The Tourist

About two weeks ago I finished with my last school work: completing Design Studio 2 and my 3D assignment, working on and presenting my final photographs, studying for my marketing test and finishing my paper. With school done I had time to be a proper tourist here in Melbourne.

So, I tried different food:

More Chinese. That purple/white stuff is hot sweet soup and it is very, very jummy.

Pancakes at The Pancake Parlour

Spanish Donuts. They taste a bit like oliebollen but more crunchy

Frozen Yogurt at Cacao Green

A woman has to shop so I visited a huge shopping mall...

...And did some sightseeing:

Victoria Library

Queen Victoria Market. Here you can buy chickens. Amongst other things.

Starbucks fail

Not really a touristic thing but still very cool was a coffee course I did yesterday. I was very much looking forward to it because the coffee in Melbourne is amazing (not Starbucks but in pretty much any cafe/restaurant) and I wanted to know how to make them.

I am now a barista! They taught us how to make a proper espresso with a manual machine, how to prepare milk correctly and how to do coffee art. It made me more coffee obsessed and I want my own grinder, coffee machine and milk pan and give nice cups of latte, macchiato, cappuccino and flat whites to everyone.

Paying attention

My next Christmas present

My best attempt at a "free poured leaf"

Once upon a time...

...there was a girl called Andrea. She used to put text with pictures on the internet on a regular basis. But times change and the days suddenly began to pass really quickly. Andrea found herself thinking about blogging but not actually doing it. Sometimes she would even wake up in the middle of the night, screaming "I must post something!". One day, prince Charming told her that she really had to put something online otherwise people would forget all about her. This made Andrea really sad so she decided to tell people about her adventures with her friend Cindy.

Cindy is from China and introduced Andrea to really good Chinese food. One day, a group of her friends made dumplings together. It took them half a day. Another day, they ate somewhere at 3 o'clock in the morning and had amazing sweet food. There also was a day where they had lunch in a very busy restaurant and Andrea had to eat with sticks, which she cannot do. Sometimes it feels like Melbourne is actually Asia. Or Italy, depending on the suburb.

Making dumplings

Amazing sweet food

Little Asia

One day, Andrea went to the Melbourne Zoo to take pictures of animals. Her photography teacher told her to do that so this made for a nice excuse. Andrea enjoyed the zoo and liked the Orang Outangs the best. Maybe because she looks like them. She used the last 3 photos for her second assessment.

Andrea is also making friends with her 3D Character. Next time Andrea puts text and pictures on the internet she will hopefully show her new friend. Until then, please feel free to come up with an appropriate ending for this post. Andrea is not capable of integrating "and they lived happily ever after" correctly.

Photography

I love Australia: while typing this I am sitting in a cafe at a food court in Melbourne central. There is wi-fi everywhere so you can put your laptop on the table and work on whatever while sipping on coffee.

The coffee loves me too.

My roommate and I had just been visiting someone who is taking care of a Seeing Eye Dog in training. I met him and his pup Niko at the training ground of Seeing Eye Dogs Australia. For my photography course I have to take documentary/narrative photos and I thought this organization and their work would be an interesting and fun choice for that assignment. It has been a great experience; I got to see all the little cute puppies and also the older dogs that are much further in their training.

Taking photos has not been easy, I am still learning the technique and I need to get a better feeling of when to take shots and why.

Puppy training at Seeing Eye Dogs Australia.

More puppies. I won't use these for the photography assignment because they don't tell a story. I post them only for cuteness reasons.

Niko getting rewarded for being a good little dog.

For another photography assignment I took shots of birds in a park near the city. It was the first "shoot" I did and I did not chose the easiest one; the birds flew everywhere and never sat still. It felt like I was running around like crazy, adjusting my camera for every shot, trying to get the right picture. When I presented some of those photos in class my teacher advised me to take pictures in the zoo where the animals sit still and I had more time or opportunities to capture their character. I guess that was a silent hint... I enjoy the course though: because I'm such a beginner I get to learn a lot. A few of the bird photos:

First Grade

Two posts in one day. It's a record!

I wanted to share the joy of receiving my very first Australian grade. It's for the 3D Character class where we had the assignment of making a pdf with our concept, references, sketches and model sheet. At the moment we are building our model in Maya with the model sheet in that document. View the pdf here.

The result: my very first Australian grade is 100. Yes, I had to look up what that meant but it was the highest score possible. I am now extra happy.

Road Trip

From the 12th till the 14th of March three French housemates and I went on a road trip along the Great Ocean Road. I can advice everybody to do this trip one day. It is fantastic!

We rented a car early Saturday morning and started driving to the west, along the coast. This was the route we took:

Thanks Google

The weather was good and the views were amazing. We were totally happy cruising in the car with the windows open and nice music on. We stopped at lots of different places, most of them the more popular sites.

A new thing for me was sleeping at hostels. I was a bit worried that I wouldn't be able to sleep properly because of snoring men but that was only the case the second night. One person also farted really loud that night. Great fun. Besides that and the lovely smell in the room the next day, sleeping in a hostel is not that bad.

Back to the actual trip. Because everything is so beautiful and a picture says more then a thousand words here come the photos:

Erskine Falls

First hostel

Twelve Apostles

London Bridge

(Picture taken by one of the co-road-trippers, Nicholas)

(Another one by Nicholas)