Never Ending Blog Post.

Righto, there is a lot of typing to be done, and frankly it seems a bit overwhelming. Ha.

Thursday, Branch Day:

It was a good day. Same as usual. Not much out of the ordinary. There was a “keeper for the day” girl. She was from Mexico. She was very nice. It’s exciting when there is a keeper for the day because then they make us tasty snakes at smoko. We got little yummy sandwiches with our hot chocolate. Thank you keeper for the day. They made ham and pineapple sandwiches and chicken, mayo, and cheese sandwiches. They were both pretty tasty. I didn’t think people put pineapple in their sandwiches. It was good though. Since there was a Mexican girl there, Adam was attempting to speak spanish all day. Iris (She pronounced it like it started with an e.) the keeper girl taught him how to say monkey en espanol. I’ve always known it to be mono, but she says chongo for monkey. Adam has decided that he is going to name the little baby girl devil that they use for devil pats chongo. They used to have a devil named monkey. Hah. I think there is a pattern starting.

So yeah, branch day. That means that a trip into the bush for fresh branches in the crappy land cruiser was necessary. I actually really love going to get the branches. I like riding around in the cruiser. It’s a bit like riding with the top down I would assume, oh and no windshield.. So bugs hit you sometimes. Heh. So yeah, usually Adam goes to do the branches. Thursday Adam was showing the keeper for the day around, so Rob had to do it. Rob usually doesn’t do stuff. Everyone actually talks quite a bit of smack about him. Justine doesn’t like that, because she actually likes Rob. I would rather work with everyone else. Anyway, so I went with Rob and Aaron to get branches. I guess it’s leeeeeeeeech season or something, Adam always comes back with bloody spots on his pants from leeches getting him. I’ve never even thought about the leeches, but Thursday was different. Ha. We were dragging branches back to the car when Aaron was like, “Hey make sure to keep checking your legs for leeches mate.” So OF COURSE I’m going to be like, “Leeches? What? On me?!” and start frantically looking at my legs for a zillion leeches. I think I may be crazy. There actually was a leech on my leg though. So I flicked him off. They are gross. I don’t want to get my blood sucked. After that I kept obsessively checking my legs for leeches. Once we had all of the branches in the cruiser and the trailer behind the cruiser, Rob told Aaron and I to sit on top of the branches so they wouldn’t fall out. Of course, right before I climbed on, Rob was like, “Oh look!” and grabbed a leech off of one of the branches. They played with it for a few seconds and then tossed it. So now I’m thinking, “.....I’m going to get a billion leeches on me if I sit on all of those branches........ I will get sucked dry before we get back to the zoo.. goooooooood.” When we got back, I had two more leeches on my jacket. Aaron kept saying stuff from behind me on the trailer like, “Oh Caitlin you’ve got on your back!” ... Stupid Aaron. Then throughout the day Aaron and Rob would stop and like stare at my face or my neck or something, and when I asked them what the heck they were doing, they’d be like, “Leech.” Then have a laugh. Yeah yeah yeah. Stupid leeches. All I kept thinking of every time that someone said leech was in Princess and the Frog when he gets a leech on him and screams LEEEEECH! when he’s talking about his money situation with his parents or whatever. Good movie.

Amber I think sent me this video on facebook a while ago called The Creep or something. It’s a dance. I taught it to Adam because he’s a creep. He’s going to do the dance to Justine soon hopefully. Heheh.

I forgot to mention this, but on Wednesday or something, I drove an Australian car for the first time! Wheee! Hah. There was a ute that had to be moved like twenty feet... So Rob told me to move it. Usually they don’t let me drive anything because it’s all stick, but this ute was automatic, so I got to drive it. It was real freaking weird driving a car from the right side. Not really difficult though. Weird.

Oh also, I played with concrete. Hah. They are building more devil pens, so I went around smoothing out concrete that Rob put down in little crevices around the enclosure. Thrilling, I know.

