Back "Home" :)

---

After traveling up and down the East Coast for 8 days, I'm finally back home in Sydney! For the next 4 days I will be staying in my program's housing, which is right by Bondi Beach and our high-rise apartment is surrounded by tons of cool pubs and a HUGE mall with tons of good restuarants. For the four days after that, I will be back at the amazing hotel where I spent orientation and get to meet some of the other kids going to Macquarie Uni with me. After that, I finally get to move in to my apartment on campus - no word on my roommates yet!

Last night we got back into Sydney around 4pm, I spent a little bit of time online trying to catch up with the world, and then my friend Jason and I went and got some great Indian food and some delicious garlic naan 😊 Yum! After that we met up with our friend Becca and went to the movie theater to see The Dark Knight (the new Batman movie, mom) and got back home around 1am. By the way, the movie was amazing, and Australian born actor Heath Ledger plays the joker and was amazing - everyone thinks he will get a post-humous oscar for his role. Today I'm just going to lay around and catch up on some much needed rest and maybe check out the pool and gym facilities here. Definitely need to make a trip to Target to get some food for the week. Eating out is really starting to deplete my funds 😞 haha.

Anyways, our last day in Cairns was AWESOME! We had to be ready by 6:30am, which was a little rough, but by the end of the day, it was totally worth it. We drove about two hours and drove through tons of sugar cane and through the 2nd largest banana plantation in the world. We went through some bluffs and through a beautiful jungle and ended up at the Tully River. I had 6 of my friends in our raft and our guide's name was Ben and he was from New Zealand. I unfortunately don't have any pictures of the day! The rapids were awesome and the whole 4 or 5 hour trip was spent going through gorgeous jungle. After we went down our first rapid, we had to jump out into the freezing water and float down a little bit so we could practice floating if we got thrown out. It actually ended up being a good idea because the rest of the day the water didn't feel too cold. The 2nd rapid was a little rough and my friend Becca's helmet ended up giving me a nice little bump on my cheek. We got to have splash wars with the other rafts, and a couple of the guys tackled each other into the water... and one guide from another boat pulled me in after lunch. Another time our guide Ben, who I got to sit next to on the raft so I called myself the co-captain, anyways, he made me go sit on the front of the raft and hold on to the rope as we went down a smaller rapid. It was awesome and then the water threw me onto the floor of the raft. He called it "riding the bull," haha. We also got to see a python and a water dragon while rafting, which was pretty cool. Towards the end of the trip we got to climb up this HUGE rock and jump off. It didn't look that steep until you got to the top 😊 Overall, it was an amazing day and the sun was actually out for most of the time!

Once we got back into Cairns Friday night, we had to get the 6 girls in our hostel room to shower in an hour, which was a little tough. Then we went to a pub for dinner and a free drink to start off our pub crawl. After that we went to 2 other pubs and then ended back at our original pub we started at. I had an absolute BLAST and ended up staying out til 4am! Many of the bars here are open til 5 or 6am, and some of them even have 24 hour licenses! I was excited to see that they have Strongbow on tap here, which is a cider that I came to love in London. After the late night, we got up around 10 the next morning and walked around Cairns for a little bit before our flight.

Overall, it was an awesome, yet really tiring, trip... so I'm glad to be home and can't wait to move into my permanant housing next weekend! Internet here is really slow, but I'm working at putting up pictures, so check back soon!!

---