Orientation in Cairns

June 1st I got up at 6:30 AM Eastern Time to make my flight from Tampa to Miami, which only took an hour.  I HATE the Miami airport though, and as always my flight from there was delayed (TWICE)!  I finally made it to LAX though, with plenty of time to spare til my 11:30 PM flight to Brisbane, Australia.  There, I met up with some of the other girls doing AustraLearn internships.  Everyone in the program is from America, but all from different states and different universities than me.


Honestly, my five hour flight from Miami to LA seemed shorter than the fourteen hours it took to reach Brisbane!  I watched The Book of Eli, Shutter Island, and Avatar; ate dinner and breakfast; peed about a jillion times; got up and did ridiculous stretches in the aisle even though I didn't see anyone else stretching at all; and slept a good deal.  After the flight, a bunch of the other AustraLearn interns said they only got up twice the whole flight because they felt bad making the other people in their row get up.  I am SOO glad that I had an aisle seat and was able to move around as much as I wanted.


From Brisbane, we went through customs, which was no biggie.  Thankfully, they didn't confiscate the Girl Scout cookies my mom gave me for the trip!  I would have cried!  They had these adorable little beagle looking hound dogs as their drug dogs, and it was soo cute because they'd hop up on people to sniff their back packs and stuff!  I know they have incredible noses, but it was just funny to see such a tiny, adorable dog trying to look intimidating.  :) Anyway, then I hopped on a plane to Cairns, which is where our orientation was before all the interns flew off to their separate internship locations.


So, I landed in Australia at 6:20 AM on Thursday, June 3rd!  I was in the air for all of June 2nd..I have yet to calculate how long I was actually awake before getting to sleep (in an actual bed for more than a few hours at a time), but I believe it was some horrendous amount of time.  Cairns is very far north on the continent, so it is warm year round and has a very tropical climate.  Honestly, it felt just like New Orleans, maybe a bit more humid if that's possible.  The majority of the other interns are from up north, so they were all melting.  But now that I'm in Sydney and it's like 13 degrees Celsius (approx. 56 F) I'm freezin' my little tail off, and they all think that it's perfect weather.

We stayed at this cute little hostel called the Bohemia Resort.  It had a little bar area with a bunch of tables right by a really nice pool and hot tub, that I regrettably didn't use.  The rooms had bunk beds, and I roomed with four of the nine other girls who have Sydney internships.  So, from the airport our internship leader, Russell, picked us up and brought us to the Bohemia.  I swear, I have never seen so many people so happy to shower.  We all felt disgusting from our two days of traveling, and therefore thoroughly enjoyed our icy showers in nasty communal showers.  We did a couple hours of orientation, where Russell covered different cultural issues and whatnot.  Afterwards, we walked down to Blue Sky Brewery where AustraLearn bought us dinner.  After that, we all went back to the Bohemia, and the vast majority of us were asleep by 8 PM! haha  I honestly don't think I had jetlag at all, I was just sleepy from having not slept more than a few hours while sitting up in days!!

It worked out alright though, because we had to be up at six for the next days activities.  I had never been so ready to get up at 6 AM in my life.  It was actually pretty funny, because around three in the morning I woke up and just fidgeted around in bed for a while trying to get tired.  I heard all the other girls doing the same, as we had already gotten a full night's rest.  We had continental breakfast at the resort before getting on a bus headed towards the marina.  Funny thing, they served some version of Australian spaghettios for breakfast...I didn't try them but thought it was pretty hilarious that that's a breakfast food over here.


We boarded the Passion of Paradise II bright and early and headed out to Michaelmas Cay to do some snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef.  Michaelmas Cay is protected land for these godawful nasty birds that like to live there, so the part of the beach humans are allowed on is very minimal.  They have most of it roped off, and the consequence for crossing said rope is a $7,500 fine.  There were so many thousands of birds that someone couldn't have paid me $7,500 to stand in the midst of them all.  Yuck!

I bought an underwater disposable camera, so as soon as I find a place to develop the film I'll post pictures from snorkeling.  I really enjoyed the snorkeling, but it certainly took a while for me to comprehend breathing underwater worked and was okay!  The first time I stuck my head in and started to take a breath I freaked out too much and pulled my head right back up. lol After a few minutes though I was fluttering all over near the beach.  There were so many types of coral.  And these MASSIVE clams that I believe the crew members said were like 100 years old!  I even saw an adorable little stingray about the size of a dinner plate.  He was sand-colored and had little blue dots all over him.  My friend Marcy (who goes to Marshall University in Huntington, WV where I went to middle school---small world!) and I tried to follow him, but he wasn't too keen on that idea and quickly lost us.

