Just finished my first week in Australia, and it's been really great so far. Class from 9:30-3:30 every day, but after that I usually go for a hike or run in these beautiful mountains we have behind JCU. There are these really nice mountain bike trails. It's a strenuous run, but worth it for the views and wallabies.
There are some really amazing birds here. Cockatoos, kookaburras, lorakeets, australian magpies, a brahminy kite, some turkeys, and also some bird called a curlew. The first time we heard it though, some jcu kids told us people call it a rape bird because its call sounds like a woman screaming. They made sure to tell us that the bird wasn't actually getting raped...
Friday night, we went to this restaurant called Rhino Bar. They had "memphis ribs" on their menu, so of course I had to try them. Surprisingly, they were some of the best ribs I've had in a while.
Saturday we went to this restaurant we'd seen the night before that was an asian grill kind of place. Both of these restaurants are in this area by a marina, and the restaurants are nice and get crowded, so they often don't have room unless you made a reservation. We really wanted to eat at this asian place though, and they told us they thought they could seat us in about 20 min. We ended up waiting like 2 hours, but they gave us free drinks which came to close to $100 dollars for our group. It was some awesome food, too.
Visited the aquarium today. Some beautiful corals and fish, but not a particularly large aquarium.
Planning on diving the reef next weekend!!

After a ridiculously long plane ride, I made it to australia safely. Saturday we walked around, had dinner and hung out for a while in town. Got up and went running Sunday then went to the Strand which is this long section of beautiful beach. It's a really pretty busy area. Along the beach they have these excercise stations. There are steps for doing excercises involving stepping up and a rope to climb and just a lot of cool stuff. People here really easily recognize us as being Americans. Besides looking somewhat lost and having accents, apparently groups of Americans are generally louder than Australians. After class today, a group of us went for a hike on these hills/mountains behind campus. There are these mountain bike trails which are really great. We saw a ton of wallabies. The hills have this tall grass that's green at the ends, but the dead grey grass clumps at the bottom. The wallabies are grey and when they lay down in the grass, you can be 2 feet from them and never see them until they jump up in your face and scare you to death. Trying to work on planning my weekends. Hopefully will go diving one weekend, maybe sailing another. There's also this place called castle hill which is supposed to have awesome trails, so might do that at some point.

First post!

So I leave in about 12 hours, haven't packed yet. If procrastination were an olympic sport, my parents would be so proud. Since it's not, I feel like they've probably had some frustrated discussions today about my lack of organization. Since communication will be somewhat limited while I'm in Australia, I've decided to try to keep a blog while I'm there so friends and family peoples will have some assurance that I haven't been killed by a mutant platypus or some other dangerous Australian thing. Back to packing!