Melbourne

For a first stop in Australia I think this has been a great city. After landing and leaving luggage at the hotel my parents and I walked around a bit. Found a cool bridge which leads to a train station and Fed Square.

After we walked around awhile we found a restaurant and bar. Since we we had landed at 8:30 in the morning and couldn't go to sleep or else we'd never adapt to the time shift here we sat down and had an Australian beer (or two or three). From there we went to a very cool place: the ACMI.

The ACMI or the Australian Center for Moving Images. Basically it was a movie museum and it was awesome! Instead of having only Australian cinema history it had history of cinema and technology from the world. A lot of the information was stuff I learned in classes, but it was still really cool to see.

There was a huge interactive part of the ACMI too. You could become a shadow monster on a screen, make your own flip book, and even act out a scene similar to Trinity in the opening of The Matrix, all while being filmed by cameras 360 degrees around you. There was a cool spinning contraption that had a bunch of figures on it and when a strobe light was added it all looked animated. And there was a three walled screen which emphasized the importance of the combinations of sound and film. It was all very cool!

Tuesday was a fun day as well! We took a tour of the city first. I was expecting it to be a small group, but it was just us and a guide in a van so it was a lot cooler then I thought it would be. We went to Queen Victoria Market, drove on the annual Grand Prix track, saw the old Olympic Stadium from 1956, which holds the ARL (Australian Rules Football League) championship every year. It used to occur in September, but because of the addition of two more teams, it is pushed back to October now. Then we stopped for coffee and cake and it was delicious!

From there we just walked around to visit the places we had seen on the tour. Walking around cities may not sound too exciting, but it's always fun. We waited for a city circle tram, which we rode around the city until we found places to stop. Simple, but entertaining.

Then we ate dinner. I'm still waiting to eat kangaroo in Sydney, so I haven't been trying much new food. However on our tour I did try Vegemite. As our guide said if you don't try it before a certain age most people hate it. I really didn't think it was terrible and am planning to bring some back to the States.

After dinner I met up with a friend who lives in Melbourne. He and I met in New Orleans last year when he was traveling in a group of 52 Australians all across the country. He was on a Contiki tour with a bunch of Aussies who didn't know each other. It was random how we met, and cool to catch up with him in his home city. This time wasn't as wild as the time we met. Instead we went up to a SkyDeck on the tallest building in Melbourne and he gave me a tour of the lit-up city from up there. It was magnificent. Then we went into Crown Casino and sat for a few hours drinking Australian beer and swapping stories from the last year and our lives. It was a ton of fun and I'm glad he came out and met up with me. He tried to get the others from his trip to come out too, but they all had work or Uni early this morning. And since Sydney is so close (around an hour long flight) he might rustle a group from there to meet up with us because he might take a trip to Sydney to get me out to a few clubs there. If it happens it'd be awesome if it doesn't that's cool too. It was just fun catching up with him.

I learned that a lot of Aussies think that everything is cheap. Just remember that. I found it weird and surprising, but we've got lots of good priced things, from alcohol to cell phone plans. Just an interesting fact.

Today is the day I get to see penguins and koalas in their natural habitat and up close and personal. It's going to be quite an experience! I can't wait!

Leaving the Country

I love traveling outside of the United States. Being surrounded by a different culture and experiencing as many new things as I can. And so begins my trip down under. I'll be traveling to Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Uluru, Auckland, Cairns, and Yungaburra.

I've been excited for this trip since I was accepted to study abroad in the rain forests of New Zealand and Australia. I'll be traveling all over Australia for two weeks with my parents and from there will meet up with my study abroad group where we'll be living in the rainforest for a month.

Today we're flying out of Milwaukee to Chicago, a very short flight, we didn't even reach cruising altitude before we had to descend again. From Chicago to LAX 3.5 hours and from LAX to Melbourne, a whopping 14.5-15 hours. I'll be keeping this as updated as much as I can, but due to possibly lacking the internet at times I might find that hard to do.

I'm starting in the south (Melbourne) where it will be the coldest I'll be experiencing (hopefully). I'll be going to see penguins in their natural habitat on one tour and going on many other tours and awesome experiences that I'll be taking pictures of and sharing here (if possible) and on Facebook.

I started this on the plane to LAX and am finishing it in the airport...on my phone. Waiting for three hours to board a ginormous airbus.

