Our last night in Melbourne! A look over the water after our final dinner as a group.

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Australian culture was something that came up a good amount in the movies that we had seen over the past semester.  In the cities that we visited, we could see this cinematic culture come to life.  One of the things that I noticed is that in most of the cities we visited, there is some sense of identity. In other words, Australians like to identify themselves with something.  This can be seen in the tribe that we visited in Cairns, and also the art culture that can be seen in Melbourne.  Over the past semester, one of the movies that showed this was Red Dog. Red Dog took place in Dampier, Australia.  The story of Red Dog has been told for generations, and the statue that sits in Dampier of Red Dog is one of the most famous in the world.  People all over the planet will travel to Dampier to look at the statue.  This plays into the culture and shows that the people of Dampier, and Australia as a whole, are proud of their identity.  Another similarity that I saw from the films we saw was the art culture that was displayed.  I saw this specifically in Strictly Ballroomand noticed the art shown around Melbourne.  I thought it was interesting that Melbourne seemed like such a young city with artists coming from around the world to paint on the walls of the alley ways.
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My family used to live right outside of Melbourne for two years.  I had heard a lot about the city, and they even told me their old address so that I could potentially go see it if I got the chance.  Walking around the city, it was extremely different to what I had thought it would look like.  When I got back and talked to my mom, she made a very good comparison.  She told me that Melbourne was more like Boston, while Sydney was more like New York City.  After thinking about it, I agree with her completely. I enjoyed the tour and seeing a lot of the artsy culture that the city had to offer. Also, I love coffee. I can’t get enough of it.  Because of this, I was extremely excited to visit the city since we had learned so much about how Melbourne has some of the best coffee that can be found in Australia.  On our tour, I learned a lot.  There were a lot of small facts that she told us that made the experience all the better.  Many of them had to do with the street art that was shown in the alley ways that we visited.  One thing that I learned was that in the alley named after AC/DC, the city actually commissioned the making of the sculpture in the wall.  This was an amazing piece of art and I thought it was extremely cool that the city commissioned its building.
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Going to ACMI was a great experience.  I did not know a lot about the things we would see, but after seeing it in person, the items I saw were extraordinary.  When I arrived, two specific exhibits stood out to me.  I looked at the exhibit titled Animal Logic – Digital Visual Effects.  Animal Logic is a digital design company that worked on a lot of movies that we had talked about in class.  Some of these includeBabe and Australia.  When I saw that this company had worked on Australia, I was extremely interested.  The company worked on the “bullet-time” scene that we can see in The Matrix. I was able to connect this to our class since we had watched Australia, but we had also talked a lot about The Matrixon our tour in Sydney where we saw many of the sights that the film was shot at.  One thing that I saw in the exhibit was that this company helped with the visual effects in the movie 300.  This film is one of my favorites, and I thought that the visual effects were stunning.  To see that Animal Logic had worked on this movie was very intriguing.

Another exhibit that caught my eye was titled Time and Motion.  This exhibit showed the power of rapid-fire images. It talked about something that stumped scientists for years.  They asked themselves if when a horse is gallops, do all of its hooves leave the ground at the same time? Since a horse’s hooves moved too fast for the naked eye to tell, a photographer named Eadweard Muybridge was able to take a series of rapid-fire images to show a horse in each stage of its gallop.  From this, later image makers were able to produce techniques like freeze frames, time-lapses, and the time-slice.  In this exhibit, they one specific thing that was extremely interesting to me.  One was a spinning “city”.  When the city was spinning fast enough, a strobe light would come on and create an incredible image.  It would create different frames that made it look like every individual fish, frog, or animal was moving by itself.  That was my favorite part of the entire experience.

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Holding this animal was my favorite experience on this trip. I cannot wait to do it again someday