So Thursday night is when mine and Justine’s flight to go to Melbourne was. Rob had said that he would give us a lift. Of course, Mel’s family was in town and they had stuff they had to do, so he gave us a lift like four hours before our flight.. We had to sit in the airport for foreverrrrr. The Launceston airport is seriously the tiniest airport I’ve ever been to. Probably. There is one security lane. One little thing to stick your carry on bags through to get x rayed. One little metal detector thing to walk through. All that jazz. Also, not one person checked my id with my ticket. I very well could have jumped someone outside the airport and stolen their ticket, and no one would have stopped me. There are three total gates I think. That’s it. Three. Hah. We couldn’t check in until an hour and a half before our flight, but luckily there was a cafe and store and stuff before the security check point. Of course, the only thing past the check point is a stair case down to the three gates. Hah. I tried a sausage roll. They have them everywhere. It wasn’t that great. The lady before me got a bag of fries (chips) with gravy. They ladled gravy into the bag. It was so strange. So we finally got onto the plane, and it took forever to leave because someone checked in their bags and then didn’t show up for the flight.. so they had to go in the plane and find his bag and get it off. Thank you mystery jerk. The flight is super short, so it wasn’t a big deal. We finally got there and Reid met us at the airport. Thank goodness because I would not have been able to find my way to his house. Reid is one of the interns that came with the big AustraLearn group. We met him in Cairns. So yeah he met us at the airport. We had to take a sixteen dollar bus into downtown Melbourne then catch a tram just to get to another tram then walk a few blocks down to his house. I was super sleepy. As soon as we got to his place, we all passed out. Hah. He is staying in a really nice house. It’s like a hotel house. There are like ten people living there, and they each have their own room that they have a key to and stuff. There is a big kitchen and living room. They have marked areas in the fridges and freezers, etc. It’s pretty sweet. It was a bit posher than my refurbished fishing cabin. Haha. Not as spacious though. So Justine (the shortest, smallest person of all three of us) dibsed the bed, which meant that Reid got the floor, and five foot eight ish little ol’ me got the teeny couch in his room. Did I fit on the couch? No. Was I comfortable? Not one bit. Did I get any sleep this weekend? Absolutely not. Thank you tiny couch.

Friday:

We woke up early ish because Reid had work, so he caught the tram into the city at like eight and we wanted to explore Melbourne until he got off at noon (Apparently Aussies think is weird that we say noon instead of midday. Noon is shorter. I don’t see why you would want to say midday). So Justine and I walked around the city, and decided to walk to the Royal Botanic Gardens. Amazing. You could spend all day there. It’s really gorgeous. Plus, it has an area called.. wait for it.. Fern Gully! Bahaha. Reid never saw Fern Gully so when we saw him later and were like, “They have Fern Gully there! So cool!” He was like, “...mhmm.. yeah cooool..” Pshh. Anyway, it would be a really cute date place. Have a cute little picnic there, and then walk around and explore the gardens. It’s a pretty freaking romantic place actually. Also, I decided that it would be a pretty great place to take engagement pictures. They had a cactus area there. I like cacti. They all look really silly. There was also a “volcano.” We saw a sign for a volcano, and we were like, “volcano! cool!” It was extremely anticlimactic. It was like a little teeny tiny hill with a pond in it. Boo. It was still kind of cool, but seriously.. why is it called a volcano. They clearly don’t realize how many people they disappoint with that title.

We passed a street called...... Batman Street! I was so excited! We mentioned it to Reid later and he ruined my hopes and dreams that it was a street fashioned after gotham city. Apparently there was some guy who had the last name of Batman and did something significant in Melbourne. I lost interest after he said, “No it’s not named after Batman.” I choose to believe it is.

There are lots of cool buildings. It’s weird. The city seemed like it was like half really old cool buildings along side modern businessy looking buildings. Kind of a bizarre mix. There was a place called the Australian Center for the Moving Image and they had a special Disney exhibit. I wanted to go look at it. Guess who didn’t care about what I wanted to do? Correct! Justine! She was just like, “I could care less about that. Let’s just keep walking.” Yes ma’am. Anything you say ma’am. If she isn’t careful.. I might just snap on her one of these days. I think I’m learning a great lesson in patience right now. I’m doing very well. Ha.

