No Worries

Well my first batch of photos just got erased off my million dollar camera, thanks a lot. So, unfortunately nothing yet to show form what has been a crazy couple of days, and a day I lost in time. I met some interesting people sitting next to me on the plane. They we’re both young, and simply traveling all over. It’s, I guess, a custom in Australia that before you go to college, you just run around the world and explore. Their average age of a freshman college student is older than in America. We passed over the international date line, thing, and jumped from Wednesday to Friday. No Thursday. I will never exist on February 7^th, 2008. Getting through customs, pain obviously, but somehow I bypassed a three hour line and was able to enter the country. Took the “happy cabbie” from the Sydney airport to the “Uni”, which is what they call the University. “You goin’ to the Uni, mate?” I arrived at the college two hours later, which meant that I had then be traveling for around 30 hours, but thanks to sleep on the plane I was jacked up and ready to go. Of course there is no internet in my room yet, to which the guy in the office simply replied, “Chill out, mate.” I don’t like not having the internet.

Dean and Doug, friends from Iowa, live right through a jungle pathway, which really isn’t a path. But as I was lucky to find on my drunken first night walk home in the rain, does have large lights. I showered and composed myself slightly, and we all took the train to the city of Newcastle, which is about ten minutes away. The city is beautiful, breathtaking. The beach is massive, and there’s a ton of happy people on it. Surfing, laying, barbequing. Everything is very slow and simple out here. In response to any request the standard reply is, “no worries.” Since I’m usually worrying about EVERYTHING, it’s going to take some time to adjust to not being able to worry. We ate at a lovely restaurant, Subway, but since it costs $11 for a foot-long and drink, it really doesn’t matter where you eat, or drink.

The biggest shock comes when you first enter the liquor store. A case of beer costs over $40. Even the Australian beer is $30 for a case. I must have walked around 100 times, until the owner came over, realizing I was a cheap American, and told me to buy the $7 bottle of Chardonnay. Wine is the only thing reasonable in cost. For some reason the system of minimum wage is all screwed up over here, so it goes by age. If you’re a 21 working some shitty job, you get paid like $15 an hour. But then your sub costs $11, but so it just doesn’t really make sense. But hey, “no worries mate.”

We canvassed the town a little, and I took some amazing pictures, which my camera happily decided to erase. But hey, “no worries mate.” I saw Phil, a friend from home, who was in a hostel, and a buddy from school Austin was staying in a hotel downtown. The programs everyone went through gave an option to either stay on campus or off, but they really screwed the people living off campus for not telling them there is a HOUSING SHORTAGE. Those words are something everyone in America wishes we could trade with Australia. So the folks with nowhere to live, and there’s hundreds of them, are just hunting and extremely pissed. But hey, you know what they say in Australia, “no worries mate.”