I've Arrived!

I'm here! I'm in Australia. I just woke up from an 11 hour sleep on a relatively hard bunkbed. What a treat. Right now I'm in northern Australia, in a city called Cairns, pronouned CANS, which reminds me exactly of downtown Aruba. So at least theres a little bit of familiarity. So I guess lets start at the beginning of the trip.

The flight to LA was pretty much non eventful. Once I arrived, I met up with some other AustraLearn kids. Some that will be going with me to UTS, others are going to Murdoch, which is in Perth, located exactly on the opposite end of the country. If you were to overlay American on top of Australia, it would be like flying from Toronto to LA. Sucks for them. Our flight to Sydney is only 4 hours, I can't imagine what theres will be. I've had enough flying for my lifetime already. So we all met up and got to know the UTS kids we'll be going to school with the next 5 months. We also met a guy flying down that went to Michigan and did study abroad at Bond University two years ago, so he really helped us out. He was going down for work, lucky him, to recruit councelors for a camp in Maine. So he was doing job fairs in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney, but was extending his trip in Sydney a week after all his work was done to just party. He offered to take us out and show us all the fun spots when we get into Sydney, so we exchanged emails, and we're all looking forward to someone who's been there to show us the ropes.

The flight to Brisbane was lonnng. 14 hours to be exact. But it really wasn't too bad. Lucky for me there was no one sitting in the middle seat, so it gave me a little more room to sprawl out. In front of every seat was a personal TV screen, showing new release movies and TV shows on demand. I stayed up for two hours once we took off at midnight, or 2am Chicago time. Started trying to watch a movie about the guy that invented the windshield wiper, Flash of Genius, which I'd never even herad of but apparently was full of big names. But I fell asleep. Slept for seven hours, thank you Tylenol Simply Sleep and my little bottle of Jacob's Creek shiraz we were served with dinner. Once I woke up I still had five hours to kill, so I watched Rachel Getting Married and started three other movies which I eventually gave up on and just listened to music.

Once we landed we had to go pick up all our luggage to go thru customs. Of the 30 students total, everyones baggage all made it. What a miracle. So then for some reason I was expedited thru the entire customs process and was told to walk right on thru while the person in front of me and behind me both had to stand in a lonnnng line. Not quite sure where all this luck I was getting was coming from. Surely it would be biting me in the butt later on. So then we continued on to re-check our luggage for our flight to Cairns. The women at the desk were yelling at us all to hurry up because our flight was going to leave without us. So we were all just throwing our luggage on and they were shoving new boarding passes in our faces and telling us to move as fast as we could. They couldn't leave without 30 passengers...could they? So then we had to get on a trail to take us to the domestic terminal, which had just left, and only came every 15 minutes. So we waited around on the platform for 15 and then hopped on the train. Upon stepping foot into the terminal we hear over the loudspeaker last call for boarding flight 718 to Cairns. Yep, our flight. So we zip thru security, which couldn't care less what we bring through, and sprint tot he gate. We seriously looked like a scene from a movie. My friend Tessa and a couple others randomly got stopped to search for a bomb in their bags. That really helped our cause of getting to the gate. Once we got on the plane, we were all seated in the very back of the plane, which meant we got to walk past an entire plane of angry, sweaty people that we'd been keeping waiting. The auxillary air wasn't working, so they were all sweating waiting for the engine to start so some air would be pumped thru there. Needless to say, we were the most hated people on the plane. That flight was easy as pie, two hours was nothing. And they served us cupcakes! No, not muffins, but pink frosted cupcakes. I love Australia!

So we land in Cairns and are so happy to be done flying for four days. Go to meet our AustraLearn leaders, who decide to tell us only 6 peoples luggage came across.

And a little thing just popped up on my screen to tell me I only have 5 minutes of credit remaining. So I'll end there for now. We do have our luggage now, don't worry, they delivered it all to the hostel a few hours later.

Hope all is well with everyone at home. And if it makes you feel any better, yes its hot here, but its INCREDIBLY muggy and humid. Ugh. Gotta go put my hair up.

Cheers!