Surfer's Paradise
Surfer's Paradise is a seaside tourist attraction where people go to lay on the beach, swim and play in the sand. The day was perfect, not too hot, and not too cold and not a cloud in the sky.
Surfer's Paradise is located to the South of Brisbane, we travelled 20 - 30 minutes by bus to South Bank and then by train for an hour to Nerang and then again by bus for about 20 minutes to get to Surfer's Paradise.
On the train we met a lady who was born in Brisbane and has lived there all her life. She pointed out a few of the sights that we passed by while on the train, like the old prison and talked about nice places to go and see. She was also happy to answer any questions we had about Brisbane or Australia in general.
All in all the ride wasn't too bad getting there, I think going back was worse because it was dark and there was nothing to see and everyone (including me) was tired from walking around all day. And I mean all day, we only stopped to sit for lunch.
The beach was pretty empty, it was only packed around the designated swimming areas. Every once in a while you'll see a helicopter flying just over the coast, that's the shark watching helicopter. :)
About 10 of us went to the beach, half went to the beach and the other half of us went shopping because we didn't want to just lay around the beach all day.
This is me and Chantal on the beach.
We saw this bus called Aquaduck, they do amphibious bus tours around the area, the water part I believe takes place on the canal that's near the ocean. We didn't get a chance to go on the tours but maybe we will the next time we go.
There were also lots of neat touristy type shops that sell all sorts of souvenirs. Most things that they sell are expensive but if you look carefully you can find some good deals. Chantal got 5 t-shirts and a koala plushie, all for $24.
These are just a few of the photos that I took today, if you want to see more of them use the link on the right.
Touring the Neighbouhood
I went for a walk this afternoon around the neighborhood to see what's around and to see it I could find the bakery that's supposedly nearby. Unfortunately it started to rain so I never got to the bakery but I did notice a few interesting things about the houses around here.
Firstly almost all the houses are 1 floor high, so no upstairs, and most have fences around their front yards but they're little ones, only about 1.5 to 2ft high. The weirdest thing that I noticed was the driveways. Some people have cement driveways or interlocking bricks but what I mostly saw was this configuration:
2 columns of asphalt with a strip of grass in the centre, interesting.
Living at ISV (International Student Villas)
I moved into the new place (
International Student Villas) today and it's fantastic, I really think I'll like living here. There are 7 townhouses each with 4 rooms, a kitchen (fully equiped w/cutlery and pots and pans), livingroom and backyard; and each room has an ensuite. Each house is also equiped with a washer and dryer in the garage, no coin laundry for me! Cleaners come to clean the common area bi-weekly (or fortnightly as they say here).
There are lots of organized trips and there are 2 other girls here from Canada. One, Kelly from Cornwall and the other Chantal with who I sat with on the plane here; she's from Niagara Falls.
I moved in around 11:00am and around 2:00pm the landlord James had a bbq for everyone in the complex, there are about 28 people living here, so a pretty small group, a few of which don't really participate in any of the group activities here, they apparently like to keep to themselves. After the bbq we all sat and talked for a while, and we all seem to get along just fine. Once it started getting dark we watched movies (Euro Trip and Van Wilder both pretty funny) via projector in the livingroom of one of the townhouses. Once summer comes around October or so and it's warmer we'll start watching movies on the wall outside in the garage instead.
I got to try vegemite today! It's not as bad as people say, I had it on some bread. To me it tastes like soysauce but much more salty, some people really hate it. Troy (one of the guys living here) says it tastes really good on mashed potatoes, so I'll probably give that a try at least once.
I have 3 other flatmates in my house Jan (pronounced Yahn) from Germany, Owen from England and Elena from Spain, all great people.
Kelly, Chantal and I are going out shopping tomorrow as well as to the school, we found a deal at the butchers for a bunch of meat we can get for $80, that feeds a family of 8, we're going to split the cost and each take a bunch and freeze it that way we can save money since food is a tad more expensive here than back home (bread is twice as much).
Shopping
I did a bit of shopping today to get some essentials that I need for before school starts and it's interesting to see what's different and what's the same here. Firstly bus fare is charged based on where you're going, not a flat rate.
The products are named differently here too, for example, Kelloggs Rice Bubbles? Complete with Snap, Crackle and Pop on the front. Or how about Hungry Jacks, instead of Burger King, I think Canada is the only place that calls it Burger King, apparently it's Hungry Jack's in the States too. And while we're on the topic of fast food restaurants the McValue meals here are sold differently too. Basically, the way it works is that all McValue meals have 3 standard prices for small, medium and large, I think that's the basis for the size of fries and drink you get. And for some of the meals you add a few cents to it, like for nuggets you add $0.50AU. They also have this other burger up there called the McOz I think it was, it looks like it has the standard burger, lettuce, tomato, mustard and mayo but from looking at the photo it looks like they also put a slice of beet in there as well.
