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Published: July 19th 2008
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The view from our front door After getting settled into our new apartment (Cheyenne and I live together in a 3 bedroom, 3 bathroom fully furnished apaprtment, we're waiting to find out who our 3rd roomate will be) we ventured out to Surfer's Paradise, the nearby beach people flock to for great waves. Although it gets a little chilly at night, the sun keeps things really warm during the day. Apparently the ozone layer doesn't exist above Australia so the sun is even more powerful here. On Thursday one of the apartment owners, Michael, drove Cheyenne, Lindi, and I down to the far beach of Surfer's and then we did a little exploring. Afterwards, Cheyenne and I walked to Australia Fair, a shopping center that's something around 12 or 13 floors high. Some of the floors are higher up from the previous floor than others and so some levels have regular escalators and others have less steep escalators without stairs, so even a wheelchair could fit on it. We were fascinated by this, as you will see in some of the pictures. We asked other people walking for directions to ensure we were heading the right way and everyone said it was way too far to walk,
but we made it! After doing a little shopping we headed home, which people, again, told us was too far to walk. We made it home but figured we walked somewhere around 6 K from Surfer's to Aus Fair to Labrador. I will try and put a map up that shows this area. On the map, the red dot is where we live in Labrador, at Central and Brown streets, and the yellow dot in Southport is Australia Fair while the yellow dot in Surfer's Paradise is a rough estimate of where we started our walk. If you start at the dot in Surfer's, we walked to the dot in Southport next, and then ended at the dot in Labrador. After eating a late dinner in our apartment, we called it an early night. We were pretty tired from all of the walking!
The next day we decided to head to campus to see what it was like and to look for jobs. Again, Michael the apartment complex owner dropped us off and then we walked back. The campus is pretty from what we saw. We wanted to print off the resumes we had prepared to drop off at
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Our first time at Surfer's! This is facing North I believe jobs but the library requires you to set up an account and load money into it before you can print, something we are definitely not used to at Baker! The walk back from campus was about 30 minutes, so not bad at all. We figure we can shave some time off of that because we got a little turned around the first time. Our maps don't even really help us because we can't always determine our directions and then match them to the map. We are getting better though! That night, one of Lindi's roomates, a New Zealander, was celebrating his 23rd birthday by having a barbecue out at our pool. It was a lot of fun but really cold, we could even see our breath! The barbecue was a great way for us to meet some of the other people living in our apartment complex because so far the only people we had really met were the other Americans from Australearn. Also, most people can immediately tell we're American, sometimes even before we open our mouths, so we're going to try and do a better job of blending in, though we don't quite know how to do that yet.
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And this is the view to the South Today we slept in and then laid out at our pool. If we stayed out of the shade we were warm, but as soon as the sun moved and a building blocked our light, it was cold. There are hardly any clouds here and hardly any rain, even though it rained the first 2 days we were here. We were going to walk to another shoppin center nearby called Harbortown but it got dark earlier than we expected and didn't want to walk in the dark when we didn't know where we were going. Plus, when the sun goes down, its almost too cold to be outside without a jacket. Instead we decided to rent some movies from the Blockbuster next to our complex and make dinner. Tomorrow we are planning on getting up early and spending most of the day at the beach, hopefully its warm enough! Also, we are looking into planning a short trip for next week as we have orientation the morning of the 22nd but don't start class until the 28th. We would like to do something non-beachy like hiking, visiting National Parks, or going to the Outback, all activities we don't want to
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We thought the lifeguard's little Speedo was funny do once it starts heating up relatively soon. We are also going to try and book our spring break trip, tentatively set for new Zealand, and a trip to the Whitsunday Islands the week after classes but before finals. Then the week after finals, we head to Fiji for 6 days before going back to the US.
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I am thrilled with the comments you have added to the pictures. Very interesting! Love You