Adelaide!

Hi everyone! After 24+ hours on planes and in airports, I finally arrived in the fair city of Adelaide, where I'll be living on and off for the next three months. It is a pretty big city, with over a million people. There are tons of shops, museums, parks, restaurants, and coffee shops. The good news is that museums are free, the bad news is that the American dollar is the worst ever against the Australian dollar, so I'll probably be spending more time eating sandwiches than at restaurants. 
I've been here for 2 1/2 days, and I've already been to the South Australian Museum twice - its awesome! I have free wireless at the hostel I'm staying at now, so I'll try to update this blog frequently while I have the chance. Hope you are all doing very well. I miss you all!

The first display I looked at in the museum was of a culturally modified tree - what a good sign! This tree was peeled to remove a large sheet of bark, which was probably used to build either a canoe or as part of a shelter.

This is a bark canoe, which was made out of the bark peeled from trees like the one in the first photo. Sorry for the crapiness of some of these photos, there was no flash photos allowed.

This painting, which measures approximately 7x5 feet, was created by contemporary Indigenous artists. It is a map of some of their traditional lands around Adelaide and it portrays dreamtime stories. The colors are very vivid and it is very striking to stand next to it. 

This caption is next to the painting, and it explains some of the elements of the landscape and stories that are described in the painting.

Today I took a walk by the river and saw tons of native black swans - they were very exciting to see!