I think generally speaking the cost of living is higher here, a regular loaf of bread is around $2.00AU, and for those of you who are reading this and have no idea how much bread is back home (tsk tsk!), it's around $1.19CA for the cheap stuff (Value brand not Wonderbread). There are a lot of palm trees around here too (see photo above). I find it kind of funny how most people seem to be walking around with full on scarves, long coats, and hats, some even with boots on for who knows what reason since it never snows here.
In res...
Well I made it to res and met one of my new "flatmates" Mikkita, she's from Zimbabwe and is really nice, she even bought us dinner (pizza from Pizza Hut). Tomorrow she's going to show me how to get to Garden City where I will be buying all my groceries 'n stuff, it's about a 5 minute bus ride from here.
My residence is called Kinaba and it's located on top of a hill across the street from campus. My room is pretty plain looking, in fact, it looks a bit more like a cell block from the outside than a residence, probably due to the cement block style architecture the "fancy" metal bars that are on the windows. I haven't seen them anywhere else but here, everywhere else looks normal even across the road where campus is.
Asides from that, campus is in the middle of a bush, there are lots of walkways to go around to and lots of greenery everywhere. It sounds quite different here too because of all the birds, there's this one bird that sounds exactly like a person whistling.
In for the long haul
I'm currently writing this entry while in the air, we're flying in a Boeing 747-400 Pacific class (in other words economy), first class sits upstairs which is also where the captain sits. This is definitely a much larger plane than the Air Canada plane.
The plane was delayed by about an hour due to some catering issue, but we soon got underway, this flight was 11:45 long. Upon getting on board each seat had a pillow, blanket and complimentary headphones (at this rate I could start a store or something!). Shortly after we took off we had dinner... again. I think the majority of us just wanted to sleep at this point but we had a little bit to eat anyway since it would have been about 6:00pm in New Zealand and thus starts the transision period from eastern time to theirs. We had a choice of beef or canelloni, I went for the canelloni, it came stuffed with spinach and beef. Our choice of drinks on this flight included the standard juice, water, tomato juice (tomaahtoe juice) etc. but also included New Zealand red and white wine at no extra cost.
Asides from that most of us slept, it's been a pretty uneventful flight so far. It's about 2:57 New Zealand time and most of the passengers are up now, we should be getting breakfast at somepoint on the flight, I think there's about 2 hours or so left to go, it'll be nice to be on land again.
LAX Los Angeles
I'm currently in the Los Angeles airport Terminal 2. The plane got delayed by about an hour but we made up the time on route due to "favourable winds". The flight itself was pretty good the stewardesses were very nice and the food was pretty good. We had a choice between chicken caccitore and penne with cheese, I had the penne. It was ok, but a little heavy on the oregano.
We got complimentary headphones with the adapter which was suprising since the last time I had to purchase the headphones and adapter, that was on Canada 3000. The only thing I didn't really enjoy was the noise on the flight, was a bit louder than I had remembered it to be since the last time I was in an airplane. I was lucky to get a window seat 23F and thus got to take a few very nice pictures as you can see. I think I've been a bit spoiled though looking all those satellite images off Google Earth, so the view doesn't impress me as much anymore. Although the one thing that I really do enjoy seeing everytime I fly is the clouds from the top, it looks like a whole different world up there.
When we started landing you could see all the mountains in the distance, I tried to take a picture but I wasn't too sure how well it would show up.
I made a girl named Vanessa who is also going to Griffith along with about 16 other students; we got to sit together on the plane. She has a major in biology and a minor in history and is going to school to become a teacher like all the other students with the exception of me.
YYZ Toronto
Well I'm currently sitting here at departure termainal 2 N, it's 4:00pm and I can't board the plane for another hour and a half. I went through customs pretty quickly and hauled all my luggage off and it's all sent away to wherever it is luggage goes after it clears customs.
For those of you who don't already know, I actually got a really nice e-mail this morning from Griffith letting me know that a space opened up in residence so I now have a place to live and I don't have to go searching for one when I get there which is good. The rent is only going to be paid for the first 4 months that I'm there and then after that I can find someplace else to live which should be good.
Surfer's Paradise is located to the South of Brisbane, we travelled 20 - 30 minutes by bus to South Bank and then by train for an hour to Nerang and then again by bus for about 20 minutes to get to Surfer's Paradise.
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