Australia: Week 1

I will give a general update of how things have been here so far.
My first morning I woke up at around 4:30, but the clock in my hotel room was off by more than an hour so I thought it was 5:30. I left for work at what I thought was 7 but actually 6, when I got to work there was no one at the office yet and almost nobody on the street.I had to wait about an hour and a half before I could get into the office to start working, not the best start to the week.

For most of the week I have just been waking up early (around 1, then 2, then 3, then 5 every morning), working then going home.
I have been getting pretty good at navigating from my apartment to work and back, and I also feel pretty confident with driving on the opposite side of the road. It is fun to see people's reactions when they find out I've never driven on the left side of the road until this week. They are always surprised that I am driving, but impressed that I've picked it up so fast, at least that's impression I get but I could be totally misreading them.

Last night I met up with an old mission buddy and his family. I drove out to his house, about 30 minutes outside of the city, and had dinner with them. It was so nice to have home cooked food again. After dinner we went to an Aussie rules football game, known as simply the AFL here. I was really fun for me but not as much for Alex, my friend. They team he roots for was playing a much worse team but ended up getting crushed in a huge upset. But it was fun watching the game, the field is huge and there are a ton of guys on the field at the same time. If I try to explain the game in this post I'll just ramble on and I probably won't be very clear anyway, so just enjoy a couple of these video clips. Oh, I also learned the rules to Cricket, that's an interesting game.Also yesterday I visited a couple buildings in the city, including the aquarium. It was pretty small but the main attraction is a huge aquarium with sharks, snappers, and huge sting rays. Divers go in and feed the fish a couple times a day and create huge feeding frenzies with hundreds of fish, it's pretty cool.

Today, I went driving on the Great Ocean Road. A beautiful drive that goes on for hours, I only went on a small portion because of my time restraints.

I went swimming in the ocean despite it being super cold, I couldn't pass up a chance to swim off the coast of Australia. I was really hesitant until I saw some local teenagers going to swim without wet suits. So I hung out with them, getting pounded by the huge waves, and freezing in the water (and rain).

I also saw a couple wild koalas. There was a car pulled off the side of the road with its occupants taking pictures of something so I stopped to see what the hubbub was about. Sure enough there was a koala really close to the side of the road, I saw her climb down a tree, walk on the ground and up another tree. I was super happy to see it. Seeing animals in zoos and seeing them in the wild just feels different.

That's all for now. Enjoy the pics.
Here are a couple video clips of Aussie rules football.