Hi guys,
So my first day at Macquarie ROCKED. Here's a recap-- a bit dry, but whatever. I'm tired.

Enjoy.

outside our kitchen window!

lessons learned

1. NEVER book a plane ticket with vayama.com.
2. While trying to secure an Australian temporary long-stay visa, side-trips to Africa and Europe are crazy fun but not advised.
3. Fitting 26 years of stuff into two suitcases is very difficult.
4. While traveling, it is convenient to bring either cash or credit cards to buy all of the stuff you no longer get for free
6. The international departures lounge in fiji has nice seats for sleeping, and the men wear skirts.
7. If you are poor, it takes 33 hours to get from Atlanta to Sydney.
8. Always have best friends pick you up at airports.

Le Visa qui court plus vite que la lumière

Based on a true story

C'est l'histoire d'un Visa qui une fois demandé sur le net arrivait dans ta boîte mail quelques heures après...

Et oui, j'ai commencé mon application en ligne pour obtenir le Visa Australien : Working Holiday. Ce Visa permet de passer un an en Australie et travailler pas plus de 6 mois pour le même employeur. L'application a duré exactement 18 minutes, et n'importe qui aurait pu répondre correctement aux questions (avez vous fait de la prison, allez-vous en Australie pour obtenir des soins médicaux, avez vous fait l'armée...). Même si j'ai l'intention de partir début décembre, je voulais m'y prendre en avance pour éviter tout le stress inutile, à savoir les documents incomplets ou manquants...

J'ai répondu tellement bien aux questions qu'un mail m'est parvenu tout à l'heure pour m'annonçer que mon Visa était accepter !!! Ce processus a pris moins de 6 heures. Qui dis mieux?

Je suis en fin prêt pour partir en Australie en toute légalité, et c'est une bonne nouvelle, si on pense aux problèmes que Lindsay a pu rencontrer pour obtenir son Visa.

Survive-the-spiders-day

Make this one about hiking Linzi says to Nina... so, I will give it a try... about the oh so damn scary spiders we met, our quest against them, our walk-on-the-road-trip, Linzi trying to speak Dutch, our Vodka-talk-evening, u know, the regular stuff people experience.

En dan maar hopen dat jullie je een beetje kunnen inleven in de gevaren en de avonturen van de afgelopen week. Werkelijk! Wat een feest.

So, where were we? Right, I think the day after our off-day. During our off-day we practically only ate food, slept, watched movies. Not much to say about that right. Anyway, we decided we needed some exercise the day after. Let's go hiking at Mistletoe Park! And let's do so in the morning. Seemed to be a great idea... but the spiders kinda thought the same thing... but the subject of their thoughts were not focused on hiking, but on moving in permanently on our hiking trail.

We choose the 1 3/4 mile trail... doable right? That's what we thought too, just before we ran into the first just-moved-in-spider. Honestly, every yard there was a ginourmous spider-villa-web across the trail, and I am not exaggerating! We could not move one yard without ruining a web. It feels disgusting, sticky on your face. And if it was just that, fine, but noooohooooo, the spiders were home! See!

We were so scared... So we decided to walk down the trail with our just discovered magic stick which, when we waved it around as much as we could, was supposed to get rid of all the spider cities. It did work, but nonetheless it took us like 10 minutes to do 1% of the trail, so we decided to move our athletic hiking to a better place. As disappointed as we were, we did decide to leave the forest trail alone, and we took of hiking down the road. Linzi got herself roadkilled, but Nina did not mind joining her.

We felt totally reborn after the hiking adventure.

After that, we naturally needed to regain our strength. We did so sitting down at the doc with our delicious vodka-lemonade. Talking about life, Nina trying to overcome some word-finding problems, and Linzi reliving her IRB-wtf-thing (Cecily, awsome commentary!) and trying to speak Dutch, we felt really proud of our perseverance that day.

Btw, if u wanna see more pix: http://picasaweb.google.com/Mistaya00/NinaAndLinziGoToGeorgia

Linzi and Nina say: oogjes dicht en snaveltjes toe, welterusten!