I’m finally here!
The journey started from my house very early Thursday morning. Before the Philly to L.A. flight, the flight attendant said, “enjoy this long flight.” I was like “long, this is my warm-up act!” Brittany and I got into L.A. at noon, 10.5 hours before our flight. We booked it so early because we thought that Philadelphia in February would mean lots of delays. However, we had no delays, and so we found ourselves with lots of time to kill. We wanted to take a taxi and do something fun, but the Qantas check-in counter was closed when we got there so we couldn’t check our baggage. Since both of us had baggage that totaled close to 100 pounds, we found a table at the international terminal and just sat for about 3 hours. Finally we met up with everyone from IC a couple of hours before our flight left.
The 14 hour flight to Sydney was really not that bad. We flew on Qantas airline, which was awesome. Everyone had their own screen in front of their seats and you could pick from TV shows, movies, concerts, etc. that you could watch. The food was actually very good too. I managed to keep myself up until about 6 am east coast time (making it over 24 hours of being awake) by watching Mythbusters and playing solitaire and then I slept pretty well for 8 hours. I mean, as well as possible sitting up on an airplane. Once I woke up, there was only 3 hours left of the flight, and I entertained myself by watching a documentary on Ugg boots (pretty interesting actually).
Then we got into Sydney and had 2 hours to clear customs and get to our flight to Perth. Easier said then done. The customs guy saw that I was having trouble with my two very large suitcases, so he let me get out of line and get a cart. That separated me from the rest of the group, and when I finally got out, there was no one to be found. I looked around for a little while, and saw no one. By the time I got into the line to have my luggage re-checked, there was 15 minutes before my flight was going to leave. I got through the line and met up with Brittany only to find that we had to take a bus to our terminal. Sweating bullets, we get to the terminal and sprinted down the looooong hallway. Luckily, our flight was delayed by about 20 minutes, so we made it just as it started to board. However, since I cut it so close, my luggage didn’t make it to Perth with everyone else’s. But, I got it by the end of the night, so it was no big deal. This whole thing had me majorly stressing, but it turned out fine, so “no worries, mate.”
When we got to Perth (about 2 am Saturday east coast time), I explored the city a bit with Brittany. The CBD (Central Business District, i.e. downtown) is not that big, so we walked around most of it in an hour or so. It is quite clean and quite nice, though there’s not too many skyscrapers (see above pic). After that I ate dinner, got my luggage, unpacked, showered (finally), and went to bed. I made it until like 11:30, so I’m not feeling jet lagged at all today (yay!).
Today we went to Cottesloe Beach, about a 15 minute walk and then a 20 minute bus ride from our apartment. Holy cow, it was gorgeous. Turquoise water and everything. (There were shark nets, Mom, so don’t worry). I put a google picture of it above, I will have to take some pictures of my own and post them.
So far, I’m having a blast. The weather’s awesome, the IC kids are super cool, and there are palm trees outside my window. As my favorite Aussie, Crush from Finding Nemo says, “sweeeeeet.”
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