Ethan's Semester In the South Pacific: First Days Down Under

First things first: I’ve received constructive criticism that my blogs have boring titles and need pictures. So from here on out, I will post photos, I will start titling my blogs with clever titles and no longer title them “Blog Number __”, and you will notice that I made a background picture and if you check my previous blogs, you will see the corresponding photos. Like I said, I’m new to the blogosphere and I need to learn how to do these things. Shout out to Paige Biringer for teaching me how.

So anyway…

Well, as predicted, the travel day was absolutely terrible. The day started really early when we had to be at breakfast by 7 AM. After a quick breakfast, we got out of the hotel around 9 AM. We loaded up the coach and headed to the Cherry Blossom Festival in Waimea, Hawaii, the second-largest Japanese cultural festival in the world. We stayed at the festival for about five hours, an hour and a half of which we spent walking around, and the rest of the time we spent sitting together at children’s playground trying to stay out of the sun since most of us were fighting sunburn from the previous day. For one thing, if I had been the one making the schedule, I think I would have structured the day a little differently. Five hours at a Japanese culture festival was a little excessive, especially since we already had a long day ahead of us and we definitely could have reallocated some of those festival hours to waking up a little later than 6:30 AM. Secondly, family members could probably attest that something titled “cultural festival” wouldn’t really be my thing (And I mean no disrespect to Japanese culture).

Moving on…at around 2 PM, we had the pleasure of departing the festival and went to the Airport. Of course, our flight got delayed. And the airport was basically a courtyard with a restaurant, gift shop, and ten airplane gates. So then around 7 we had the shortest flight of my life over to Honolulu where we had a 2-hour layover before the 9-hour flight to Auckland, New Zealand. Fortunately, I took a melatonin and could barely keep my eyes open for the first 20 minutes of a movie. That made the flight pass pretty quickly. After a 4-hour layover in New Zealand, we had a three and a half hour flight to Brisbane, Australia, our final destination. Crossing over the International Date Line was pretty strange. We basically went from Saturday, February 2 to February 4. Our only thing on the agenda upon arrival was to have our Australia orientation after which I took a 2-hour nap before going to dinner. After a quick dinner, I was ready to pass out. I went to bed at 7:30 PM and slept until 6 AM the next day. Honestly, after the nap and the full night’s sleep, it was a pretty seamless transition into the new time zone. Granted, its only 4 hours different from Hawaii.

The next day brought our first full day in Australia.

7 First Impressions of Australia:

Australian people are very friendly. Most people behind counters want to talk and ask you what part of the US you are from. Everyone has been really helpful when it’s come to directions, recommendations, and such.

Brisbane is a really cool city. My impression is that the urban size is pretty similar to Atlanta. There are a lot of tall buildings, but there is also a lot of green space. In fact, there’s a nice little park called King Edward Park right across from our hotel where we go to use free WiFI.

Food is really expensive- Lunch at McDonald’s was 11 Australian dollars. It’s pretty tough to eat a meal for under 15 dollars.

Alcohol is really, really expensive. A 24-pack of Budweiser (the cheapest one) at the package store is a cool 55 bucks. Strangely, wine is grossly disproportionate. All the fine-wine drinkers can get a bottle of Yellow Tail for less than 10 dollars. The Australian dollar is 91 cents to the US dollar, so it’s really about 9 dollars.

We’re definitely not in Athens, GA. I definitely stick out like a sore thumb in my pocket-t’s, khaki shorts, and rainbows. However, I haven’t been treated any differently because I don’t look like a local. If anything, people are more friendly. There’s also the obvious difference from the previous 2 points…

They drive on the left side of the road. As a pedestrian, it’s a little tough to get used to looking right-left-right rather than left-right-left.

Mall’s are very common. It seems like there is one on every street corner However, their malls are very different than ours. They all have food courts, but they all close at 5 PM. Also, instead of department stores, you would find things like Target or the grocery store.

Anyway, that first day we had class from 8-11 AM (miserable) for our first Anthropology class followed by a presentation on Australian culture. Afterwards, we had a lunch break before having a scavenger hunt at the local natural history museum. Fortunately, it wasn’t too hard to find everything and I actually learned some cool things in the process. Did you know that Australia is home to the world’s largest species of cockroaches and they are 35 times the mass of a normal cockroach? (Imagine having one of those crawling on you Ryan Johnson)

That night, we decided to take the opportunity to go out for the first real opportunity on the trip. We went to the local bar called Down Under, which was definitely an interesting experience. It was “Ladies and Lady Guys Night”. Use your imagination as to who was walking around and what they were wearing. Needless to say, I stuck pretty close to people from our group. At one point in the night, I met and talked to a guy from Kenya who told me he lived in Dunwoody before I told him I was from there. What are the odds? (He wasn’t a “lady guy”)

This morning, I got up at 7 AM and headed to WiFi park to get my Internet time in. We had 8 AM class again for a couple hours before taking the train to Boondall Wetlands Environmental Center. We took a little tour around the facilities with mosquitoes literally swimming in the air around us. That definitely put a damper on things. Other than that, we sampled some foods native to the Bush and got a slightly boring lecture on the Aboriginal people. Afterwards, we took the train back to downtown Brisbane where our hotel was and got the rest of the day off. We went to dinner downtown, came back to the hotel to hang out, and now here I am in WiFi park working on this blog. It’s 10 o’clock PM here, but I still got a couple more hours. I have an interview at midnight to match up with 9 AM in Atlanta. Not sure what the internet situation is going to be like the rest of the week, as we’re about head off into a more remote area, but look for updates in the next few days.

Good luck to the Dawgs on National Signing Day. Not feeling too good about it, but we’ll hope for the best. I may have to post a blog about that too.