1443 Brightside Drive: Apartment 1132

This is my apartment I have been living in for the last four months and which I will be living in until July 31st next year. I've been living with my French friend Fab and two American roommates we were randomly selected to live with. The apartment complex is huge with something like 15 buildings housing a few hundred people. It's only a 45 minute walk to campus from here, but thankfully it's right on a free LSU bus route meaning just a 15 minute ride on a packed bus. The apartment came fully furnished and with a washing machine, dryer, dishwasher, microwave, oven, fridge etc. There is also a basketball court, tennis court and sand volleyball arena along with a gym, pool, hot tub, and BBQ area. Pets are allowed, which sadly means you want to avoid grass areas. However, all in all it's a fairly nice place to live.

Living here also hasn't been without its dramas, particularly involving one roommate. First, food from the fridge would dissappear. Later on in the semester we would arrive home to find that our rooms looked like they had been searched through and some loose change had disappeared. Next, Fab's French credit card had mysteriously been used to buy €150 of pizza, Chinese food, and other takeaways which could be traced to being ordered from our roommate's cellphone and which we were told had been delivered to our apartment. Our suspicions confirmed, we called the police, who promptly did...nothing. Thankfully, this particular guy was evicted a week later for not paying rent, but not before threatening our other roommate Mo with a gun...

The day after a tropical storm

BIOL 7800 - Biodiversity & Macroecology

My first semester at LSU is quickly coming to a close. It has gone really fast and the work so far has been enjoyable but at times a bit overwhelming. The highlight so far was the final class of my biodiversity and macroecology course I talked about in an earlier post. The final class consisted of a 15 minute presentation by each student on a project related to the class content which they had been working on during the semester. So, on Wednesday morning we sat through four hours of twelve really high quality presentations on some diverse and interesting topics. Now I only have my final statistics exam early next week and the semester will be officially over!

I've embedded the presentation I gave in this blog post because it's some work I'm pretty proud of. I spent many hours slaving over the data and various data analysis programs to get the results that I did. My presentation was pretty well received by the rest of my class judging by the comments they gave me, I just hope my grade will reflect that too! Hopefully the main points of my research are able to be understood by those without an ecology background, or you can even just enjoy the great photographs! There's still a huge amount of further analysis that can be done on this and the many other kinds of data we collected during the field work for this project; it's exciting to think of what interesting patterns we may uncover. However, for now it's definitely interesting to find that restoration of native sand dunes is not largely altering their beetle assemblages, although we may still find evidence to dispute this.

Make sure you view it in full screen by clicking the icon on the bottom right of the powerpoint slides.

My First Classes

Teaching is over for the semester! Yesterday and today I gave my two classes their final exams for the semester, and now I feel like I have a huge weight off my shoulders, other than having to mark the exams of course...This was my first time teaching any sort of class, and somewhat surprisingly I really enjoyed it. The interaction with the students was great, most were really eager to learn, and most of all I felt like I did a pretty good job as a teacher. The students in both classes which I taught were a lot of fun, despite those in the 6:30 - 9:30 pm class on Wednesday always wanting to get out early! I hope they had fun in the lab and learnt a lot in the process, even if introduction biology can be brutally boring at times. Here are my class photos:

Section 38 - Wednesday 6:30 - 9:30 pm

Section 39 - Thursday 9 am - 12 pm

Tundra Lights - Four Nights Under the Lights

This is another great song with an excellent accompanying video. It's by a one man band, Tundra Lights, hailing from Georgia in the United States. They have many songs as good as this one and I've been listening to them quite heavily in recent weeks, but this one in particular.

Halloween

Halloween is kind of a big deal here in the United States. Huge numbers of people dress up (not just children and university students) and the whole Halloween weekend is celebrated with trick-or-treating and rowdy parties. For my first Halloween in America I dressed as Ron Burgundy (Will Ferrell) from the movie Anchorman and roamed the streets with my friends interviewing other party-goers. Anchorman is a funny funny movie (see the clip below), and I was stoked to dress as Ron Burgundy using secondhand clothes from the thrift store for just $14! My mustache could have done with a bit of work though...


