I’ve finally arrived in Australia now, after a too long flight with more or less good food and bad hurting knees! The food (except the dessert) wasn’t much better than on the other plane.. Well, fortunately I get lots of nice food here instead. The first “meal” I ate here was a toast with butter and marmalade. And the first breakfast was amazing aswell! Jasmine had made Australian pancakes with cream and lots of strawberries.. yumm! (It’s going to be interesting to see what I look like after 12 months..) I’ve also noticed that the orange and apple juice is much better than in Switzerland (just in case somebody’s interested). Another thing that I have noticed is that Aussies eat a lot of pumpkin. The water out of the tap isn’t that good, so they filter it, and then it’s alright. So much about the food.. And now to the house: My room is great, it has a cosy bed and a big wardrobe with big mirrors on the doors. I even have my own bathroom at the moment, but I’ll have to share it with Ben, Gesa and Dorien when they arrive in a few weeks time. I’m looking forward to meeting them! The rest of the house is very nice aswell, all clean and tidy. 🙂

Jasmine and Scott are great host parents: always nice, helpful, open and funny. I already felt the difference when I arrived at the airport in Brisbane. They’re all so helpful and nice, never in a rush and they always have time for a chat. Even the dogs are friendlier here, I even managed to feed them a (Swiss) dog cookie, and they didn’t eat me (the dogs didn’t eat me, not the cookies).

Jasmine has already shown me around about half Australia, driven me to Cleveland Point and Victoria Point and shown me all the shops in the area. They’ve got totally different shops here (except of Aldi), e.g Woolsworth (a grocery market) plus many clothing shops, Fish & Chips shops, cafés, bakeries, Sushi restaurants and even a shopping centre (yesterday we also went to the National Australian Bank to activate my account, so here I come shopping centres! I’ve already figured out that I’ll be trying a lot of new food (fish & chips, sushi, vegemite,..) while I’m here, which I’m looking forward to. Jasmine’s also tried to explain all the bus routes to me, which is quite a lot more complicated than I’m used to, but I hope I’ll have understood them before I leave. But the funniest thing about the buses is that you can buy a bus card with money on it, and every time you get on and off the bus you have to scan the card to pay! So Scott brought me one home today, so I can soon be cruising around Queensland, that was very nice of him. He’s also ordered a surf board which we’ll be allowed to use for the first time when we go over to Straddie on Monday in a week. We’ll be staying there for 5 nights, so until Friday. I hope the weather will be a bit better by then, because at the moment it’s just cold and rainy.. (the houses here don’t have a heating!) I’m looking forward to summer!

A good friend of Jasmine & Scott’s called Lloyd came over for dinner this evening because he had his birthday. We ate lamb, potatoes and vegetables. Then we started watching the “State Origin”. That’s a rugby game between New South Wales and Queensland. They’d already played 2 of 3 games, and today the 3rd game took place (in Sydney, but we followed it on TV), and QLD now has won them all! 🙂 In the half-time we ate a nice cake which Jasmine had made, together with vanilla ice cream and some sort of berry and vanilla sauce. We also went to have a look at school uniforms today.. The uniform itself isn’t actually too bad, but the shoes! So I’ll wait until Monday to buy some together with the other student called Lisa who will be arriving on Sunday from Germany. I’m glad we don’t have to wear those sort of shoes in Switzerland aswell!

So.. at the moment I don’t think I’ve got much mor to tell.. (Ah yeah, Daddy: They got really glad about the presents, and Scott is very proud about his Swiss Army Knife. Lloyd got jealous of it as he saw it, so I said I would buy him one aswell, eventually..).

I’ll uplade some photos as soon as I’ve got a few together! And I’ll blog soon again to keep you updated on what’s going on.. But at the moment I just want to kuddle under the warm blanket and have some beauty sleep..

See ya lata mate!