Leaving at 11:30 pm US time I'll be missing out almost entirely on May 27th which is pretty cool I think. It'll be like I'm time traveling (hello LOST) and then gaining that day back by experiencing a day, July 11th, basically twice. I'll be even more confused as to what day it is than I am normally during the summer. I'm excited for that and the only reason I can come up with is the fact that I'll feel like I'm in Back to the Future or something, but instead of traveling back multiple years, I'll be "traveling" one day. Oh well.

As I said before I'll have intermittent Internet access while down under, mostly when we take trips into the nearby town and I'm going to update this as much as possible. I may even be able to Skype for a short time. If you want to you should be able to search for me by name. Otherwise try minicoop1227. Until next time, from Australia, have a good Memorial Day weekend!

Taken from the plane to LAX

Continental Travels

I have a few goals for traveling in my life. One is to get to all 50 states. I don't know how many I've already been to... (that's for another day). Another is to set foot on every continent. Yes that includes Antarctica. Don't know how I'm going to get there, but someday I hope to, if only for a short time.


This summer I get to check another continent off my list by going to Australia. So I can check three off my list. North America (crazy I know), Europe, and now Australia.


Over the past year, my desire to travel has increased exponentially. I've always enjoyed traveling, but I just want to see the world. There is so much to see and so many ways to go about seeing the world. You can travel to each continent, try traveling to every country, or take one of the many lists of Seven Wonders of the World and see where they used to be and see the ones that are still standing.

Of the seven wonders of the ancient world only one still remains standing: the Great Pyramid of Giza, but the sites for the other six are mostly still visible. Now a new list recently came out and I've actually seen one of them: The Coliseum in Rome. It was incredible! One of the coolest things I've ever seen.

Seeing it from the outside is one thing, but  until you've walked through and around it and seen the old structure, you haven't truly appreciated this amazing structure! Many people know the Coliseum from history and  some people know it from Gladiator, the best picture and best actor winner of 2000. Being where so many people fought and watched people fight to the death was really cool, but pretty eerie at the same time.

We were able to walk pretty much anywhere in this enormous place. From the lower levels, to the upper levels, and all the way around the bowl. Just spectacular. One of the many awesome places I was able to go to during a Mediterranean cruise I took after my senior year of high school. It's a lot bigger than it first seems from the outside and I had to catch my parents' eyes to get the picture below.

So while I still can I want to try and see as many of the seven as I can. Here's a list of the "New Seven Wonders of the World":

The Great Wall of China

Petra in Jordan

Christ The Redeemer (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)

Machu Picchu (Peru)

Chichen Itza (Mexico)

Taj Mahal (India)

The Coliseum (Italy)

Honorary member to the list:

The Great Pyramid of Giza.

It'll take some time, but I'm going to cross each one of these off my list of place to travel to at some point in my life. My personal favorite way to travel to all of these would be to get a ticket around the world, which allows you to stop at 12 different airports and travel anywhere for one year. I better start saving!

Travel Tuesday

It's traveling Tuesday today! I'm going to feature a place I have either traveled to or want to travel to. Today will be about Australia, where I'm studying abroad for a month and traveling for two weeks before my program starts.

First of all, I'm incredibly excited for this. Australia has been a place I've always wanted to travel to and didn't know when I'd get the chance to go, unless I was studying abroad. So I made it a goal to study in Australia during a summer while I was in college and now it's actually happening!

I'll be traveling all over Australia for the first two weeks. I'll be hitting Sydney, Melbourne, Ayer's Rock, and Cairns, among a few other places along the way. Then for a month I'll get to live in the rainforest in Australia and New Zealand and work on studying the ecology, environment, and conservation of the rainforests.

Among the many things I'll be seeing, I expect to see a lot of different animals, especially when I'm in the rainforest. I do know that there are some dangerous animals and the School for Field Studies has told us about some of them, but that we really shouldn't have to worry about them where we will be working. But here's a fun video my brother showed me the other day all about deadly animals.

Having just finished "Lost" for the first time, it got me even more excited to go to Australia if only for the reason that everyone on the island was flying from Sydney to LAX. Either way, I can't help, but hope that my time in the rainforest will be similar to some of the events from "Lost." However, I am not Abed from "Community" so I don't expect anything that crazy to happen and I won't go out of my way to make it happen as he so often does.

More than anything I'm excited to go to the "land down under" and to see the Sydney Opera House, the Great Barrier Reef, Ayer's rock, and lots of other cool things too. I've heard that once you go to Australia you never want to leave, so we'll see how I react to it, but I usually become attached to new places when I travel. It would only be a matter of time I'm sure, before I would be sick of living there and want to travel to another new place.