So It Begins...

Well, it looks as though I already messed up my goal of updating this blog weekly. I've received several complaints about my incompetence, and I apologize to those people. In any event, this will be quite a long post, so sit back and be prepared to read this in shifts.

Our trip begins on July 6, a little more than two weeks ago. My lovely sister drove me to the airport on the bright and early, after a few hours of sleep due to my procrastinated packing. My flight out of Seattle was on time and everything was peachy, but once I arrived in San Francisco at 1:30, I had about 9 hours to kill before the group flight left. I called up Cory to see where he was (he had been there since 8:30 that morning!). We met up, stored our bags, and hopped on the BART to go into the city and meet up with some other Australearn students. For those who don't know, Australearn is the program that I came through to get here. I had talked with a few other students on Facebook about meeting up downtown, so I called Annie to see where they were. We met up with four girls down on Pier 39 and had lunch and got to know each other a little better. After lunch, we headed back to the airport to wait for our plane and meet some more people going through Australearn. Turns out there were quite a few of us, with the majority going to Newcastle, others to Queensland, Southern Cross, and a few other Unis. The flight to Sydney wasn't too bad. I reckon it was about 13-14 hours and I slept for a good portion of it.

Upon arrival in the Sydney airport, I discovered, along with a number of other students, that both my bags had been left back in San Francisco! I was informed that my bags would be forwarded to Cairns (pronounced CANS) and would be delivered to me at the hostel where we were staying. I was also told that I would receive $100 emergency money from Qantas to purchase necessities, which I needed because I hadn't packed any extra clothes in my carry-on. We had one more flight to go (at this point, it had been about 40 something hours since leaving Seattle) to get to Cairns and it was a pretty short flight. In Cairns, we were greeted by the Australearn staff, put on buses, and taken to Gilligan's Backpacker's Hotel and Resort. It's technically a hostel, but when you hear the word "hostel," this is the last thing that would come to mind. This place was one of the coolest places I have stayed in awhile. I'll just let you check out the pictures and stuff for yourself.

http://www.gilligansbackpackers.com.au/welcome.html

Over the next three days, Australearn gave us some general information about Australia and how things are done down here. I believe there were about 117 students from the U.S. and Canada in the group. About 43 of us were going on to Newcastle and those were the people I was mostly hanging out with. During the day, Australearn took us on some awesome excursions. First, we went out on a big catamaran to the Great Barrier Reef, where we got to scuba dive and snorkel. Amazing. Just amazing. It was too bad we were there in winter, because it was a little cloudy and very windy, which made for some cold conditions. That night, a group of us went out to dinner at a small local place and all seven of us got the kangaroo BBQ burger. Definitely a different taste than your standard beef, but a great burger nonetheless.

The next day, we were taken to a nature park called RainForeStation (very clever). The first thing we did was hold a koala and get our picture taken with it. Then we were shown some traditional aboriginal dances. After that, we were shown a spear-throwing demonstration, and we got to try our hands (and mouths) at throwing a boomerang and playing a didgeridoo. I was actually able to make the right noise on the didgeridoo, but it's impossible to play for more than a few seconds if you don't know how to circular breathe, which is also impossible. Our next adventure was on an army duck, which is one of those amphibious vehicles that the army used in WWII. If you know those Ride the Duck adventures they have in Seattle, it's basically that, but these were actually over 60 years old. We went on a little tour around the park in it, both on land and water. Next we got to go check out a bunch of Australian animals like wombats, lorikeets, a crocodile, a blue tongue lizard, a cockatoo, a snake that we got to hold, and of course, kangaroos which we were able to feed and pet.

The next day we had to be up at 3:30am to head to the airport for our 6:30 flight to Brisbane. We didn't end up getting that much sleep that night, but most everyone passed out on the flight. Even after that quick flight, we had another short flight from Brisbane to Newcastle-- only we had a 4 hour layover first. That was awesome. When we finally touched down in Newcastle, there was a nice round of applause by our Australearn group for making it to our new home. We were met at the airport by some University staff and everyone was taken to their accommodations. I was taken to my room in International House where I met my first roommate, Chantel. We had the whole weekend to just hang around and explore campus and downtown. The thing that struck everyone first was how expensive everything is here. It costs $3 for us to ride the bus or train, and that's only one way! A 6-pack of beer is about $15 or more!

