I Come From the Land Down Under

Well I made it. The land down under. Bonus points to you if you know why I named the blog as I did. My two day travel bonanza is finalllly over. As I’m still a newbie to air travel, bare with me as I go over some of the things that stood out during my travels. First I flew out of Dayton to St. Louis. My plane was absolutely tiny: two seats per row on one side of the aisle and only one on the other. Luckily I got one of the singles. Sky Mall officially has the most random crap ever, such as a remote control car that can fit two beer cans in it. Interesting idea, but really… not necessary. My flight to LAX was pretty uneventful until we were flying into the city. It was interesting to see how close the city is to mountains, now I see why the call the show The Hills as such. Off in the distance I saw the Hollywood sign, which was pretty cool. When we were landing the people next to me asked if I was from LA which I found to be funny, I guess I’ve just got that cali look (haha). I had about 8 hours to kill in LAX so I pushed 4 chairs together and took a short nap/watched stuff on my laptop until a few hours before departure, when I went to the Quantas gate and met up with everyone else. If the American flight to St Louis was the smallest plane ever, the Quantas flight was the hugest; it had 3 sets of rows; 3 seats next to each window and a middle section of 4 seats. I’m most of you seasoned travelers don’t really care about that but too bad. The flight was terribly long (14 hours), I watched several movies and several episodes of different tv shows on the person entertainment system each passenger gets. Didn’t sleep much at all, which really sucked. Airline food SUCKS. The highlight of this flight was getting a Victoria Bitter, or VB, beer with dinner, my first legal drink. Finally getting into Sydney was a huge relief. Saw the opera house from the air. We had to go through customs, quarantine, etc so we didn’t have a whole lot of time there, but enough to get some money from the ATM (aussie money is very brightly colored with each bill a different color and also with a small see through plastic part unique to each denomination of bill which is very odd) and get a whopper meal from Hungry Jack’s aka Burger King. Next up was a 5 hour flight across Australia to Perth, which was pretty uneventful. Getting out into the fresh Perth air was great; it was in the 90s but with a really nice ocean breeze that I guess the area is famous for. A bus came and took us on a really long and circuitous route around the Perth area to Fremantle. We got room keys (my single is about 8 ft x 7 ft, no exaggerations involved. also every room is a single), dropped our stuff off and then a group of us went to the beach, which just so happens is only a 2 minute walk away. Our dorm is right by this nice open park and on the other side of that is the harbor and a bunch of fish and chip restaurants right on the water and beach is off to the right of all that. It was really breezy and windy so we didn’t get in all the way but it was nice to just relax in a completely stretched out position after all that flying. Then we came back, showered, and hit the streets of Freo. The beach group and I went out to dinner, unfortunately as it was 9pm at this time most places were packed. But we finally found a little Mexican place that could fit us downstairs. It’s really cool in that all the restaurants are open to the street with tables and chairs out on the sidewalk. Going out to dinner is going to be quite expensive as everything was around 20 AUD even at this casual place. Tried Carlton Cold with dinner, not bad. Then we walked around looking for some place to continue the evening and found some bar/club whose name I don’t know. I had to go back to the dorm and change into shoes because they wouldn’t let me in with sandals. Had another Carlton Cold and a Carlton Draught but I decided I didn’t like them that much. I was feeling realllly tired and the few beers weren’t sitting well with me for some reason so myself and a few others went back early to try and catch up on sleep. And here I am at 7:30am wide awake and writing a blog entry… I hate jet lag. That’s all for now, sorry it’s so long but I’ve got nothing to do. We have a week of orientation before classes start so that will be nice. Today, Sunday, though is still a free day as we are waiting for a few more kids to get here. We will probably go out exploring the town today and hit up the beach again at some point.