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Bushdance is not Aboriginal Dance. Bushdance is more like country dance. We realized that yesterday at a barbecue-dinner organized by the International Education Office. Free food, free drinks, nice music. Needless to say, we had a lot of fun. Yes, we went dancing. We also met a few students from Germany who have already spent a semester here and gave us some very important information on Canberran nightlife and travelling (thanks, Claudia!).

Today was the first day of classes. So far, everything is fine… The weather is quite cold right now, with freezing temperatures at night and about ten to fifteen degrees during the day. The days are rather short, with sunrise at seven and sunset at five. We do, however, get lots of sunshine. In the first couple of days, it was quite rainy and unpleasant, but the locals told us that this was the first rainy period for over two years. Understandably, they were quite happy about it. I added the weather button to the left column.

We were on a half-day bus trip through Canberra today, which was organized by the International Education Office. It was a kind of sightseeing trip that was hindered by a lack of interesting sights. As the national capital, Canberra is the home to the national parliament, the national library, the national museum, the national university (of course :-)) and the national war memorial, as well as the national science museum (called questacon) and a lot of other national institutions. I’m positive that the museums‘ exhibits are quite interesting, but from the outside most of the buildings look quite boring, and that’s what you get to see on a sightseeing trip. Apart from the city center (Civic) and the government triangle (I wonder if people get lost there like in the Bermuda triangle) most of Canberra is reminiscent of the suburbs of any american city–a few bungalows and two-story houses with a lot of trees and grassland in between. There are just a few shopping areas and „strip malls“. Every now and then, we drove by a high-rise residential building, most of them were of the eastern european style. As a highlight, we were at a small market/shopping center where we could buy fresh food at incredibly low prices (e.g. apples for 0.99AU$ per kg–approximately 0.65€). The real highlight of the tour was Mount Ainslie, a vantage point with a very good view of parts of Canberra and the surrounding countryside.
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