So I went on an excursion with the neighbor's out to a place called Orange, which is over the blue mountains (which are actually blue because the oil from the gum trees, eucalyptus, makes a blue haze over the mountains) about 2 hours inland (with no traffic). Thier highest peak near by is about 4000ft, just to let you know how small these mountains are, but they were still beautiful. So first we stopped off at like a grandmother's house and she had a bird feeder and there were these amazing birds eating from it and I think I found one of the breeds I saw searching online. So anyways I went to this big gathering of family and friends at this house, and I knew no one but I just kinda got dropped into this party and so I just started talking to people and getting asked questions about Boston. The main event of the evening was a giant bon fire that everyone watched and got drunk around. The pile of burning things was huge, it was probably 8 feet tall and at least 10-15 feet in diameter. But once it had burned down a little bit it had to be reorganized into a pile again so the guy used his tractor and pushed all the burning stuff into a taller pile, which was pretty cool. Then to keep it going he kept pouring gas on the fire and making it flare up. It was a fun night.
So I have officially moved into a place of my own, the woman who I am renting from is a very nice little chinese woman whose english is not that great, but at this point in my chinese life I can understand the accent pretty well. The room isn't bad, not huge, but its next to the kitchen and there are 2 bathrooms off the kitchen and one has a washing machine, so I can do my own laundry, instead of Laura doing it for me. So I have started working on my own experiments and I have the set up for the first experiment of my own almost ready. I am using a big bucket that they use as a phantom body when testing the equipment and I made legs for it out of cardboard so that it can be raised up and a gallium source in a red lead container can be fit underneath it. I will probably be using that set up next week to get some numbers when the new shipment of gallium gets in.Ok so I have spent my first nights in the room and its not bad, a little chilly, but not bad. I took some pictures of Dale and Laura's house which is a very nice place. I also took some pictures of my room there, which was also very nice, so that you guys can see where I was staying. I already posted pictures of the room I am staying in but just to show you what I have moved to here is a picture of my street and the outside of my building.
Ok so I figured some of you might want to see what my "office" looks like so here is a fuzzy picture of it, but you can tell that it is actually a filing closet that has a little bit of cleared desk space and sometimes a chair. I put my stuff in there and do little projects like building the legs for my experiment (that's why there is a box on my desk), but I end up spending most of my time using my computer on the internet to do things like post this message in their computer room type place, you can see my little computer squeezed between the big computers.
