Arrived!

After over 25 hours of travel, I am finally FINALLY here, in Cairns, Queensland. It is supposedly winter here, but when we arrived at around 9:30am it felt around 75 degrees outside. Wish New England winters were this pleasant! After settling in at our hostel and going out to lunch (found a delicious small vegetarian place) we had a group meeting with one of our leaders/coordinators, Tony. He gave us an introduction we were mostly too jetlagged to listen to, then since we need to stay up in order to get over our jet lag quicker, we took a walk down to the Esplanade, a GORGEOUS park/beach area with a live band playing (I will take pictures next time I go). We also explored the area around our hostel (downtown Cairns) before dinner.

Most of the time so far I feel the exact same being here as being somewhere else, but it’s the small random unfamiliar things that remind me. On my Dallas-Brisbane flight, when I handed my empty food tray back to the flight attendant and told him "thank you", his response was "cheers, love". That and the three whole seasons of the big bang theory on demand pretty much made that flight for me. After I got over the shock of all the accents (yes it was a shock even though I knew it was coming), there's the lingo. I've been on Australian soil for less than 24 hours, and already I've learned take-out is take-away, granola bars are muesli bars, the elevator is the lift (already knew that one at least), I and every single person around me are "mate", the response to "thank you" is "cheers", flip flops are thongs (I'm not sure what thongs are...), texts are SMS, and a drug store is, well, not like a 7 eleven. Another thing I notice is the birds and trees are all different from most I've seen before. Other than palm trees and plain grass, I don't recognize any plants, and the only birds I recognize are seagulls (although they're smaller here, more like pigeons). The birds are everywhere making strange bird calls I've never heard in my life. It's really lucky everyone on my trip is interested in ecology because it means I'm not the only one who stops to look for the bird responsible for the strange calls.

This is all I can write right now as I am completely exhausted, but I'll try to get some pictures to post next time.