I Guess We Just Took the Scenic Route...

It has been so much fun exploring my new surroundings!  My apartment is in a small complex with walkways throughout surrounded by beautiful tropical plants and a pool conveniently located directly outside my door!  Next door we have an Aldi, a Blockbuster, and some cool local food places.  The bus stop is just a couple blocks away.  Tomorrow, we're all heading to the Uni for orientation (yes, I AM going to classes while I'm here...), so I'm excited to see my new home campus!

In the past couple days, I've been able to check out the cool shopping, beaches, and attractions the Gold Coast has to offer.  They obviously have mostly Australian stores here, but I was surprised to see KMart, Burger King (under the alias of Hungry Jack's), and Target!  I breathed a big American sigh of relief on my first day out in Surfers Paradise when I was starving because I didn't have any food in my apartment yet and slightly overwhelmed by all the new surroundings, and there was a Subway!  It was like a beacon of light and familiarity!  (Unfortunately, $5 footlongs don't exist here... more like $8 footlongs) 

Today a bunch of us went to the Wet 'n' Wild water park, which was, once we got there, a really cool place.  Overall, it was a fun day, except for the part where it took us over two hours to even get to the park!  Our landlord got us all semester passes and told us where to go on the busses... then the next bus driver told us a different route... then the next passenger told us another route... and so on.  About two hours later, we arrived at the theme park down the road and had to walk through a swamp to get to the water park... ha.

It's also been kind of hard adjusting to the metric and currency differences compared to the states.  Everything is more expensive here, but I always put myself at ease knowing that I'm actually spending less in American dollars because the currency exchange is favorable!  Additionally, the nutrition labels' calories are in kJ, the pounds are in kilograms, and the degrees are in Celsius.  My friend Chris had a really embarrassing (and amusing to female onlookers) experience the other day when he was working out in our gym and using the bench press... he put his normal bench press weight onto the bars and laid down to start benching it.  However, the weights were in kg instead of pounds, so his "20 lbs." was actually 20 kg... equal to about 44 lbs.!  He obviously couldn't lift it back up to the standing position so he had to dump them off onto the ground which abruptly shifted the equilibrium to the other side and the other side's weights clattered to the ground as well... hahahaha.

Lastly, if you want to send any goodies my way... (hint: they don't have Twizzler Nibs here :-P) here is my address :-)

Lydia Beck

Metro on Central

24c/7 Brown St.

Labrador, QLD 4215

Australia