So we land in Brissie on Friday Feb 29th and have to rent a car. We are able to swing a deal w/the guy because we are so poor and are with a voluntter organization. :) We have a very strict budget, so we really are poor! Brad is the driver first - but this really is team driving. not only are we in new city, but we are driving on the left side of the road! it's weeeeird! i have to remind him to stay on the left, as well as to stop at red lights all the time.
So we arrive safely at our first campus, Queensland University of Technology (QUT). We have to "set up campus". which means find internet access that we can use every day in bewtween making announcemnts - find all the biggest lecture halls, find out about parking, class times, check out our thursday meeting room, get posters approved to be hung, find out if we can get on the webtsite, or in the student paper...ect. that all goes great - we actully find out there's another campus about 10 mins away, so we actully go there too. It's home to the Nursing and Education degrees, which love the ISV program.
Then we head out of town to Surfers Paradise. A little road trip, took about 2 hours w/friday traffic. when we get there, i see it's all sky scrapers. (yuck) i guess they call is little miami. We get into Surfers and don't know where our hostle is, nor do we have the number. (Because brad lost to book w/those notes on it). I rememver the street started with a P... so i look at a map of surfers, and get us to that street, and we finally find it. It's a cool hostle, it was like we had our own little apartment. We both fell asleep after 2 beers. (we were so tired and still hung over from the party at randy's the night before). The next morning, we wake up and walk around, it was a sunny day, so we go to this roof top patio bar that's overlooking the water. We have lunch there and a few jugs of beer. We tried to have a beach day, but it was so windy! so we walked around alot, and went in and out of pubs. When we get back to the hostle, we find out there's this massive pubcrawl involving 5 differen hostles! so we buy our ticket. We take a nap - then it's pub crawl time! Everyone got glowsticks and a cowboy hat! I have photos, just haven't downloaded yet. I tink it involved 5 bars, but i didn't make it to the last one. I didn't drink too much, it was just getting so late! i had a great night of dancing and meeting poeple. it's funny to be apart of a 200 person pub crawl! I met a gilr Michelle that is about to move to san diego, she's from San Jose now. he boyfriend is Irish, but living here. The next morning we see Michelle and Irish boyfriend (forgot his name) downstairs checking out too... so we get breaky together. Then they tell us tehre's a pro surf competition at Coolendatta - about 45mins down the coast. So we all pile in his car and go! It was such a pretty day, and the surf comp. was awesome! I even ran into a guy that i met in Perth in 2001! small world huh! I didn't get to talk to him, b/c there was such a massive crowd, i didn't want to loose my peeps. I Tried to find him later, but I couldn't. (this reminds me I have to email him!) His name is Trent. He's the guy that got puked on at a bar we were at together... just in case anyone remembers that story.
So it's Sunday night - me and brad are driving back to brissie. And we have to find a place to sleep. This becomes quite a task. We try to negocitate with some hotels, but they only have sooms for $200 a night. Our budget is $80 a night! After much stress (on brad's part) We find a place in the city for $89 a night, with $9 parking. IT's walking distance from campus, so we suck it up and eat the extra amount and stay there.
We still have a lot of work to do! We have to staple all these packets together for campus. We have these little while sign up sheets, that we staple to bight colored paper. we just these when we run into class rooms and colete email address from student, to try to get them to our meeting. So we go to bed pretty late - and set our alarm for really early.