After the Gardens, we left on the opposite side that we went in on, and right outside was this big WWII memorial. It was a bit weird going to a WWII memorial for a country that isn’t mine. Hahah. I felt like I was in DC. We saw people standing on a balcony up at the top though, so we went inside and checked it out. We saw a sign for a crypt, and were like, “Yeah cool! Crypt!” It was basically just a basement with a flag. It had a sign saying that there were no dead people there though. Not really sure how it qualifies as a crypt then.. But thank you for tricking me. The view from the balcony was really quite amazing. You could see the river that goes through the city and all the big skyscrapers and the gardens. It was beautiful.

Reid got off work just as we left the shrine place. He called Justine and she was like, “Yeah well you can come meet us here then.” Uhhhh. We were on the COMPLETE opposite side of the city, and Reid was waaaay closer to where we were headed anyway. So she made him come all the way to us, just to go right back the way he came. Efficient, yeah? We stopped at a grocery store and bought stuff from the deli to make sandwiches and took the sandwich stuff to the beach and had a little pseudo picnic. It was actually really nice and relaxing. Of course, it wasn’t sunny.. sooo it wasn’t really a nice beach day. That’s okay though. I took a little nap on the beach and enjoyed being near the ocean and being out of my little zoo quarantine area. When we were walking to the beach from the tram, a drunk Aussie followed us and started talking to us. He was all, “What country are you guys from? Where are you from? What’s your nationality?” “We’re Americans.” “What the *bleep* are you doing here? *Bleep* *bleep* *bleep* Go home. Don’t you have *bleeping* beaches there!” “We are just here working man.” “Fine fine, enjoy our beaches and stuff, but don’t ever forget where the airport is!” Righto.. thanks for making us feel really welcome dood. Hah. It was actually really funny. No one has had that attitude towards us. It seems like a lot of people in Melbourne were really proud and hated every other state/country. When anyone there found out that Justine and I were living in Tassie, they very vehemently told us how awful Tassie is and how unfortunate our lives are that we are stuck there and that we should obviously rethink our lives and come to Melbourne instead. Haha. I actually really love Tassie. It’s beautiful here. It may be the “hick” state, but it’s charming and the people are a heck of a lot nicer than in Melbourne. Anyway, at the beach there was a seagull (Yes, I do understand how disjointed all of my thoughts are.) hanging out near me that was missing a foot. Poor guy. There was another seagull that chased every other seagull within ten feet of us away. Jealous little guy. It was pretty entertaining. My little AustraLearn backpack that they gave me before I came here ripped. It was just the little pocket in the front that ripped, but that was where I had put all my jewelry that I was wearing... Fortunately I didn’t lose all of it.. I only lost my pearl earrings that my uncle gave me for Christmas a while ago.. I freaking loved those earrings. I was soooooo sad when I saw the hole. I think one of the seagulls stole them. Sneaky buggers.

