Wednesday 9th of October in the afternoon two more excursions were planned, these excursions were the visit to the Melbourne cricket ground and the RMIT excursion
The visit to the Melbourne cricket ground was one of the cultural excursions within the Studytour. These types of excursions are necessary to really get a feel what Australia is all about. The MCG is an enormous stadium which has a capacity of 100.000 visitors, and is a stadium that hosts different sports, mainly cricket and Australian football. Australian football, just as the name indicates is a sport originating in Australia and came to be because of different settlers from great Brittian having different rules on playing football. The Australian football competition is very popular in Australia.
However being such a big stadium and having a large capacity also goes hand in hand with being a civil engineering marvel. Here the grounds opt to be more sustainable. This sustainability is achieved with solar panels going placed on top of the roof of the stadium. The energy retrieved from these panels is then used to power the lighting plates for the grass field and used to light up the stadium lights. This lighting plate system is necessary because of the structure of the stadium. Since a part of the field ends up not receiving enough sunlight to grown and this has to be compensated. Next up is recycling where there are also efforts made for. Here organic waste, is dried and then used as compost. And waste containing plastic is recycled into the structures that can be seen in the park surrounding the stadium.
However there are also problems that occur with the MCG. An example is concrete cancer, the deterioration of the concrete structures within the stadium over time and the lack of a roof over the stadium in case of certain weather conditions. At last, the connectivity of the stadium is pretty good from the centrum of the city, where it accounts for approximately 15 minutes, however for traffic outside of the city centre it is not so well connected.
After the stadium tour the next excursion ensued, this luckly started Infront of the stadium, so much travel was not needed. After passing over the bridge connecting the MCG and the Federation Square surpassing the train tracks. Here our guide Guillermo from the RMIT started introducing The federation square which is a square built to celebrate the 200-year independence of Australia against the commonwealth (Their previous British owners). Furthermore the “square” itself is not shaped as a square, since it spans the uneven area surrounding the Yarra river, the river that divides the city. However, the Federation square is there to unite the inhabitants of Melbourne. Although, in the beginning the inhabitants did not like the federation square simply because of its aesthetics. However when Apple wanted to demolish some structures to build a new Apple store in 2001 the existing opinions changed and the inhabitants didn’t want Apple to demolish anything, because they started liking the Federation Square.
Furthermore, The Federation and if we look broader the city of Melbourne does not really have a outstanding trademark sightseeing. So, there is also non on the square, since it wouldn’t resonate with the soul of Melbourne. Since Melbourne should be experienced as the city it is. At last, The square, was built on top of train tracks, big challenge was to make acoustically (Didn’t want to hear the trains beneath you). Furthermore, since built on top of train tracks, it could be a possibility an accident occurs, to make sure that if a train derails it does not damage the foundation of the already existing structures.