The start of the next week was O-Week (orientation week) where the University and the residential colleges had all these organized activities for new students. Monday there was a big gathering of new students in one of the large lecture halls. Here we were treated to some more aboriginal performances; these were a little funnier and were meant to make us laugh. There was a break at about 1 and we were given a BBQ lunch. A bunch of people left, but those who stayed were mainly just trying to see if they were going to win the free spring break trip through STA Travel. There was a drawing at the very end and one lucky girl won a free $1600 trip for 16 days on the east coast. I don't think she made too many friends by winning. That is to say, everyone applauded then quickly stopped and stared on with jealousy.

Later that night, the colleges organised an excursion out to one of the local bars, called Customs. It was pretty crazy leaving IH (International House) because we filled up an entire bus and it was quite loud and boisterous. We were some of the first to get there, and it was pretty empty, but by about 9:30 it was packed with students. We had a great time and met a bunch of cool people. Eventually a bunch of Australearn kids and a few randoms headed over to one of the off-campus apartments and hung out there for awhile. Unfortunately the next train came at like 2:25am so we had to wait there awhile, but we managed to make it back to campus just fine. The next day was some more orientation stuff at the Uni and a campus tour. A few of us also booked a trip to New Zealand over spring break (the first two weeks of October), so we have something pretty awesome to look forward to. That night at IH there was a trivia night in the dining hall. The returners and newcomers were pitted against each other in three teams of each. My team ended up getting last place overall (we didn't have any Aussies so we missed all the questions about Australia) but it was still great fun. Then we headed over to ONE of the on-campus bars (awesome I know) called Bar on the Hill.

The next day, IH took a bus load of students on a winery tour in the famous Hunter Valley. We went to three different wineries and a brewery. I really can't stand wine so it wasn't all that great but there were a couple that weren't too bad. The brewery was probably the group favorite because we all got this long paddle with 6 shot glasses with different types of beer in them. Then when we were done with those, we got to get a full glass of the one we liked best. Then we hopped on the bus and napped on the way home. Wednesday's are student nights out on the town because drinks are much cheaper, so there were tons of people out that night as well.

On Friday, there was another big excursion through the Uni that went to the Blackbutt Nature Reserve. It was mostly unexciting and didn't see many new animals, but we went on a good hike/walk around the park which was nice. The coolest thing that we saw was a dead fruit bat under a tree on our hike. There were lots of maggots crawling all over it. We went back for lunch and they gave us another BBQ. We also got to sample a little piece of kangaroo steak, which was amazing. We ended up going out again that night. This time all the boys dressed up and put on ties. We pretended Cory was getting married and that it was his bachelor party. It was pretty fun, and even if people didn't believe it, we looked better than everyone else.

Saturday the 19th was my 21st birthday! I have to say, it was a pretty amazing birthday. A bunch of us started the day by riding the bus downtown and walking to the park. On the way, we stopped by the Queen's Wharf Tower (also called the Giant Penis by the locals) and climbed to the top for an awesome view. We stopped at a grocery store and bought some stuff for lunch, then headed down to the park. They have public grills at the park that are free to use, so we threw some chicken and hamburgers on and played with a couple frisbees and a tennis ball. While we were there, more and more people kept showing up and hanging out. After the park, we headed over to the beach. The beaches here are stunning. Beautiful fine white sand and clear water. You can also see about 30 huge barges out in the water that apparently have ridiculous waiting times (sometimes months) to get into the harbour. Later that night, we had a bunch of people over before going out to the bars yet again. Many people were keen to buy me drinks, so needless to say, I had a good night.

Sunday was pretty relaxed because classes started on Monday, but we went to see the Dark Knight, which was wicked cool (damn East Coasters). Some people are going again tonight, and I was about to go, but figured I would save another $12 and finish writing this. I was supposed to have class on Monday, but that class doesn't start until week two, so I'm in the clear on that one. I did have my first class today, which was Myth Making and Mythic Experience. Should be a cool class. We start by looking at Malinowki and some of his studies of the Trobrianders. I had always been interested in his work because he was one of the first anthropologists to do actual fieldwork and participant observation, so it will be fun to take a closer look at it.

Well that pretty much brings us up to date. I'm still ashamed that I already failed my goal, but I will try to be more diligent in the future. I'll throw a bunch of pictures in for those of you with a more visual disposition.