After that, we went back to Reid’s place, changed, and went to dinner. We went to this little Italian restaurant that was surprisingly similar to a lot of the little restaurants my family and I had gone to in Italy. We had a super cute waiter. His name is James. He came over to take orders and realized we were American, and he got so excited. Hahah. So he stayed and talked some more. By talked some more, I mean he talked mostly to me. After that, Justine and Reid were like, “Geez, get his number already will ya.” Of course, they sounded a bit sarcastic and more like they were trying to tell me that I’m a shameless flirt and they were disgusted or something. I ignored all sarcasm and disgustedness and responded with, “Well I wouldn’t mind having his number. He’s rather attractive” then I commenced drinking my water. Every time James came to check on us (me) they would make snarky comments after he left. Silly people. Other than that, we actually had a really good time at dinner. We all chatted and joked and had fun, surprisingly enough. Speaking of attractive boys, I’ve seen like a zillion since we’ve been in Australia. Before we went into the Italian restaurant, Justine had mentioned how she had not seen ONE attractive boy. Clearly she is crazy. There are so many good looking guys here. Not really in Tassie, since I haven’t really seen many boys since all I really see are animals.. Haha. So at dinner when she actually agreed with me that James was attractive, I wanted to be like, “Yeah sucka, the only boy you’ve thought was attractive wants me! Take that Wisconsin girl!” Justine has complained about how whenever people ask where we are from, they could not care less about Wisconsin, and I totally show her up by saying California. You’re right, I purposely fixed it so that I would be born in Southern California just so that I could tell people that and show up all you small town country hicks. I’m a conniving genius, really. Okay, I sound really mean when I talk about her in my posts. I apologize. She is nice and we get along sometimes. We just aren’t pals. I always feel awkward when I say things like, “Yeah I wish I had more friends and stuff around me” and she says, “Oh so I’m not enough?” She’s joking, but it’s still kind of awkward cause in my head I’m like, “Well.. yeah.... I would rather have someone who wants to be my friend living with me.. but you’re a nice girl I’m sure.” We did get along better this weekend compared to any other time. Thank goodness, because I would’ve been miserable if I was stuck in a different city without all of my distractions like a computer and ipod and books and stuff on top of having no one to talk to or do things with. We were all talking about snow at one point because they are both from places that get snow frequently, unlike southern California me. So when I had said that I didn’t think that I would like to permanently live somewhere where it snowed constantly, they thought I was a crazy person. I gave them about a zillion reasons why snow is unpleasant to live in. I do like snow sometimes. It’s fun to go sledding and it’s very pretty, but it’s cold and icy and you slip and fall in it and you have to put a ton of layers on just to take them off once you get inside a building and it makes your extremities go numb, etc. They still thought that I was crazy for not being 100% in love with living in the snow. They also started talking about how “hoity toity” southern Californians are, they were talking about it like I was not from southern California. I’ve never thought of myself as “hoity toity”.. Whatevs.

We were looking at a newspaper that someone left on the tram, and there was an article about a new game that someone came out with. It is a kissing game. It apparently uses magnets that people put in their mouths and the other person uses their tongue to bowl or something. I have no idea. It sounds extremely bizarre, and whoever came up with it is obviously a bit pathetic.

Reid has an Irish housemate. I talked to him for a bit. It was hard to understand him. Also, he dropped the f bomb like every other word. Haha. I still have a hard time understanding the Australian accent sometimes, throwing in another accent wasn’t helpful. He seems nice I guess. He was talking about how he wanted to be a personal trainer.. he’s skinnier than like a scarecrow. He then said that he decided to go in a different direction because that didn’t work out. Of course it didn’t. Ha. He watched National Treasure with us. It was on tv the night that we missed our flight.

Saturday:

