Australia - the first half week

We are here! And having lots of fun, though missing all of our friends… I’m going to completely overdo it with the pictures, but I guess too many are better than too little. The plane trips were great. We flew on three different planes, from Pittsburg to Los Angeles, from there to Brisbane, Australia, and from there to Townsville. We got some sleep on the 2nd plane- the one that we were on for 13 ½ hours- so we weren’t completely exhausted by the time we got there. :) We’re finally getting used to the time zone difference! We quickly realized that we weren’t in Kansas anymore.

And here I’m going to make a list of the things that are different:
1. The light switches turn on if you flip them down and off if you flip them up.
2. You have to turn an outlet on before you use it by flipping a switch down above it, and if you don’t turn it down all the way it looks like the toaster doesn’t work. Yes, I am speaking from experience.
3. The streetlights are beside the road instead of above it.
4. Speaking of roads, they drive on the left side here instead of the right. Very confusing, but Dad is doing very well. We haven’t died yet!
5. The ocean doesn’t smell like the ocean and is extremely windy.
6. The island right off the shore blocks the larger waves and so you can find whole shells here that you can’t find at our old beach place!!!
7. The trees here are all different, and I’m missing the forests from home.
8. The birds and birdcalls are also very different and interesting. The calls sound almost metallic.
9. We’ve also heard lots of the Australian accent, and people look at us weird when they hear us talk because of our American accent. I haven’t got it yet, but I will!
10. They use older English spelling, like Centre, colour, labour, etc. They also call ketchup tomato sauce.

We would have emailed everyone immediately, but our condo does not have internet access. We didn’t think about that when we rented it. So we’ve been using the free internet at McDonald’s of all places. Their ice cream is very good, by the way. I’m planning to post every Monday since our access is limited. We also don’t have a car anymore; We only had it until Today so that we could get enough groceries (or some at least) to last a while and explore without having to walk everywhere and we’re going to get it back for weekends. That’s another thing: everything is more expensive, and mostly unrecognizable brands.

Mom and I have made two resolutions:
1. Next time, we’ll make sure we have internet access so we can contact our friends.
2. We’ll also pack more toiletries and fewer clothes.

So we’ve gone to the beach everyday-Evan is going nuts over the crabs. We’ve also walked to the Strand, a popular beach with a swimming enclosure, a water park, and lots of playing equipment. It’s very windy, which I absolutely love, but Mom isn’t too thrilled about. We can forget about having our hair look nice. It’s not going to happen. :) There are some very cool trees here that look like they belong in a tropical rainforest. As you’ll see, Dad took several pictures of us with them. Dad has to blog for me, so I’m just going to have him put the pictures on in a long strip with no captions this time. The pictures of the island are of Magnetic Island which we hope to go out to someday. We’ve already gone up Castle Hill, and the high up pictures are from there. And today we went to the Aquarium, and saw a lot of interesting fish, including a sawfish. We got to see them feed the fish and the sharks, and learned several cool things about them like the fact that sharks don’t just go around eating anything. They wait for distress signals, which are sent out from sick or dying fish. We also got to see how sawfish eat- they spear their food on their ‘saw teeth,’ then swim down to the bottom and suck it up into their tiny mouths. Interesting, interesting. Post lots of comments and tell us how you guys are!
Emily