Planes, Trains and Automobiles...

We were unbelievably happy to be leaving the hostel but if we knew what kind of day we had ahead of us, we probably wouldn't have been itching to leave so badly. We began the morning at 6 am to it pouring rain outside. We were instructed to return our keys, have breakfast and be outside and ready to get on the bus by 7:30. Well one small problem with that plan is I lost my key earlier in the week. So I had to go pay for a new key after eating the usual hostel breakfast. We brought our luggage out and dragged our suitcases through the huge puddles surrounding the hostel and out to the bus. After standing and getting soaked while waiting to load our suitcases onto the bus we were finally on our way to the airport. Once we arrived at the airport we were informed that the plane couldn't carry both our suitcases so we had to choose one to come on our plane and the other suitcase would be delivered around 8pm at the university later that night. Extremely thrilled at this fact, we tried to repack some items real quick and than checked in for our flight. We boarded the flight and luckily Matt, Jen and I were sitting next to each other so that was helpful for the 2 hour flight back to lovely Brisbane. We played a little game on the plane where we all listened to our Ipods and than would journal our favorite lyrics from each song. Sounds dumb, but pretty entertaining. When we got off the flight under the impression that we had transportation to the Gold Coast from Brisbane which was an hour away, we discovered we were dead wrong. Since we aren't living on campus, the program we were with hadn't booked us spots for transportation to the Gold Coast with the rest of the group we were with. So quickly after getting our 1 checked bag, we bought a train ticket to Gold Coast which left in 9 minutes from when we got to the counter. We hopped on the train and ready to head to our home for the next 4 months.

The view from the train

The Train ride where Matt looks frustrated...? I'm not really sure haha

After about an hour on the train we got off to realize we were still pretty far outside the city so we needed to now take a bus into where we were staying at Club Surfer's. We got help from a little 10 year old looking Australian boy who was dressed as if he was 30 years old. (You see here, where we are living while studying at Bond is in apartments about ten minutes away from campus, but since it is tourist season our apartments won't be ready to move into for another 2 weeks so for the mean time we are staying at a hotel called Club Surfer's that is in Surfer's Paradise.) Once we got on the bus smarty pants Matt realized he never looked up the address of our hotel so we didn't even know where to go once we were on the bus! Luckily after asking the kind man, with a questionable girl magazine in his hand, for help we were able to get off on the right bus stop for our hotel. Since we were so far away from Bond we decided to just stay in the first night and not travel all the way to the university. We got some Italian food from the Italian restaurant down the street, played some cards in our lovely small hotel room and called it a night. The next day after getting frustrated about our bus not coming, we just decided to take a $20 cab to the university, but once we got there, it was worth it. The campus is beautiful and pretty big for only 4000 students.

This is just the main part.

Once we arrived we grabbed some food, and went and did the usual orientation stuff to get ourselves ready for the semester at Bond. We than got our luggage that had luckily made its way to the university, bought these little bags that had t-shirts in them which were the whole reason we decided to buy the bag and put our names in a raffle for a free helicopter ride ( that helicopter ride is totally mine). After dropping our bags off at the hotel and taking a quick hour nap (thats quick for us considering the day before we took over a two hour nap) we headed to the huge shopping center where we thought we could buy groceries and things at the Target there. False. Target here is expensive, little trashy and does not sell food. But K-mart on the other hand is cheaper and nicer than Target. We had to hurry our shopping though because everything closed at like 6! After our shopping experiment I decided to walk to the beach two blocks away and just spend some time looking at the waves while the others hung out at the hotel. It was amazing just looking out at the ocean at night with no one around sitting in the super soft sand, jamming to music and staring at the stars. I have now been in Australia for a week exactly and I have felt like it's been a month. I've had to grow up real quick because if I don't take care of something, it won't get taken care of. I miss my family and friends heaps more than I thought I would but I know God brought me here for a reason so I plan on spending the next 14 weeks here figuring out what it is. G'day mates :)