Down Under Study Abroad: Day 5 Melbourne - Melbourne Convention Exhibition Center

Today we went to visit the Melbourne Convention Exhibition Center with a RMIT professor. The MCEC is truley one of the most adaptive, innovative, green, and the smartest building I have ever seen or heard about. At first glance you would not think much about this building but as you walk in you get a feeling that there is more going on than the eye can see. With it's amazingly thought out color tones to its adaptive rooms. Every aspect of the building was thought out with great care. The building systems from their HVAC system to their Computer systems are extremely advanced. For example, the man that was leading the tour was telling us about one time when someone was giving a presentation in one of their back rooms to a decently sized audience and their power point crashed. Within a few seconds the computer system that monitors the entire building caught this and ran the PowerPoint through its mainframe and automatically compressed all of the photos to a smaller dimension within the PowerPoint... Soon after it did this the presentation poped back up and the presentation was able to continue with very little delay. Hearing all about this particular building was really a great experience. Oh, and in the main room the chairs could be lowered and raised into different types of position with the touch of a screen on a tablet. Pretty incredible.

After drooling at how amazing the convention center was we all headed to another job site that is still in the process of being built. Again, the project manager was extremely knowledgeable about the site and could answer any of the questions that we threw at him. He spoke a little bit about immigration and minimum wages which was exciting for me since that is what I'm doing my thesis on. I look forward to doing more research tonight and continuing to learn more about construction labor and immigration over here.