I saw bunches of little Nemo's but no Dory's.  There were these cool green and purple metallic rainbowy fish.  And I swam with a school of silver fish just like the ones in Finding Nemo that formed funny shapes to cheer up Dory when Marlin tried to ditch her.  And yes, I realize I'm a huge dork for referencing Finding Nemo so much but I can't help it, so brace yourself for more over the next few weeks! lol

You didn't have to be certified to go scuba diving, and they said they'd let you try it out near the surface for ten minutes for free.  I figured I'm in Australia on the Great Barrier Reef so why not!  I didn't want to later regret having not done it.  So, I strapped on all the gear and plopped down in the water.  They had two ropes tied to the boat, one at the surface and another about one meter deep.  They had us stick our faces in and get used to breathing for a while at the surface, before pulling us down to the lower rope.  After a couple minutes they signaled to ask us if we were ready to go down for the dive.  I signaled back a "hell no!"...Well they didn't exactly teach us that sign, but I think what I made up got the point across pretty well, because the instructor came up to the surface with me.  She asked me why I didn't want to go, and I explained that I was panicking just there on the ropes and that the breathing underwater thing just wasn't flying with me.  She asked if I'd be willing to swim out near the surface to have more time to get comfortable, so I complied.  I completed the whole dive with the instructor and two other unexperienced divers.  Those two both swam off on their own (still following the instructor, but no longer arm-in-arm) after a few minutes.  The dive leader kept signaling at me to ask if I wanted to swim independently too, and I just kept staring at her with my wide, terrified eyes vigorously shaking my head "no."  I clung to that woman about the same as I did to my mom when she first brought me in the deep end of the pool to try to make me swim for the first time.  I was petrified the ENTIRE dive, but I did see some cool things.  My favorite part was playing with the spaghetti-looking coral that when touched pulls away from you.  So that was my first and last dive experience; definitely not my thing, but I'm glad I stuck with it through the whole dive.

We went to a second snorkel location, but it was right after my dive and it was in the middle of the ocean rather than off of a beach..PLUS the waves were getting much more choppy, so I decided to sit the second round out.  A few other girls did too, and we were just sitting at a table inside the boat's "saloon" talking.  As we were at a stand still, the skipper---who, I kid you not, was named Popeye---came to hang out with us and chat for a bit. After a while he even offered us drinks on the house.  So I got a Chardonnay, and people weren't kidding..Australian wine is really good!  (FYI, the drinking age in Australia is 18, not 21, so this was completely legal.)  Also, it was a good thing we stayed inside because we all got to see a view that none of the snorkelers were able to enjoy:

 

(ewww)

We were on the boat from 8 AM til 5 PM and despite being in Australia's ozoneless sun all day long, I managed to escape with absolutely no sunburn!!  Operation "tan before leaving the US for a bit more protection" with the help of my 100+ SPF is definitely working!  We got to shower before going to our second half of orientation, and thank goodness because my hair was matted to my head.  A bunch of people went out after dinner but about 8 of us just went back to the Bohemia.  I wanted to be well rested before my flight the next day and didn't feel comfortable having more than one drink until I figured out how to stay hydrated (I swear I've been dehydrated ever since I left the States; it's hard to drink as much water as is necessary!!), so I went home.  I did stay up til about 10 or 10:30 though which was much less pathetic than the night before.

Check-out was at 10 AM, and right after us Sydney-going folk hopped on a Maxi-Taxi (that's what they call the van cab's over here) to the airport to catch our flight.  We got to watch Alice and Wonderland on the plane and they served us lunch even though it was only a 2 1/2 hour flight!  Stupid American Airlines doesn't even give you a free peanut or pretzel anymore!  Ironically enough, the penne pasta and roasted veggies with an orange/pineapple/passionfruit popsicle for dessert was the best meal I've had since being in Australia.  The food isn't bad; it's actually really similar to American food.  It's a lot of the same dishes, they just taste different.  I think my tummy is going to take a while to adjust to it, because I've had a bunch of tummy-aches since I've been here.  Oh, and there "tomato sauce" (aka ketchup) is not so great :( Oh well, I'm sure I'll find yummy stuff soon; I've just been spoiled by New Orleans' out-of-this-world cuisine.  Guess you can't have cool stuff like the Great Barrier Reef AND the world's best food all in the same country.


So now I'm in chilly Sydney.  I guess it's been raining almost every day lately, but the locals are saying it should clear up for a while soon.  I'm still not sure if they're just saying that so we don't get scared off lol.  The house we're staying in is pretty cool, but I'll save all that info for the next post, as this one's getting awfully long and it's almost 1 AM here and I'm zonked!


Goodnight all!  Oh, and Saturday, June 5th was a good day, so enjoy it.  And let me know if you need anymore advice from the future ;)