Kangaroos in the Top Paddock

Well it's Friday here and I still don't have my laptop so no pictures or anything cool yet. I went and visited where I'll be working for the next seven weeks, the Country Fire Authority (CFA), for the first time today. My sponsors, Mr. Stitz and Mr. Butler, weren't in but I got a tour around. It's a laid back office environment. I felt kinda overdressed in a polo and slacks even. Seems like it's going to be a fun place to work. Everyone was quite nice. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get a laptop and they only gave me a couple daily tram passes for next week so I won't be able to explore the city as much as I wanted to this weekend. Hopefully by next week they'll have all those things worked out for me.

Anyways, I'll get to some details about my flight in. So the flights to LA were quite boring and uneventful. Tried to stay awake so I'd sleep most of the LA to Sydney flight. When Putnam and I arrived in LA we met up with Dahlberg and grabbed some food. Five hours later we boarded the flight to Sydney, however there was a maintenance issue and we ended up sitting on the runway for about an hour and a half. As we were getting on the plane we noticed an unreasonable amount of hotties on board. Then we realized something strange; they were all wearing the same thing. Come to find out after talking to one of them, we were flying to Sydney with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers Cheerleaders. They were doing some show for troops stationed in Sydney. It was awesome. Haha sorry Steph.

We arrived in Sydney around 9am. We got past customs relatively quickly thanks to a fruit sniffing beagle. Australian customs is weird. So the plan was to check our luggage and roam the city for 24 hours until our flight the next morning. That didn't work out so well. Our flight was at 6:15am and the luggage place opened at 6am. So we'd have to pick it up that night and we decided we'd pick it up around 10:30pm right before it closed at 11:00pm and we'd sleep at the airport. More on this later.

We took the train into the city and decided to do the touristy stuff first. Sydney is a beautiful and clean city. We walked around the entire day and only saw two bums! In Worcester I can see two bums from my window most days. Anyways we went and saw the opera house and bridge that's so famous in Sydney and it's quite a site. We took a ferry to Manly beach and swam in the Pacific for the first time. The water is a lot colder than expected but it's still nice. Sorta like New England during the summer. Awesome waves though, lots of fun. Also Sydney is an extremely expensive city I spent way too much money there. So after Manly beach we walked through the botanical gardens next to the opera house. Awesome wildlife and plants there. We say all kinds of vegetation and wildlife including flying foxes, macaws, other birds, some lizards, a huge eel, and spiders as big as Ryan's ear.

After the gardens we set out to find Lord Nelson's Pub. It's apparently the oldest brewery in Australia and is world famous for its home brews. After a lot of walking, we found it and enjoyed some excellent beer, meat pies, and conversation about the finer parts of cricket. After a couple of beers we decided the crowd was a bit old for our tastes and tried to find another bar. This is when we noticed something weird. Australians are like responsible or something. The city was deserted by about 9:30pm. Bars were mostly empty and no one was partying on a week night. This trend has continued in Melbourne. People just don't go out unless it's a weekend.

So we wandered around a bit more and decided to just head back to the airport. Predictably, we got lost and ended up having to take a cab to the airport. We picked up our luggage as the airport was shutting down and settled in for the night. Unfortunately, we were told we had ten minutes to get out of the airport and that we couldn't sleep there. It would have cost us each about an additional 100$ to get back into the city and find a hostel at that time of night so we decided to sleep outside the airport. We met a couple of German guys our age as well who had been kicked out and we hung out with them for most of the night while napping on the ground, benches, and airport wheelchairs. Absolutely crazy. The next day we arrived in Melbourne without a hitch.

So I have to go but I'll post more details about Melbourne later. Hopefully I'll catch up sometime this weekend. Later guys.