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Going to the Great Barrier Reef was one of the events I was most looking forward on this trip.  I had talked to my parents about things to do while on the trip, and they said to visit the Great Barrier Reef.  I talked with friends who had gone on this trip before, and they said that The Great Barrier Reef was one of their favorite experiences.  However, I did not know a lot about the reef.  On the boat ride over to the reef, I learned a lot. I had learned that that the reef covers approximately 1,600 miles.  I knew that it was big, but I did not know that it was that big.  Another thing that I learned was that it is not made up of one reef. It is made up of over 2,900 different reefs.  I also went on a few boat tours while visiting the reef.  I went on the glass-floor tour, and I also went on the semi-sub tour.  On the glass-floor tour, I learned a lot about the reef we were visiting, Moore Reef. On the semi-sub tour, I learned more about the animals that lived around Moore Reef, including the clams, sea cucumbers, and different types of sharks that were potentially around us.  One of my favorite parts of the day was going scuba diving.  It was my first time ever attempting it, but I had always wanted to try. It did not go as smoothly as planned. During the briefing on the boat, I was a little worried that I would not be able to acclimate to the pressure. This actually turned out to be a valid concern.  When I first got down there, it took me a little longer than the other divers, and it hurt my head while swimming.  It felt like as soon as my head felt better, we would need to go slightly deeper, and the pain would rush back to my ear. Finally, we came up to the surface and I had a slightly bloody nose.  However, the instructor said that was perfectly normal and not to worry.  Even with all this, I am extremely happy that I attempted diving, and I could see myself doing more of this in the future.

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Visiting two separate cultures was extremely interesting for me.  In the United States, I am not exposed to anything similar to what I saw from the Maori and Tjapukai tribes while studying abroad.  When we first visited the Maori tribe, I had some type of understanding as to what I would see.  They were mentioned in the in-class presentations, and I had also done a decent amount of research on them for my movie analyses.  However, I did not know what to expect from the Tjapukai tribe. I did not know how similar they would be or, more importantly, what differences they would have between them. There were a decent number of things they had in common.  One of the first things that I noticed was that both tribes display markings on their bodies that have certain meanings. Although they were different markings for each respective tribe, they both applied ink on their bodies.  They also were very involved in music and chants.  When we visited both tribes, we were able to see a performance.  Personally, I thought the Maori tribe’s performance was more interesting.  They had a variety of songs that had certain stories behind them.  There were a few differences in their music.  One of the first things that I noticed was the different instruments that each tribe displayed.  The Maori tribe had many songs that were acapella and only used the voices of the tribe members. Then, they performed a song using a guitar, which I thought was interesting.  The Tjapukai, on the other hand, performed many of their songs using a famous instrument that I had personally never seen used before.  They used a didgeridoo.  This was the first time that I had heard one in person and it was interesting to learn how to find one, how to make one, and then how to play one. The man teaching us about the didgeridoo tried to show us a technique that allowed us to breath in and out simultaneously so we could play the instrument longer.  I could not figure out how to do this correctly.  Overall, I thought it was extremely interesting to learn about these two tribes and the similarities that they share.

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A panoramic photo looking out at the Sydney Opera House and the Sydney Harbor Bridge!

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Throughout my time in Sydney, I learned a lot about the city. A lot of what I learned was about the Sydney Opera House.  One thing I found interesting was that they did not budget their time or their money well at all.  They had planned on taking approximately three years to build the Opera House but it ultimately took them sixteen years.  They had also budgeted around $7 million to pay for it but it ended up costing them $102 million.  The architect of the building won the competition because his design was the only submission that placed the houses next to each other rather than one in front of the other. He also left Sydney to go home since there was so much pressure to finish the project.  There was so much pressure that he didn’t even design the inside of the Opera House. Even after it was built, he never returned to Sydney to see the finished result. We had learned some things about the Opera House (who designed it, when it was built etc.) but these details were extremely interesting to me and made the experience even better.

I did learn a good amount about the Sydney Harbor Bridge.  This bridge and the Opera House are the two main attractions and it was interesting to learn more about them.  I learned that the bridge is a suspension bridge.  When they started building the bridge, they built it from both sides so they would come together in the middle.  However, the finished product left a gap between the two sides that was about 3 feet long.  For this, all they did was put in a few bolts to close the gap.  The most fascinating part about the bridge is that because of the placement of the cables, the cement road going over the bridge is literally holding itself up and is essentially hanging in mid-air.  This was surreal going from the classroom presentations seeing pictures of this bridge to seeing it in person. Me and some other classmates had a small discussion while looking up at the bridge from the water.  This was a harmless discussion and was based off of pure curiosity.  We were thinking about if someone were to free fall from the top of the bridge, how many seconds would it take for that person to reach the water?  After a lot of discussion and arguments, we pulled out an equation that calculated the time to be approximately 5.33 seconds.  That was also another fun fact I learned about the Sydney Harbor Bridge that I will probably remember for a long time.

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