My First Week in Oz!

Follow me from St. Louis to Townsville, and a few exciting places in between!

This documents my flights to Australia, my time in Me

lbourne and the Melbourne area, and my flights to Townsville... including our near-death experience!

I cannot say enough good things about my first week in Australia. Arcadia treated our group very, very well.

After saying good-bye to my family, I happily left a cold and snowy St. Louis, Missouri afternoon and flew to an even colder and snowier Omaha, NB, followed by a mountain-less Denver, CO, and finally made it to LAX. As we landed, I saw the Quantas planes with the Kangaroo, and for the first time, it really hit me what I was doing. I actually cried. I couldn't quite decide why I was crying, either. I felt excited, but overwhelmed and intimidated and anxious. I had no desire to go back, but to go forward would be a huge adventure and like it or not, it was happening. I then gathered my luggage and walked almost 15 minutes from the Southwest terminal to Bradley International. I breathed in the stuffy LA air and even though I was sweating like crazy, I enjoyed the polar change in temperature from home. As I checked my baggage at Quantas, the attendant gave me a "G'day!" and I'm absolutely positive that the smile painted across my face made me look like a fool. By a crazy coincidence, I found one of my Arcadia mates in the LAX mess with whom I had been corresponding over facebook for the last few months. We ate McDonalds and tried to chill despite the roller coaster of emotions. We went through the security mess, which took about 45 minutes to go through, and made it out to the other side right in front of our gate. We met a bunch of other Arcadia kiddos, and got on our plane.

After just over 30 straight hours of travel (I timed it), we landed in Melbourne and were gathered by Cat and Lyndon, our coordinators for the week. They guided us to St. Kilda, a little area of Melbourne right on the beach with a creepy clown

theme park, and an awesome beach. I also had my first legal drink... at $8 for a bottle of beer!

Then, it was off to Sorrento. We stopped to see wild Eastern Grey Kangaroos, which was super awesome, and we settled into our new digs right off the beach. I'm pretty sure the group got pretty sick and tired of hearing me repeat, "Oh my God... We're in Australia!" But I didn't want to ever want to take one moment of my new reality for granted. That evening, we went on a night-hike up a mountain to a lookout and I saw more stars than I've ever seen in my life. We found the southern cross in the sea of stars above us. I've only seen the Milky Way once or twice before that night, and never had it been as brilliant as it was then. We hiked back to our hotel, and finally, after being awake for 48 hours, I fell asleep.

Over the next 2 days we participated in a lot of meetings on Australian culture and tried Vegemite and Tim Tams. While I don't think I'll ever be eating vegemite again, I'm pretty sure I have developed a lifelong addiction to Tim Tams. We went to the beach and enjoyed the beautiful rock pools, went into town and ate some pizza at $9 for a personal pan, and searched high and low for internet. To the people coming to Australia, internet is NOT EASY to find. And when you do find it, you will pay for it (and it's not cheap). Free WiFi is an almost unheard of concept here. As is central air-conditioning, but I'll get to that more later. We went on a night cruise and had fish n chips to mixed reviews (I really liked it). We saw more Kangaroos, Seals, and endangered birds before going back to port.

The next morning, we drove into Melbourne city, got cell phones, and ate sushi. By the way, Australian sushi is not like our sushi. Here, they don't cut it into slices, they leave it in a whole roll. And you pour the soy sauce into the roll and eat it like a wrap.

That night, we had our first taste of goon (boxed wine) and I had heaps of tastes after that. The ladies ended up pretty intoxicated, and so our group walked around the city looking for a club to go dancing. We walked for an hour and a half and finally decided on a club whose name I can't recall, and neither can anyone else. We danced until 3:30 in the morning. And then came back to our hotel for a few hours of sleep.

Australians dance WEIRD. They do a shuffle thing and no one touches one another. We Americans remedied that. :)

We sat in the airport for a few hours and slept while waiting on our flight to Townsville. During our landing, our plane experienced a lot of turbulence right before the landing and with just meters to go before we touched down, our pilot sped back up and took off again. It was so crazy! When we finally did land, we were a little shook up, but no worse for wear. All of our luggage made it and we walked out into the hot, sticky, steamy, rainy sauna that is Townsville, Queensland. We had dinner that night downtown with Cat at a Mexican joint and once again realized the insane expense of things here in Australia. My quesadilla meal that would have been $9 at Chevy's, was $22 at Cactus Jack's. I've come to expect that things will be twice as expensive here as they are at home. I will also address this more later.

For now, I am required at my dorm's kegger. Yes, you read that right. My dorm's kegger.