the first days...

So I'm here going onto my third week of chillin' out in the rain forest with some sweet tree possums, pademelons, cockatoos, parrots, deadly snakes and very large spiders (and many, many more...)! We arrived at the Center for Rainforest Studies here in the World Heritage rainforest of far Northern Queensland on Monday, 6 September, after having left CT on Saturday, 4 September. We didn't actually get the chance to live through Sunday the 5th... that was a very strange situation! I flew from Hartford to Dallas Fort Worth to La to Brisbane and finally to Cairns! (whew, that was a long one!). I met my first fellow student, Marcus, in the Bradley airport. It was nice not to be flying alone and sort of talk to someone about my worries, excitements, etc. We seemed to be on the same page about what to expect... except he made me feel a bit nervous that he was only bringing a hiking backpack and a regular backpack, where I had a 51 lb. suitcase and a duffel bag and my hiking backpack! Oh well...

So arriving in LA I was very tired and sick of planes... but SO EXCITED to be finally going on this trip and meeting new people (I had been anticipating my abroad experience since about a year ago when I applied to SFS). Marcus and I met up with some people in the LA airport and ate at On the Border, where alot of the group was hanging out. They were all very noticeable with their hiking backpacks and SFS T-shirts. I had a white Zinfandel to try to put me to sleep before our long 14-hour journey over the Pacific Ocean and Coral Sea to Brisbane. It worked very well. While in the terminal, I was greeted by almost the entire group of fellow SFSers. We were all excited to be on our journey to the Southern hemisphere where the toilets DO, indeed, flush the opposite way!

When I got onto the plane I was almost immediately prompted with dinner and then easily fell asleep for about 7.5/8 hours. It was sooooo nice. It was actually surprisingly pretty comfortable, too! They gave us alot of food. nom nom nom.  I plugged my headphones into the seat and Beethoven's 7th started playing... it was beautiful! My seat mate (visiting Aussie to thank a doctor that saved his hand while he was in the Marines training in OZ) gave me his Tiramisu desert (unopened, of course) and was very nice to talk to. The view out the window was absolutely amazing... it was dark out for almost the entirety of the trip, and mostly everyone was sleeping. I was awake for the last 6 or so hours of it, though (on and off of course). At one point I was staring out the window of the (double decker) plane at the stars and was graced by the presence of a shooting star! I couldn't believe it... when the sun started to rise it rose behind the plane in a horizon filled with reds, oranges and yellows, with a very deep purple above and ahead of us. Eventually the rest of the sky turned orange and red and again another deep purple was above us. It was one of the most beautiful scenes I've ever seen.

The arrival in Brisbane was successful, and the flight to Cairns was SO EASY compared to the past few flights I'd been on that day... when we arrived at Cairns and got our luggage, we were greeted by our SAM (Student Activities Manager) Leslie. She's super great-- she helps us organize ourselves into committees for deciding what to do on free time/ sundays/ mid semester break, helps us work out problems, is our mom when we're sick and is just someone to talk to outside of the group that understands and can offer sound advice. She's great. We met Rohan (our socio-economics professor), and Leah, Ian and Hester, all interns this semester. We then loaded the SFS vans (with the driver on the opposite side of the car!) and headed off to the CRS site. The vans were exactly what I pictured them as-- dirty and crazy with opportunity to get very close with the person next to you (due to the close proximity of the seats) and dangle your arm out the window if you're not driving past a wait-a-while tree/bush or near the center line of the road. The drive to the center was ridiculously windy-- we drove on the Gillies highway which you have to go slow on because it's along the edge of a mountainside (mom, you'd hate it!) and turns the opposite direction around every corner. Once we finally made it to the top, the lookout was fabulous! you could see for miles, and see the layers of the rain forest and the city of Cairns below. What a beautiful site!

Upon arrival to the site, we drove down a long and windy access road, which is our main road for entry and exit to and from the site. We are located directly in the rain forest, so you can imagine the vines and trees attempting to repopulate the roads. We took a general tour of the center, which is where we spend all of our classroom time, eating time, and other time (watching movies/ hanging out in the common room/ changing other peoples' facebook statuses when they forget to log out... things like that). Afterward we got to move into our cabins (I was assigned Cabin 2, which is the awesome cabin, basically) and meet all of our new cabin mates! There are 4 cabins, with one bathroom cabin... they are all located along one leg of the access road and trail to the center. Cabin 1 is the furthest away from the center, then cabin 2, then the bathrooms, then the dongas (where the interns and Leslie lives) and then cabin 4. My cabin mates are Kenyetta, Kelsie, Ali, Sonia, Val, Erin and Camille. They are all nice people, and fun to hang out with... we have some great cabin time conversations at night and in the mornings!

After moving in we had some basic ice-breaker games led by Leslie. This lasted until Thursday morning, when we began our first class with Rohan. We were to go out to an assigned town in the Atherton Tablelands (of course driven in the SFS vans) and talk to the local people about the economy, population, politics, environmental issues, etc. We learned alot about the surrounding towns through presentations that we gave at the end of the day. On the following day we did a geological tour of the Atherton Tablelands with Siggy (our ecology course professor) and learned about the basalt and granite soils, the cinder cones and formations of the rain forests throughout geological history. It was really alot of information to take in all at once, but overall a good introduction to the surrounding area. That night we had a barbecue at a cinder cone transformed into a state park. It was very pleasant... the sun was warm, and setting behind the distant mountains.