So, we woke up early to go into the city and check out the Queen Victoria’s Market. I think it’s every Saturday and on like Tuesday nights or something. They sell lots of fruit and veggies and spices and nuts and meat and cheese and other tasty things. There was a little shop that was selling mini pancakes.. They looked SO good. No one else wanted them, so I didn’t get to stop and eat some.. I cried a little inside. There was also heaps of stalls selling jewelry and clothes and souvenir ish type things. Tons of cool stuff. I wanted to stop and look at a lot of the things, but no one else wanted to. It was a bit frustrating wanting to enjoy everything, but not really being able to do so to the extent that I wanted to. Oh well. It was still cool to meander about the place. After, we were going to head back to Reid’s because Justine was tired of carrying her purse because she just hates purses. (She’s a total tomboy. She doesn’t like carrying purses. She doesn’t like shopping. She doesn’t care about her hair at all. She doesn’t care about wearing cute outfits. Etc. She was talking about how a night on the town involves her throwing on a sweatshirt and throwing her hair up in a messy bun. I like getting cute. I purposely dress up and do my hair whenever I get a chance here because I don’t get that many chances. She just throws on whatever t shirt is closest to her. Not that I’m judging her for doing so, because I do that occasionally. I’m just whinging about how different we are and how I wish we weren’t so different.) Oh oh and before we went through the market, Justine had to have a coffee because she drinks coffee all the time. So we walked around a bit looking for a suitable place for her, and she did not approve of like any of the places and I was freaking hungry and wanted breakfast so every time she didn’t approve of a place, we had to leave and go look for somewhere else. After a while, I pointed another cafe out and she goes, “Uhm I really don’t like having all this pressure on me. I don’t NEED a coffee. Let’s just go to the freaking market, okay.” You just made us go to like seven different places and rejected all of them in the search for the perfect coffee, and then you say that you don’t appreciate us pointing out other places because we’re being nice and trying to get you your dang coffee and turn everything on us. Thank you. She makes it difficult to be nice to her sometimes. I’m doing my best though. Anyway, so we were heading back to the tram to go back to Reid’s place when Justine says, “Geez, can’t we walk or something. I actually LIKE walking.” So we went on a thirty ish minute or more walk back to Reid’s house because we needed to assuage the beast, I mean Justine. Finally, we got there and she wanted to sit down and relax for a bit. I just wanted to go to the zoo. So after a while, we finally headed to the tram for the zoo. Huzzah! It was a pretty big zoo actually. We stopped and got sandwich stuff to take with us to the zoo. We spent like four hours walking around and looking at all the animals. I loved seeing stuff that we have at our zoo too, and being like yeaaaaaah I get to go in the enclosure with those animals. There was a lot of stuff to see. They had lions and tigers and bears. Oh my! Also, snow leopards, pumas, echidnas, red kangaroos, western gray kangaroos, pademelons, heaps of birds, PLATYPUS, seals, penguins, fishes, tons of monkeys (gorillas, mandrills, baboons, tamarins, lemurs, gibbons, spider monkeys, black capped capuchins, orangutans (Fun fact: some people call gingers, rangas as in orangutans. Hehe), etc.), hairy nosed wombats (the wombat we have at our zoo is just a common wombat), elephants (there were two little baby elephants!), turtles, tortoises, bongos, and more. They had a sweet reptile house. They had Gila Monsters! Cool! I love Gila Monsters. I was talking to Adam about the Melbourne Zoo today, and he said that they used to have Komodo Dragons there. I was so sad that they didn’t have them anymore.. They also had tree kangaroos and a red panda and a macaw and sting rays and stuff. It was a pretty great zoo. I enjoyed myself very much :D

From spending all this time out in the sun, and wearing my toms.. I got a beautiful little awkward toms tan line. It looks funny..

On one of our tram rides, there was a poster for an Italian festival that they were having that coming Sunday. It sounded super fun. They were attempting to break the world record for largest pizza! Since we missed our flight that night, we were like, “Cool we can go to the Italian Festival and hit up the aquarium!” But the airport nazis said we had to go on the next available flight. That was fine though. So yeah, flight missing. Here’s the story. To get to the airport, we had to take two trams and a sixteen dollar twenty minute bus ride. Of course, Reid had told us that it would take about thirty minutes total to get to the airport so if we left at six for our 7:50 flight, we would be totally fine. I wanted to leave earlier because I didn’t want to take any chances. They were watching Scrubs though, and did not want to leave. In fact, when six came around I had to be like, “Uhmm... shouldn’t we be leaving..” I need to start being more forceful or something. I’m way to unconfrontational. So when we finally left, we had to wait for the trams and then pay for the bus ticket and catch the bus.. It took us like an hour to get there. When we tried checking in, the little computers wouldn’t let us. When I talked to the lady at the desk she said, “Oh you’re ten minutes past the time when we close the flight. Sorry. There is absolutely nothing we can do except make you pay sixty dollars each to wake up at five in the morning tomorrow and catch a different flight that you should leave a bit earlier for this time. Mmkay? Your life sucks. Bye!” ...Yeah she didn’t really say the last bit, but she might as well have. It wasn’t a horrible situation obviously, but we had to pay for another bus ride and take two more trams to get back to Reid’s house. Justine was pissed at Reid. It isn’t totally his fault, the trams took longer than he thought they would, but she blamed him 100% for all of it. So he felt bad. Oh, and it was raining by this time. We bought ice cream and food and watched National Treasure with Irish kid. I went to bed early. Justine and Reid stayed up and snuggled or something. She was putting her leg over him during the movie and stuff. She has a “fella” back at home. Whatever.

