My time in Brisbane began after I got off a plane that had been over two hours delayed. For once, this wasn’t even the airline’s fault; there apparently had been some unpredictable weather conditions and they straight up didn’t have a plane available for a little while. The plan had been for Jane Andersen, Rotarian from RC Brisbane High-Rise, to show me around a little before she took me to her place, but unfortunately it was late enough in the evening when I got there that we just went straight to hers.
I spent most of the week being hosted by other Rotarians, but since they only returned from a cruise late Sunday, and I got in on Sunday too, Jane Andersen was gracious enough to put me up for a night. We chatted on the way to hers and over dinner; it was good conversation, and the dinner was quite nice too. Since it was evening, it wasn’t quite as hot as it could have been, but despite this it felt quite a bit more stifling than what I’m used to from Melbourne because of the humidity. Nothing a bit of aircon couldn’t fix though.
Next morning Jane took me over to Allan Warwick Strong and Deborah Jean Le Garde’s house. They are also Rotarians from Brisbane High-Rise, and they were the ones who hosted me for the rest of the week. I dropped off my stuff and nearly immediately headed over along with Allan to QUT for my first day of Maths Summer School.
It was a wonderful experience to go there, learn maths and connect with people. I must admit I wasn’t too impressed by the first lesson, which was almost entirely spent cutting up lemons, but other people were apparently really enthralled with it, so what do I know. It only went uphill from there though; my favourite was when we coded an algorithm to solve the Travelling Salesman Problem in Python, since it was great to see it coming together in your hands and know you were on the right track to the solution, and it was similarly enjoyable when we modelled predator/prey systems in Python as well.
I was a bit sceptical when I saw that one day was a ‘biology scavenger hunt’, 
since in my experience scavenger hunts can get boring and/or tedious, but I was very pleasantly surprised by it. We learned some interesting applications in biology during it and actually got to solve concrete contextualised problems, which was great. From the talks by QUT students and the content of the lessons, it turns out one can actually do quite a bit with purely a maths degree; something to consider.
In the afternoons, Allan and Deb took me out around Brisbane; one day, we went up to the lookout at Mount Coot-Tha, and saw a news reporter setting up. It was because they were reporting on the Aurora Australis, which was supposed to be possible to see all the way up north in Brisbane. Apparently some people out in the countryside near there did see it as a glow on the horizon, but unfortunately when we went back to Mount Coot-Tha later that evening we couldn’t really see anything. Oh well.
Another evening, Allan and I went out to a nearby park to go look at the flying foxes. Due to a light vocabulary mishap, I actually thought they would be something like flying squirrels except more foxlike, and only when I saw one did it click that they were really bats under a different name. My camera doesn’t perform too well in the dark, but considering the conditions I got some photos I’m actually quite proud of. We also heard some curlews.
One morning before t
he lessons began, Deb took me to a Rotary meeting to do a presentation. Two days before, when she asked me if I would be willing, I said yeah, no sweat, I’ve already got one pre-made since I’ve done this before, I’ll just tweak it; imagine my horror, then, when it turned out the evening before I didn’t have the presentation saved to my computer and my USB was back in Melbourne.
Ultimately it turned out for the better though; when I made the presentation from scratch, I took a slightly different approach and the presentation was better for it. I’m glad to say it was quite a success; I got some laughs, and most of them were even in the places I wanted them to be.
The Summer School only ran from Monday to Thursday and I went back on Sunday, so we made the most of the two full days I had in Brisbane.
On Friday, I went out birdwatching with a relative of Deb’s and saw the local bird fauna. Unfortunately, my camera was nearly out of charge, and perhaps related to that it was acting up a bit (I have quite a few photos of some nice branches with a very blurry bird in the background), but despite that I managed to snap a decent amount of good shots. The highlight was when I got the closest I’ve ever been to a kookaburra; before that, I’d only seen them from some distance, so I got to properly appreciate the size and look of them.
Saturday Deb and Allan took me, their granddaughter, and their grand-nephew out to go for a surfing lesson near Surfer’s Paradise. I must admit a lot of it was more enjoyable in hindsight than during the experience, mostly because the water was insanely salty and kept getting in my eyes and burning so much and so painfully I was near blind for most of the hour and a half we spent in the water. My eyes are actually burning right now as I’m writing this just from the memory. Other people were fine though, so it’s apparently just my delicate constitution – turns out one isn’t quite completely used to the ocean when it’s their third time total in it; go figure. That said, I was completely fine when I was throwing myself at the waves earlier in Jan Juc, so what gives? That all got very easy to gloss over, though, when I actually managed to surf standing up all the way to shore at the end of the lesson. Yay for me! I definitely want to try again! 
Sunday before I flew off, we went stand up paddleboarding on a nearby dam, which was good because that was singlehandedly the hottest day I had in Brisbane. I had been very lucky with the weather, which stayed under thirty degrees for most of my stay, but Sunday went well over that.
The Sunday afternoon when I flew off was a bit bittersweet. Deb and Allan were both wonderful and generous hosts, and I’m so very glad they were kind enough to host me for the week. Thank you so much for letting me have this experience!