30 Hours To Cairns

Edit: Big shout outs to Strege, Hanni, Ralston, Achelpohl, and whoever else might be keeping up with my journey.  You guys were the BEST teachers I will ever have.  Truly the best.

I made it!!

So now that I've gotten that out of the way, more about my journey, my new friends, and the things we have been doing.

Dallas and LAX

I landed in Dallas and had a small amount of time to kill.  I wondered around until I found my gate and quickly set up shop.  As I was sitting there, reading Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, I heard "Are you going to Australia?"  It was Brittany and Candace, two of my new friends.  They were from Philly and were also on their way to ICMS.  All 3 of us had the AustraLearn bag tags, a dead giveaway that we would all soon be studying together.  We conversed and got to know each other before boarding the plane.  We we landed in LA, we all got off and went our separate ways for one reason or another.  I headed towards the Qantas international terminal.  I needed to get my flight confirmations out so I could see my flight number.  I had no clue where my gate was, or if I was even in the right place to begin with.  I whipped it out and tried to match it up with the flight number on the screen.  

This is when I started to panic.  My flight number wasn't listed on the screen.  I was looking at the departures screen, for Sydney and Qantas.  Nothing.  Picture me standing by myself in LAX with my back pack on and my flight confirmation out, looking down at the paper, looking up at the screen, down at the paper, up at the screen, paper, screen, paper, screen!!  

This is when I realized it all.  I had been exactly in sync with the monitors, they had the departures text scrolling and I was timing my looking at my paper with my actual flight information on the screen.  My heart rate then returned to normal.

After that, I met my 3rd classmate, Dana.  She was not on the group flight, but going on her own.  Then I ran into Brittany and Candace again.  We got in the wrong line for Qantas, wrong terminal actually, we had to go outside and walk about 2 minutes over to another building for our flight.  When I got there, I had left my bag tags on the American Airlines plane I was just on, so I had to walk back over to the other terminal and have a worker there write my tags down for me.  After I checked in back over at the Qantas counter, I checked out all of the restaurants before I went through security.  I had the best chicken quesadillas that I have ever had at a place called Daily Grill.  So good, that I took a picture of the place!

If you are ever in LAX at the terminal with Daily Grill, it's California law that you get the chicken quesadillas.  After that, I met up again with Brittany and Candace at the gate, where all 65 of the students were flying over together sans a few, and anxiously awaited.

The Flight

I sat in the window seat of our 747 next to two other study abroad students, Laura from Vermont and Scott from Denver but he goes to San Diego.  We chatted for the first hour or so and then split off doing our own things.  The window wasn't that bad considering I'm 6'4.  I took a few sleeping pills and was out for 8 hours.  I woke up in the middle of the night, and to my surprise Scott and Laura were awake.  We talked for another hour, ate breakfast at 5:30 am, and then I went back to sleep for another 2 hours.  All in all I slept about 10.5 hours of the 13 hour flight to Brisbane (Bris-bin).  Here is picture from my seat.

Sunrise over the Pacific

Cairns

Cairns (pernounced Cans, silent "i" and "r") was a blast.  Having been there before, I knew what to expect, and knew my way around the city.  What a cool place.  I've never said the word cool so much as the 3 days we spent in Cairns.  All in all, from my flight in Omaha to touchdown in Cairns took 30 hours, so you can imagine that I felt pretty disgusting, as did everyone.  We got to our hostel

No doors allowed

and got our room assignments, and met our room mates for the next 3 days.  Gilligan's was the perfect place for us.  It was only 22 bucks a night for a room, which was included in our payments for the trip, had the best night life in Cairns (3 bars, 2 downstairs and 1 upstairs called Pure) and a great location with markets, shops, and tons of restaurants and pubs nearby.  Probably about 75% of these places were open air.  For example they had their doors open, had no doors, or had sliding doors that were kept open during hours of operation.  Very cool.  Here's a picture of our room in which 7 20 and 21 year olds stayed for 3 days.  It's no bigger than your average 2 person dorm room.

Hostels are a very cool (there I go again) idea.  First off, it's cheap.  Hostels save money by not having daily maid service and also save on electricity by requiring a key card be slipped into a slot in each room every 24 hours to activate the current. Second, the rooms are more than adequate.  They provide all of the linens, including 1 towel per person, pillow, blankets, and sheets.  Third, they are full of interesting people just like yourself.  Most of the people we ran into were traveling and looking to not open their pocket books to get some shut eye.  And Fourth, they have community kitchens.  Now this is the most interesting of them all to me.  Each floor has a fully stocked kitchen.  Sink, oven, microwave, 2 huge refrigerators, and all of the other standard appliances.  It's totally based on the honor system.  You keep your food in the kitchen refrigerators, and use the hostel's plates and silverware.  After you eat, you do the dishes and put things back how they were when you found it.  The honor part of it is that you don't touch anyone else's food, or leave a mess.  It works better than you'd think.  We were awake by 7:30 each morning and I never saw any messes in the kitchen.  Here's the kitchen.

Cairns has a lot to offer for a small city.  We went to the reef and to an aboriginal culture center.  Both we very fun and interesting.  Here are some pictures from both of them.  

The aboriginal dancers

A 250 year old australian fan tree on the army duck tour

We fed some reef fish off the side of the boat

An island in the middle of the Great Barrier Reef.  We dropped

anchor here.  This is literally the most beautiful sight i have ever seen.

This tiny island is home to more than 50,000 birds and is protected

by the EPA.  The dark spots in the water are reef.

We rode a boat over to the island and played with some fish.

This is looking back over at the main boat.

After a fun weekend in Cairns, all 65 of us packed up our things and headed to Sydney.

Sydney

We got in around lunch time and took a bus to ICMS.  My fingers are about spent, so I'll leave you with these 3 pictures.  I will have more pictures tomorrow or Thursday of the school, it's an amazing building.

This one is for my mom.  I hope you're proud!

The great view from my room.

This is the only picture I have of myself on the trip so far.

I never think to take pictures of myself, I just point and shoot

at everything else.  I hadn't shaved in 5 days (sorry mom)

Obviously I can't share every single detail or picture on the blog for a number of reasons, time and energy being the two most obvious.  If you have any questions and want to e-mail me, just use claycollier44@gmail.com and I'll be happy to write you guys.

Cheers,

Clay