Sunday:

Woke up early. Reid paid for a taxi to the bus place. Paid more money for another bus. Got to the airport. Made our flight. Once again, some punk checked a bag in and didn’t show up for his flight, so we all had to wait around while they looked for his bag. Finally got back to Tassie. Had to take an extremely expensive taxi back to the zoo because Rob wouldn’t come get us. The taxi driver was really nice. He was telling us about all his traveling that he has done. He has been to every country in Europe except for one, all countries in Asia except for two, multiple places in Africa, all over America, and still has more plans for traveling. How awesome is that?? I want to go everywhere like that. He had all these cool stories about safaris that he has been on and stuff.

When I got home, the first thing I did was take a nice really long shower. It was fantastic. I got ready for church and got a ride form Jess and her brother Daniel. They are super nice. I sat with their family during sacrament, and felt a bit weird because I didn’t know if they cared that I was sitting with them or not, but I didn’t really know where else to sit because we showed up late so I just followed them into their row.. Hah. The talks were really awesome. Sunday school was way good. The teacher is really cool. She remembered my name. Lots of people did actually. I remembered no one’s names except Jess. Haha. Anyway, the teacher was chatting with me afterwards for a bit and she’s really cool. I went to Relief Society by myself because Jess had to leave early. A ton of people stopped me and asked me how I was doing and introducing themselves and stuff. It was awesome. So it’s really weird because no one in Relief Society knows how to play the piano! I’m used to being in these wards that have heaps of people who are insanely musical. The first Sunday that I was in Relief Society, they asked me if I could play the piano. Hah. So yeah, we sing all the songs in Relief Society without the piano. Totally weird. They announce birthdays and stuff, so this nice lady who talked to me before Relief Society got up and she had just been reading something and was all teary eyed. She apologized and was like, “Sorry, I was just reading a note. My son is on his mission in Christchurch, New Zealand and I’m just so grateful that he is okay and that all the missionaries there are totally fine.. etc” That’s so scary that her son was there! I’m so glad that none of the missionaries were hurt in the earthquake. The death toll from that seems to keep rising. Erin said that it’s at like 150 now.

So after Relief Society, I had to find Jess’ dad because he was giving me a ride home. I had no idea where to find him. I stood awkwardly in the lobby. Thankfully people kept coming up to me and chatting. Hah. This nice boy that may be around my age was chatting with me. He’s nice, as well as a few inches shorter than me. Haha. Everyone is so friendly in this ward. I love it! The boy’s name is Danny. Some girl came over to talk to him, and so she was talking to me because she had just gotten back from America recently. She was in Orlando working at DisneyWorld. Cool! She didn’t seem like she wanted to talk to me though.. Hah. I kept asking questions about it, and she would answer a little snobbily.. Oh welllll. So finally I found Jess’ dad and we left. He asked me lots of questions and we talked lots about differences between Australia and America. He served his mission in Salt Lake and was telling me stories about getting used to living there. Haha. It was so fun. Two of Jess’ brothers were with us. Luke and Joseph, I think. Hah. They were nice and chatty. Joseph is going to JAPAN with his school soon. What the heck? Why did Hart never take us to cool places like Japan for a school trip! Curse you Hart High!

Yeah this is insanely long, I don’t think there is anything else significant or funny or anything that happened. I’m exhausted.. and done with typing this post. Goodbye.