• Student
  • 06/12/2019

And how are things in Sydney?

I had not thought to experience a culture shock in a country like Australia, where the spoken language is English and which culture is more western than not. That being said, seeing Christmas trees everywhere you go and hearing that timeless classic from Mariah Carey when the sun is shining and the temperature is around 30 degrees is one of the weirdest things I have ever experienced. It didn’t help that when I arrived on June 30th during the “winter”, (winter here means an average temperature of 16-18 degrees), the celebrations for Christmas in July were in full swing, which was even weirder. Apart from that minor detail, adapting to the culture was not a problem for me at all simply due to the open character of Sydney and Australia in general.

by
file photo Erik van Heijst

Sydney is one of the most versatile cities I have ever visited. Take a bus north and you’re in view of the Harbour Bridge and Sydney Opera House, a bus east and you’re at the beach, a bus south and you can spot whales from majestic cliffs and a train westward will arrive at one of the largest national parks in the world. Though I’ve been here for almost five months, I feel like I have only scratched the surface.

A ginormous cruise ship casually docking in the Sydney Harbour. Photo | Erik van Heijst

My internship at the Centre for Quantum Computation and Communications Technology (CQCCT for short), which is located at the University of New South Wales, concerns optically finding a single Erbium atom in Silicon which can be more efficiently used for key tasks in quantum computing. Even though Google has achieved quantum supremacy, there is still a long road ahead of us. The most Australian thing that happened during my internship was finding a Huntsman spider in the lab. We named him Steve and he has been returned to the wild.

 

Feeding the kangaroos. Photo | Archief Erik van Heijst

They say that everything in Australia is out to kill you. Most people would associate that idea with the spiders, snakes, scorpions, crocodiles, bull sharks, box jellyfish and so on and so on. The only animal I have yet been attacked by, though, was a bird. During “swooping season” the magpies make their nests everywhere in and outside of the city and in order to protect them the birds are more of a “attack first, ask questions later” type. In the first day of swooping season a magpie had already been responsible for the death of a biker.

 

A photo of Erik while diving in the Great Barrier Reef. Photo | Archive Erik van Heijst

Diving in Sydney and Australia in general is relatively very cheap, a fact which I gladly took advantage of and I got my official diving certificate here. About a month or two ago I took a trip to the Great Barrier Reef to dive there and it was just amazing. Coral stretches out as far as the eye can see and it is inhabited by a plethora of different kinds of fish (including of course Nemo’s and Dory’s). An interesting fact about Queensland (which is the state where most of the reef is located) is that there are signs everywhere warning for crocodiles, which are most definitely in the water and will see you as a very tasty snack.

These types of reefs stretch out as far as the eye can see. Photo | Erik van Heijst
This is what the sky looked like on the worst day of the bushfires in Sydney. Photo | Erik van Heijst

During my time in Sydney I have also seen and felt the effects of the bushfires. The effects weren’t very large but still there were days that the sky looked hazy and the air smelled burnt. On the worst day I even saw yellow brownish smoke filling up te sky and blocking out the sun. This did not happen every day, though, and  most days I didn’t feel any effects of the bushfires.

After my internship is completed I will take a short trip through Melbourne to Tasmania, where I hope to be able to see the elusive Aurora Australis AKA the Southern Lights!

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