Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport!

G'day Mate!  :)

I haven't written on this blog in a long time! I told a few people they could keep up with me during my trip to Australia, so I'm going to try to best to keep this updated as a part of my trip journal!

Our 31 hours of traveling was very tiring.  Sam's wonderful family rescued us from LAX during our 9 hour layover.  We stopped at the beach, visited Santa Monica pier and checked out the area.  It was great to see California, meet Sam's family membesr and not be stuck at the airport.  Our 13 hour flight from LAX to Queensland was a rough one!  Allison and I got about an hour or 2 of sleep.  The turbulance was so bad.  It was the worst while we were flying above Hawaii, so we're wondering if it was related to the tsunami.  Every time I'd fall asleep, the turbulance would wake me up.  Thankfully, V Australia has little tv monitors in the back on every seat.  They had tv series and movie to watch, games to play and music to listen to.   I was very happy for that.  I still had a hard time sitting there for so long, but that at least kept me a little bit entertained.

We arrived in Queensland, Australia at 8am on Sunday morning.  We were picked up my a faculty member from Queensland University of Technology (QUT).  We took a quick tour of the school we would be teaching at, met some of the people we would be working with and then headed home with our homestay families.  Allison and I are staying with a great couple!  We are enjoying their company, getting to know them and learning about Australia.

Today we took a tour of the QUT campus.  We learned the expectations of our trip and teaching, some information about the school and some helpful and funny Australian slang words. :)

The jet lag has me pretty tired, but I'm hoping that will fade away soon.  I slept about 13 hours last night and am pretty exhausted already!  It's about 3:30 pm here - we have a 15 hour time difference here!

Once we get internet set up at our house - hopefully tonight, I will be able to update this often and add lots of pictures.  We are spending 7 hours at the Australia Zoo tomorrow, so I'm sure I will have plenty of pictures to share tomorrow.

Hope all is well with all of you!