I made it!

32 hours after leaving my house… I’m safe!
The first leg of my trip went really well! Mom and Dad brought me to the airport and hung out for a while before they had to leave to beat rush hour out of the cities. Dennis came by to say goodbye which was also awesome. The flight to LAX went really smoothly. We arrived on time and as I got off the plane I immediately met two girls from my program from South Dakota. We got dinner at the airport and waited another two hours for our flight to Brisbane. The 14 hour flight to Brisbane wasn’t as bad as I predicted. It was dark for the entire time because we left at 11:30pm LA time and arrived at 6:30am Australia time, also, international flight attendants treat even economy class like royalty. We got so much food and excellent service, plus they had Australian accents which are still amusing me. I had a lot of trouble finding a comfortable way to sleep, but I got a lot of reading done, and was sitting around people from my program.
After arriving in Brisbane we had to get our luggage and go through customs. The line took forever (as there are 59 of us in our group) but customs wasn’t bad. I was randomly checked by a security guy but that only took a minute. We then had to run to catch the train to the domestic terminal for our flight to Cairns (pronounced “cans”) for our program introduction. The flight attendants were loving the fact that we were American and made us eat Vegemite, which I’ve decided kinda tastes like soy sauce in solid form. It was a fun flight, and seemed super short compared to the previous one. I also had a window seat and you can see the bottom of the ocean from the plane, how cool is that!
We finally made it to Cairns and I heard my name being called by baggage services. Turns out one of my bags was still in Brisbane… luckily, the bag I packed for this weekend was the one I had, and the other one was to arrive in a few hours. I decided misplaced luggage was much better than lost. We checked into Gilligans, our backpacker resort, and then headed to our first program session where we learned basic laws and common language. Australians may speak English, but its far different than anything I’ve ever heard. Turns out they have a very relaxed culture but very strict laws, they’re sarcastic and have a ton of slang that may or may not actually make sense. For instance “Captain Cook” means “Take a look” just because it rhymes? Eventually I’ll catch on.
After our session we had some downtime and I went to a coffee shop with a few girls. Then we all had dinner at our resort and everyone just hung out at the bar for the night. Getting served and drinking with our program coordinators was a little weird at first, but for the most part it was a quiet night getting to know people. I don’t have jet lag too bad, but considering I was up at 3am in this time zone, I was pretty tired by 10pm. Tomorrow we go to the rainforest (breakfast is at 730am!) and Sunday is the Great Barrier Reef (breakfast at 615am!). We have program sessions throughout the weekend to learn more basics about the culture and academic expectations. Luckily there is downtime at night to explore Cairns and do our own thing. So far I’m having a lot of fun meeting people, it’s all a little overwhelming at the moment. There are some unique Australian habits or tendencies that I’ll share at another time. This post is already far too long and pretty dry. In the future I promise they’ll be more entertaining, but until then.