Adelaide and the start of Cairns

Inspiration... a magic word and something I have been lacking lately. When you’ve been studying English for 5 hours a day taking many tests (reading, writing, listening and talking) you are kind of done with it when you get home. At least I am and I think most of my class mates are (although our Asian friends put in a lot of after hours work to reach the same level as the rest of the class). Anyway… life has been very good since I arrived in Oz. My last day in Sydney was spent with Lisette walking the Harbour Bridge (after I finally got my sim card activated at the Telstra shop where I was helped by a really nice guy with a serious case of Gilles de la Tourette syndrome (touching his head while muttering six, six, six, nine, six etc all the time), taking lots of pictures of the Sydney skyline from the other side of the harbour and finishing our walk with a tour through Chinatown where they were filming some sort of Chinese movie. A lot of walking which had to be rewarded of course, so we bought some supplies to make PANCAKES :D The whole kitchen smelled like our lovely pancakes and we made many people jealous. Since we baked so many of them we had them for breakfast as well the next morning. Sometimes these little things can make life wonderful!
Since I was leaving by train in the afternoon I had to check out at 10 and basically wait with all my stuff in the reception area of the hostel until it was time to leave.  Lisette was so kind to keep me company and at one o’clock I checked in my luggage at the central station after which I had to wait for another 2 hours before we were supposed to leave. That turned into three because the train arrived late and didn’t get permission to leave until 4pm, which meant we missed out on the beautiful sights of the Blue Mountains (by the time we got there it was dark and snowing). A well… at least we were dry and warm. The seats were comfortable and reclined pretty far, so the night wasn’t too bad. The views were ok, but not extremely spectacular and taking pictures was useless because the windows were very dirty. All in all it was an ok experience, but not as magical as advertised.

We arrived in Adelaide around 4 pm and I got dropped off at my hostel by the shuttle bus. The hostel was ok and not too far away from the city centre. I was getting quite hungry so the first stop was Coles where I bought some amazing premade lasagna and custard :D The next morning I did a walking tour through CBD and ended up in the Art Gallery. I had been there before with my brother when we were in Adelaide 4,5 years ago and really enjoyed it again. Time to go home and change because at 3pm I met up with Steve(whom I met on Koh Tao around Xmas 2010, together with Mike). We started the pub crawl in the Exeter hotel, had dinner at the market in Chinatown and visited several other bars. Around 10 pm Mike turned up (he had to fly in from the Outback where he works at a mine site as an engineer and his plane was delayed by 2 hours) and we continued our pub crawl. Around 1.30am Steve went home and Mike and I had something to eat at my hostel after which it was time to catch some sleep. The next morning I chilled out at the hostel and got picked up by Mike around 1:30pm to go to the little German enclave called Hahndorf where we walked around a bit and chatted the time away over a cup of coffee. He was celebrating the birth of his little niece with his dad, brother and brother in law that evening, so a nice and quite one for me.

Early next morning I took the bus to the airport and flew to Cairns where I was met by my host parents: Debbie and Ivan. How nice is that!!! They drove me around town for a bit, we dropped the stuff at the house and went straight through to a BBQ organised by Debbie’s colleagues along the Esplanade. How Ozzie is that!!! Time for the English course now, which means 4 hours of classes each day and 1 hour self study (2 hour class, 1 hour self study/test making, 2 hour class). Since we start at 8.20 we finish early (14.30), so lots of chill out time in the afternoon. Time to read a book, make some homework, search the internet for cheap tickets to Amsterdam….
I’ve booked my flight home already because I will go home during high season (August) and thus need to book early to get a reasonably priced ticket. If all goes to plan I will arrive the 8^th of August very very early in the morning at Schiphol….