It’s Sunday afternoon with the index hovering around 100 and it’s thundering outside. I’ve been awake since seven in the morning which is ridiculous for me, but I have begun to rise with the sun and the screaming birds (not by choice)—giving me ample time to start this blog albeit 3 weeks late…
On January 11th, Eden and I left from Chicago’s O’Hare airport and flew to LAX in Cali. From here, we caught our flight to Melbourne, Australia—which was about a 15-hour flight. By far the longest I’ve ever flown, it honestly wasn’t that bad. The plane was pretty nice as each seat had an individual small-screen television implanted in the back of the seat in front of you. So for the majority of the time, I slept on and off and watched episodes of Modern Family and played some Pac Man on their game console. I rocked it.
From Melbourne, Australia, we boarded our final plane to Brisbane. That plane also had TV screens which were conveniently showing the Brisbane River inundating the city (Australia’s 3rd largest) with flood waters. Queensland (the state to which Brisbane belongs) had been receiving record non-stop rainfalls since Christmas time and the worst of the flooding peaked right at the time of our arrival. Essentially, the Wivenhoe Dam built to flood-proof the city was forced to release water sending waves and deadly torrents of water through Toowoomba and on downstream to Brisbane, taking bridges, restaurants, cars, boats, and anything else with it. There’s some good videos and pics from the flooding I’ll post. From the air, we were able to see a good deal of the flooding, which ended up wiping out a lot of the cool touristy parks, riverboats, and such you could do on the river. We went through part of the city a few days later when the flooding had receded and many of the low-lying areas in Brisbane were like a ghost town as traffic lights were off and the bars and businesses were shut down. The city was pretty devastated, but this section at least was recovering pretty well from what we could see.
Thankfully, we were picked up from the airport by Gabe (the lady whose house we are staying at) just after the road had been reopened and brought to our house in Everton Park. It’s a really sweet house about 20 minutes from Kelvin Grove State College, where I am currently doing my teaching. We were really lucky to get a place like this.
Above is a picture of the front of the house which is somewhat deceiving as it is a pretty spacious house with 8 bedrooms, dining hall, living room, kitchen, and backyard in-ground pool. Of course Eden had to be in this picture as you can see her creepily standing in the doorway!
This is Gabe who owns the place, which she shares and rents out to various international friends and travelers like ourselves. She is in Bali, Indonesia, for the next few months after spending the first few weeks here with us. We had an awesome time with her as she is a great person whom we learned a lot from, whether it be about the house, the city, Australia, food, or life in general.
On the 2nd day here, she took us up to Mount Glorious. Here, we had a BBQ at our friend Cara’s house where we had lamb and a few drinks. It’s also where I met my Australian possum mate.
We also went to a river and went jumping into a rock pool!
The rest of the first week Eden and I settled into the house, getting to know the area surrounding Everton Park and buying groceries. To get an idea of how expensive things are here, a double cheeseburger at McDonald’s is $4.25 whereas in the U.S. you could get that for $1.00! The alcohol also unfortunately also follows this ridiculous trend of things being on average 2-3 times as much. The McDonald’s here, however, are much nicer than back home for what that’s worth. I’ll talk more about the food, etc. later on in a different post I’m sure as there are a lot of different variances that what we’re used to—just ask Eden who seems to think everything is going to be and taste like America haha 
The following video is in direct response (albeit completely random and useless in my post) to the snail emoticon I found; Several of my friends will remember this video while others may get a laugh out of it as well (or not lol).
All for now, success for the first post! Hopefully there will be a 2nd post before my return flight!
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