Friday was casual Friday at work so we got to wear our regualr clothes, which is always a good thing for me, since I hate wearing khakis day after day. At this point, we have back about 42 surveys out of 110-ish.
Saturday, about 10 people went for surfing lessons about an hour away and another group went on a tour of the Great Ocean Road, which is what we did the previous weekend. I spent Saturday at the Melbourne Zoo, which is about a 20 minute train ride from where we stay. This zoo is absolutely HUGE. Unfortunately, I didn't charge my camera the night before and therefore, I only took pictures of about a third of it. I'm probably going to steal Kemal's pictures at some point and post them up. I almost got attacked by a spider monkey (well not really, it was in a cage) but it jumped at me. We got back around 3-ish and I just hung around for a few hours and watched TV. Everyone else was still out surfing and didn't get back until about 8.
Sunday was a very, very long day. Chris, John and I left the apartments around 11 am and took a tram WAY down to the end of the line near the Gran Prix track. We got to the event and it was packed. There were so many people there and we had no idea where we were going. A Grand Prix race seems very similar to a NASCAR race when it comes to the amount of people who watch it. Some major differences however are that most people only by general admission tickets, so no one really has "seats". W just stood on a hill and tried to watch the race from there (we were realy close to the track but we couldn't see anything ove he crowd of people. Also, the cars are at least twice as loud. Finally, hardly anyone speaks English. Everyone there was from either Italy, Brazil, France or some other non English-speakig country. We walked around for a while and saw a lot of really nice cars. Most of them were very expensive European cars put out for show.
One thing that was really cool was that the "garages" where the team works on the cars were literally right outside the track where people can walk by. There were tents lined up with the cars inside and mechanics working on them trying to get them all set up for the race. You could touch the cars, you were so close. Also, in some cases, the drivers were sitting right in the tent. Apparently, the big car manufacturer for the Grand Prix is Ferrari.
The race is only 58 laps long but the track is pretty big (2-3 miles maybe) and it's a road course. Apparently, they try and make the race about 100 minutes long so that's where the 58 laps came from. The winner was a new driver from England named Jenson Button. Second place was a Brazilian driver named Rubens Barrichello and third was a British driver named Lewis Hamilton. All three drove Mercedes cars. When they were announcing the winners, the entire croud rushed onto the track and ran to the start/finish line where they gave out awards. It was definitely an experience.
After the awards, the three of us ran down the track to the other side to get to the concert. The concert started around 7:30 and lasted about two and a half hours. I don't know much about The Who but they were awesome. I recognized about half the songs they played. I tried to record some clips of each song (in some cases, I recorded the whole song). After the concert, the three of us struggled to get home because all the trams were packed with people. We ended up walking a few miles to a tran station, which was completely empty, and taking a train back to Melbourne Central. I went to bed as soon as I got back and I did not want to wake up this morning. Oh, and I'm almost completely sunburnt.
Today, we had to stop at AFAC to talk to our project liasion Rob. He basically added on to what he wanted us to do and gave us a ton more contacts. We made a list of all the things we need to get done and realized that we have much more to do then we thought we did. The net two weeks are going to be crazy but we're hoping to get as much done as possible before Easter.
-Tim
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