Culture and Adventure Week Improvised, Brisbane Style.

     After the longest day ever! We ended up at the Brisbane City YHA hostel. We had to wait until 2pm to check in, so a bunch of us went in the pool, then to the transit station for lunch. After we got settled in and cleaned up we went to dinner at the Transcontinental Hotel. I had the chicken Schnitzel, and man was it delicious.

This is the outside of the hostel.

This is my room at the hostel.

     Wednesday February 2, we went to Lone Pines Koala Sanctuary for the day and I got to hold a koala (i.koala.net/0202113396.htm ), feed kangaroos (see video bar), and see all kinds of other Australian animals. When we got to the sanctuary the first thing we did was have lunch. It was a barbeque. (I've learned that here barbeque just means grill.) It was really good, there was steak and chicken with salad and the absolute best cantalope I have ever had! After that I went straight over to the kangaroo area where I got to feed them! Then we went to the reptile show, where I touched a snake. Surprisingly they are not slimly like most people think, but smooth.  Then we went to the koala holding area! It was so cute! When the handler took her away she grabbed onto my hair (not pulling it thankfully) like she didn't want to leave!  After that we wandered around seeing all the different animals. I saw a cuckaburra, platypus, tasmanian devil, and a wallaby among many other things. And the last thing we did was go to the sheep dog, and sheep shearing show! The dogs were so cute, they made me miss my Niki dog.

Kangaroo

Wallaby

Tasmanian Devil

    On Thursday we went to Riverlife, first we had lunch and saw aboriginal dancing. I got to listen and see a guy play a didgeridoo. Then, we went kayaking on the Brisbane river. And just so you know there are sharks and crocs in there! We did a team building thing where we got all our kayaks in a circle and held on to each of the persons next to us. Then two at a time (across from each other) we had to run around on the fronts of the kayaks while in the water, and try to get the to the other side of the circle first. I'm quite proud to say I didn't fall in the water once.  That night we had dinner at a Thai restaurant. It was really good. I really liked the green curry beef and the peanut chicken. 

The ICMS AustraLearn group with the aboriginal dancers.

Welcome to Australia. There's a cyclone coming.

Hey everyone,

 So I made it to Australia okay. The flight was soooo long. I started out at Minneapolis, flew to Denver where I had a 2 hour layover. I found my gate which was literally 1000 feet away from my arrival gate then got some food. Then I flew to LA. When we were disembarking I starting chatting with the girl next to me. Turns out she was at the United States Air Force Academy in Denver visiting her brother. I told her I know a couple guys who go there, and she said her brothers roommates were from Minnesota, turns out its the same people! So she called them up and we all chatted for a few minutes, laughing over the coincidence. After that I got my luggage and went outside to the bus to change terminals. SCARIEST RIDE OF MY LIFE! I thought I was going to die about 5 times in less that 5 minutes. When I finally got to the right terminal I couldn't figure out where to go. I ended up wandering back and forth with my enormous bags for about 10 minutes, until I found a worker who was free. He then proceeded to direct me into the doors 2 feet away... Finally I got checked in for my flight to Australia!!! I went up through security, and found my gate (20 feet away from security on the right.) After I went to find some food when I ran into 3 girls also on the AustraLearn trip, and so we decided to get Chili's and relax since we still had 5 hours until our flight. After eating way overpriced airport food, we went to our gate where we met more people from AustraLearn! We chatted for a few hours, and even got some advice on what to say and not say in Australia from a real aussie. Finally we loaded up for out 14 hour  flight to Brisbane. About an hour into the flight we had dinner. The menu made it sound amazing! Let me just say, they are very crafty with their word choice. The options were beef short ribs or mahi mahi. Well I hate fish so guess what the 2 guys next to me got... the fish! It smelt awful! (The smell actually work me up from 3 rows ahead of me!) After dinner I watched Despicable Me then fell asleep. I had a window seat luckily so I had something to sleep against.