I haven’t had the chance to blog for a while because life in Australia has been very busy! I’ve decided to put off writing the rough draft of my global population paper to inform you all of the excitement! This weekend, the roomies and I decided to go to Townsville! It’s a city up in Northern Australia, pretty much situated in the Great Barrier Reef. You may recognize the name if you watch the news, as it was just hit by Cyclone Yasi.
Our flight left at 6 am on Friday morning, the infamous 6’s. I’m not a fan of getting up in the 8’s, let alone getting up in the 4’s to get ready. We had to get up at 3:30, because we hadn’t done our packing the night before (dumb). The night before one of my roomies had a date to the movies, so my other roomie and I decided we’d “escort” her to her date – in sum, we pretty much just wanted to see a movie as well. It was the classic helicopter parent scenario: we walked her there, hid while she and her date bought their tickets, but we were nice enough to see another movie. It turned out to be an excellent date for me – we both got slushies and popcorn. That will definitely be a weekly occurrence! Anyways, we ended up getting back at midnight and decided we had to clean our kitchen before we left, in hopes of getting rid of our major ant problem. What responsible girls we have turned out to be….
Went to bed at 2:30 and had an hour nap before getting up to pack for our adventure. We flew Virgin Blue. They don’t actually even give you boarding passes, just receipts. I kept on almost throwing mine out. After a quick two hour flight to Townsville, we took a cab to James Cook University – the uni that the guys we were visiting were staying at. Our cab driver was really nice and gave us the Townsville low-down. A few of the main roads in Townsville used to be military airplane runways. Apparently all of the beautiful “mountains” that they had (which, in the end, turned out to be rolling hills – of course, in comparison to Vancouver mountains…) couldn’t be seen because of the crazy amount of fog they were experiencing. Just our luck.
Plane photos!
The guys live in a residence type thing, so we were lucky enough to stay with them for the weekend! We even got all of our food for free in the dining hall, as they thought we were students… It was essentially the perfect scenario. Granted the six of us (3 of us, 3 of them) all slept on 3 mattresses spread out on a tiny residence room floor….
Rainy Townsville! We were pretty tired when we got there, so we decided to take a quick power nap. The weather was terrible. It was raining so hard, but when has rain ever stopped a Vancouverite?! I think the guys were pretty impressed that we were so pumped/still down to go out in the rain. Side note: They play this game within their group of friends where you can’t say “mine” or “the m word”. If you do, you have to do 10 pushups, whenever and wherever. They do whatever they can to set you up, constantly asking you whose what belongs to who. Highlights of places where these pushups were done would be: in middle of the dance floor at an Irish pub, at the casino restaurant, in a puddle outside, on the stairs. That day we took a bus down to the “Strand”. The Strand is essentially a strip of cool restaurants, etc along the beach, with piers and water parks. The city was empty when we went out (probably due to the torrential downpour). We stopped by the waterpark and played in it for at least an hour. It was honestly awesome. I wish I was still a kid!
Our next stop was the rock pool. The whole time I was imagining this creek or lake thing in the middle of the forest, but I was definitely wrong. It’s essentially a pool overlooking the ocean… that is filled with warm filtered ocean water. The water is kind of slimy, because of the algae at the bottom. We stayed in there for a long time, it was hard to get out.
When we got back we all went for our showers and got ready for our night out at the university pub. The boys were telling us about how they had a “totem” animal dance move. I asked what mine would be and they told me I’d “feel” it when I got out on the dance floor. I joked around about being a sloth, because sometimes my dance moves look rather sloth-like. Turns out this dance move is not the most attractive; thankfully, I discovered another one: the eel. It’s good, and I mean really good. So good that it was all I did. Some could say that I overdid the eel, but they’d be speaking nonsense! We ended up making a dance on the dance floor, consisting of all of our inner animals.
We were nerdy enough to make a poster in commemoration of our dance. To be continued.
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