afterwards people started to sing worship songs. I've never seen this before. I always thought that it's something boring, but the people really rocks! Two of them were rocking on the guitar and one girl was playing piano. And everybody sings (me too, but just a little bit, because I don't believe in God :D). Really interesting experience.

Next day on Saturday (10.3.) I played my first football match at the UQ 7-a-side tournament with the team I joined recently. We won 3-1 (one own goal from their team)! I didn't score because I was playing the defender, but maybe next time. The match lasted 40 min with 5 min break in the middle. The only thing that was bad was mud everywhere.. The mud also smelled like (cow?) shit, so after the match I also smelled like (horse?) shit.

Gold Coast

I've been here over 1 month and I haven't been to the sea yet. To fix that, I decided to go to Gold Coast on 17th March. Gold Coast is (according to Wiki) the biggest non-capital city in Australia.
Me & my friend transfered from Brisbane to Gold Coast by train. There's a train leaving from Roma Central Station quite frequent. After 45 min the train arrives to Gold Coast suburb (or sth like this). From there it's neccessary to take 30 min bus to get to the city, particularly to Surfers Paradise. Public transport can be paid by the go card, which is the one used in Brisbane. It costs me around 5$ from my place (St.Lucia) Surfers Paradise with my green go card. But if you have more than 10 travels in the week, than you can travel for free the rest of the week.
Gold Coast is a long city streatching along the coast. The main tourist point is definitely Surfers Paradise. As the name indicates, it's a paradise for surfing. So I thought that this place would be crowded with surfers and therefore dangerous to swim, but suprisingly there weren't so many surfers and the place was full of swimmers. The weather was f***in' hot and sunny (must be like 30 something), so I went to the sea. The waves were really good and around 2m high, so it was ideal for jumping around. At noon I lay down on the white sandy beach under the palm trees and had a little siesta. What more can you ask for?
The beach is really clean and covers with white and black sands. The sea itself is crystal clear and little wavy for swimming, but not to much to have fun. The city itself is very touristic, there are millions of skyscrapers everywhere, among them the highest skyscraper in Australia. And there's a McDonald's close to Surfer's Paradise, which means ice cream for 30 cents (the only thing here that's cheaper than in Czech Republic).

Rocky Horror Picture Show (RHPS)

I read about this show in The perks of being a wallflower, but otherwise I didn't know anything about it. At first, I thought is a theather performance. No, it's an old musical movie. Then I saw on Facebook that this performance will be at our university theather. So I attend it without any hesitation.
The ticket costs 10$ for UQ students and it includes 1 movie and the RHPS. The first movie was called Startrucks. There wasn't many people attending this movie. I watched it for 20 min, then I realize I didn't understand anything, so me and my friend got out and I ordered a pizza for dinner :)
The RHPS started around 20:30. At 20:00, there were a bunch of people waiting in front of the theather. We noticed that some of them were wearing really weird clothes - one guy came in a nightdress and underwear, the other was dressed as a woman prostitute etc. We thought that they were performers, but they weren't.
The show consisted of the movie itself on the screen and artists lip-syncing some parts of it. These parts were mostly the singing parts, performers were wearing exactly the same dress as in the movie and acted accordingly to what was going on on the screen. The other interesting part was that the audience screaming all the time, making jokes and saying nonsenses (probably because I didn't understand them). At first I thought they were drunk, but at the end I found out it was a part of the show :D At one scene some people from the audience started to spray water from water pistols on everyone, and during the other scene the whole theather stood up and danced. Crazy :D
I really like the songs from the movie, but unfortunately I didn't understand anything :) The sound was not that loud, then the continuous screaming and yelling from the audience didn't help to make it better. But that's how it goes, I should have watched it before at home. Well, maybe next time...

Study


Programming in the Large - this course exceeds my expectations. I expect easy-peasy subject when I'd spent max. 30 min every week doing homework. But the first assigment surprised me. It's harder than I expected :D The reason is that it contains stuff from probability and I don't remember them, like conditional probability... And the instructions for the assignments are little bit hazy, even the tutors don't know exactly what we have to do. So I spent couple of hours reading the instructions and comments again and again and now I think I finally understand it, I've written some codes and almost got the basics done. But still it will take me a couple of hours more... Damn!

