In the land they call down unda

G'day mates!! I finally made it to Australia and so far am having the time of my life! I was really nervous at first when I arrived at the Minneapolis airport but very quickly I found a friend who also was going through the Australearn program and we kept each other company. The flight to Los Angelas seemed really long because I was OF COURSE sitting in front of the stinky restrooms... gross. Once I landed in LA I found the group of 38 students and we all hit it off together really well. I have met some really cool people and 7 of us are all from Minnesota! The plane ride to Sydney was so much fun and surprisingly went really fast! I sat next to my new friend Kelly and an old rich lady from Australia. She was pretty funny and she didnt get up once on the flight! I checked on her a few times to see if she was dead because she never moved haha. The plane I was on had 450 passengers and was a two story plane. It is the biggest plane in the entire world and each seat had a personal touch screen tv in the head rest on the back of the seat in front of us! I watched the secret life of bees, nights in rodanthe, four christmases, and high school musical 3. I only slept about 5 hours in two days so we were all pretty tired. After we flew to Sydney we had ANOTHER flight to Cairns.

Cairns is beautiful and we have so many amazing opportunities here. Today for example we went onto a huge boat and went out the the Great Barrier Reef!! We could scuba dive for 70 AUD and snorkeling was free. We had to fill out a form and I was honest and because I said that I had asthma and haven't used an inhaler in 3 years they did not let me... I was really bummed but I was snorkeling as deep as the other people were diving and I still had an amazing time. I rented a camera for 65 AUD I split that with 6 other people so it was 10 AUD a person and we took over 400 pictures. I will do my best to get those up once I get to my own room in Kieraview. The place I am staying now is a Hostel called Gilligans- check it out online its pretty cool. There is a night club connected which is a down fall because we could hear the blasting loud music until about 4 this morning, and we had to be up at 5am to get ready to go out to the reef. Tomorrow we are going to a national park and getting to hold some kangas and koalas! That is going to be so much fun :)

I am having a great time so far and I look forward to writing some more about my crazy adventures!

~nik