This is part II of a series on my trip home to Australia for the US winter break (see part I here).

Santa Barbara is a city of close to 90,000 people just a couple of hours north of Los Angeles. The area is known as the "American Riviera", partially thanks to its pleasant climate. The city draws heavy influence from Spain, with its original inhabitants being Spanish missionaries and soldiers, and even today much of the architecture is ...

My trip back to Australia for the semester break was a long one. Prior to Christmas, I packed into a car with four other international students at Berkeley, and we drove down California Highway 1 from San Francisco to Los Angeles. From LA I flew to Hawaii and visited Honolulu for a couple days, and finally jetted back into Sydney two days before Christmas Day. This is the first installment of a series of blog posts about this great trip ...

One of the greatest things about living in Sydney is that Christmas and New Year fall in summer. This makes all manner of outdoor activities possible over the festive season, and one particular tradition is waiting out to catch the New Year's fireworks in Sydney Harbour. Using the famous Harbour Bridge as one of several launching bases, the fireworks are a spectacular way to bring in the new year. There's a 9pm show prior to the midnight fiesta ...

Like many other kids, my favourite page of the newspaper growing up was the comics page. Though it was later supplanted by the crossword page (though that's another story), my introduction to traditional media come in the form of those inked scribbles, filled with pithy wisdom, fantastic events, and witty observations.

One of my most beloved comics was Peanuts, by Charles M. Schulz. I still vividly remember cleaning my local library out of Peanuts cartoon books on a regular ...

There is a lot of talk about how Australians are overcharged for hardware and software items compared to other countries. The Federal Parliament has convened a Standing Committee on Infrastructure and Communications to investigate "price gouging" in the IT industry, particularly from the likes of Apple, Adobe, Microsoft, and other tech giants.

The United States is a particularly common source of ire, and many people point at US prices compared to Australia as evidence for gouging. There's a number ...

Spending money in a foreign country is a frustrating process. Credit cards typically charge a currency conversion fee of 3% or so, and hit you with an exchange rate that's inevitably worse than the actual rate, sometimes by several percent. Travel cards are offered by various banks and currency exchange companies, but there are a plethora of hidden fees for loading money onto the card, as well as a fee for the card in the first place. Currency exchangers ...

Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films are one of my favourite cinematic experiences. It's hard to believe that close to a decade has passed since the first one was released. Even now, the trilogy still seems fresh and innovative, its CGI hardly dated amongst many other poorer imitations that have not aged as gracefully. Howard Shore's incredible music remains a heavy part of the rotation through my headphones - and I have seen both the Lord of ...

I've loved reading for as long as I can remember. Some of my earliest memories are going grocery shopping with my mother every week, and each time getting to buy a new Little Golden Book - short picture books about nursery rhymes, nature, science, and fairy tales. I built up a huge collection of them, before they were given away to cousins as I grew older.

As I grew older I moved into more weighty tomes. Nowadays I own many ...

While Utah is justly famous for its skiing, it is also full of many interesting sites besides mountains. That being said, there are some very, very pretty mountains (particularly for someone who has grown up on the driest continent on earth).

Salt Lake City was the site of the 2002 Winter Olympics (a fact made famous by 2012 Presidential candidate Mitt Romney's leadership), and many of the facilities constructed for the Games remain present in the city. The large ...

The goal of seeing at least 10 states in the US leaves plenty of room to see interesting places that wouldn't normally be on the tourist list for an overseas visitor. Today I'm writing about state #3, Utah, and its capital, Salt Lake City. I visited with my friend Tara over the Thanksgiving weekend.

Thanksgiving is the most important holiday in the US. Celebrated ...