On the Friday night of Halloween weekend I went to the Carlotta Street party. This is an annual party on a street just on the northeast edge of campus. The police shut all the surrounding roads for the party and thousands of people turn up to check out all the crazy costumes, have a few drinks, and enjoy the live bands playing in the residents' front yards. The party had a really great atmosphere and I had a lot of fun, even if the turnout wasn't as high as normal due to the cold weather.

I'm Ron Burgundy?

On the Saturday, myself and six other guys traveled the 90 minutes down the highway to New Orleans to spend the Saturday night of Halloween weekend on the fabled Bourbon Street. For those who don't know, Bourbon Street is a long street in the heart of the city which is dedicated to only bars, restaurants, and souvenir shops, and is open 24 hours a day for 365 days a year. It lives up to its name, and you will see drunk people there at all times of the day. We had booked a hostel to stay in and when we arrived we found it was an old asylum for the mentally insane (quite appropriate for Halloween). Our dorm room smelled like a mixture of vomit and burnt diapers, so we quickly decided we would spend as little time there as possible. We quickly put on our costumes and headed out into the early evening. We had an excellent night touring many restaurants and bars on the street, meeting lots of fun people, and taking in the lively atmosphere: almost every bar has a live band playing, there are performers on the street, and most of the patrons are also putting on a performance themselves. The only downside of the night was Felix getting pick-pocketed (apparently a common occurrence on Bourbon Street). We arrived back to the hostel at 6am, desperately ready for our 3 hours sleep, before catching the bus back to Baton Rouge at 9:30am to catch up on our school work for the weekend. We're now into the serious part of the semester with around one month left until final exams, so it's time to knuckle down and get some good grades!

Guillermo, Ali, Immy, Mikel, Darko & Felix - my asylum dorm mates

A Kiwi, two Brits, a German, a Serb, and two Spaniards walk into a bar...

The chaos that is Bourbon Street

Geaux Tigers

Panoramic view of Tiger Stadium/Death Valley (click to view a larger image)

I've now been to all four LSU Tigers (that's the LSU American Football team) home games so far this season at Tiger Stadium/Death Valley. The stadium is massive, seating 92,542 people, and it sells out for every single game. So far this season the LSU Tigers are undefeated, have destroyed almost every team they have played, and are ranked #1 in the entire country. People in Louisiana are extremely passionate about football, just like we are about rugby in New Zealand, and LSU has a proud tradition, having won the national championship three times, in 1958, 2003, and 2007. This year there is a real possibility that they could do it again. However, their next game is away from home against #2 ranked University of Alabama, which should be their biggest test so far this year. If they win then they should be on track to go to the championship game in late December.

The games I have been to so far have been a lot of fun. Before the game most people go "tailgating" which is basically just setting up a marquee and having a BBQ and a few beers. Campus is usually buzzing on game day with all the people who come to watch. The university has a huge marching band (must be around 200 people) who play before and during the game, and who lead the student section of the stadium in their LSU chants. Sadly, I'm yet to see a close game as we have won every one so far by around 30 or more points. Inside the stadium it can be very loud and the atmosphere is electric at times (almost as good as when watching an exciting run chase in cricket), but I'm sure that during a close game it will be at its best. I'm sure I will get to experience it at some point while I'm here as I intend to go to as many games as I can.

As for American football itself, I definitely enjoy the game. It's exciting, there's a lot of big hits, and a high level of skill involved also. However, I wish there weren't so many breaks during the game; a game which has only 60 minutes of actual playing time should not take over three hours to finish!

Below are a few pictures from the various games I've been to so far:

LSU vs Northwestern

Pre-game huddle - LSU vs Kentucky

LSU vs Florida

Student section & band at LSU vs Florida

Beautiful Video

I've known about the band Hammock for about one year now and they've slowly grown into one of my favourite bands. This is a masterfully constructed video for their song Breathturn which tells a really sweet story. It's well worth the six minutes of your time to watch the whole thing. I'd recommend wearing quality headphones and giving the video your full attention...enjoy!