Introduction to Web Design - again, the first assignment is not easy. We have to write a documentation about our personal web page, including things like persona, wireframes, discussing about target audiences etc. And I'm still confuse about what to write and how to write it.

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) - Until now I've lost 1 point from 8, so it's ok. Tomorrow (27.3.) I'm going to miss 1 tutorial as I'm in Melbourne, so I'll probably lose 4 points more. It's bad, but I'm an exchange student, so it happens :D We also have to write an essay about a given topic, but there's still plenty of time for it.

Web Information Systems (WIS) - chill, but lengthy. I didn't know a thing about PHP, but the assignment was pretty easy (login, logging, timer and auto-logoff), so I haven't lost a point yet. The next assignment will be about JSP and I have some XPs with it already, so it should be quicker.

It might seems that study here is very easy :) I can ensure you that's not as easy as it seems. Overall, the subjects I mentioned are not easy at all for everybody. I picked them because I have some XP with programming and I've worked before, but if you come from VŠE FIS (my school) and have no interest in programming and had only the programming subjects at school, they might be a problem for you. Especially WIS course is pretty comprehensive and during the semester you have to learn PHP, JSP and JavaScript. Also the Programming in the Large expect you have taken a Python programming course and many examples are based on algorithm and maths and statistics.

Rainy days in Brisbane

I signed up this semester for the CCM (Christianity sth Movement) and to make it complete as a package, I also signed up for the G Race, which took place on Saturday. Start was at 9:00, but because we needed to meet at South Bank at 8:15, I had to wake up at 6:30 am on the weekend...

I was in a team with another 7(?) people and there were a lot of teams (above 30 for sure), but not all teams started from the same place, so the start wasn't crowded. The race is about going to different spots in Brisbane, solving tasks there and get a clue. All the clues will then help you to answer the main question "Where is Frank?" (Frank Abignale from Catch Me If You Can movie). The tasks were various, e.g. first one was about throwing our shoes to the paper box so the box will move as far as possible, or dance Gangnam Style in front of the strangers and let them guess what's the dance, or sing an arbitrary text to a melody of a well-known song (well-known English song, so I didn't know them :D).

The finish was at UQ at 1 pm, so 4 hours to fulfill 6 tasks and to get the answer to the main question. We got the answer with the 3rd clue (the answer was "Madagascar"), but those 6 tasks took us almost 4 hours to complete. Because the time is also important, we ran the whole way as cheetahs, and because the rain is really persistent today, it was raining the whole day. And as I heard in a song, "When it rains it pours", that's a true story. I got soaked, even I wore a poncho and got an umbrella. But at the finish we got pizzas and drinks :) Unfortunatelly my team didn't win the first and second places, because there were better teams (or rather, more lucky teams), so I guess that we finished third. Not bad (Obama face).

I also got 2 new E guitar strings, yay :D Yesterday a friend of my landlord has came over. As she saw me bought a guitar with a broken string two weeks ago, she asked me whether I fixed and tune it. I answered that I fixed it, but probably didn't tune it well. So she offered that she would have a look at it and tune it for me. As she was trying to tune it, one string got broken... Too bad, but it happened to me also. So today, she bought a new string and fixed and tune the guitar for me :) In addition, she left 2 more strings for me, and a tuner. So I got new stuff for the guitar for free. Not bad (Obama face).

On Sunday I planned to go to the Koala Pine with my new friend here, but it rained again. So we ended up in the Brisbane museum and Brisbane gallery, but I had fun there even it was my second time in those places :) We also saw a Aboriginal dance performance and it was absolutely awesome.

Second week in school was funnier than the first week, because the practicals and the tutorials have started. I have pracs and tutorials in my Programming course, and the difference is simply about having/not having a computer to program. During the tutorial, we write code on the paper and on the blackboard. And the computers here are pretty fast as they're Intel Core i7 3,4GHz, have 16GB of RAM and Win 7. Not bad (Obama face).

Me and my Czech classmate also created a plan for the mid-semester break. We will travel to Melbourne, from there to the Great Ocean Road by car, and afterwards to Tasmania by plane. We'll probably live at my acquaintance's house in Melbourne, which means for free, so it should be a low cost travel. The trip is going to take about 8-9 days, so I'll miss some of my classes and probably lose 4 points... If someone happened to be on those places while I'm there, let me know and we can grab a drink or two (or more). Not bad (Obama face).