First Days in Australia

Hello Everyone!

Well, it is officially my fourth day in Australia. It is about 8:40am here which would be 5:40pm your time. I don't have pictures yet, but I hope to soon after we visit a wildlife santuary today.
Things have got better in the past couple of days; I had a rocky start. My flight from Dallas was delayed by an hour due to lightning, causing me to be late to L.A. When I tried to check in at L.A., they told me they were over booked and took me outside of security to see the ticketing agent. After a while, they finally got me a seat, it was 10:35pm and the flight was boarding at 10:40pm. I still had to go through security. I was pretty frantic at this point. I made the gate right when they started boarding and met Traci and Amy (my classmates from Whitewater). We did not get seats together, in fact, they both got upgraded to business class and I wasn't allowed to look for them because I was economy. The service on Quantas Airlines was pretty nice, everything was free, they had a screen in the back of every seat with free movies, TV, video games and other entertainment. Unfortunately for me, I had the only seat on the plane with a broken screen and the plane was too full for them to move me to another seat. Needless to say, it was a long 15 hours. Lucky for me, the people to my left and to my right were very nice and friendly. One was a young aussie guy who let me use his IPod to watch part of a movie. The other was a women who was a youth leader of a group on a trip to the World Youth Day, a huge Catholic event held every few years. It is being held in Sydney this time. Most of the people on the plane looked young and were probably headed there.
When I got to Melbourne, I met up with Traci and Amy to go through customs, which was a breeze, except for the heavy luggage. A univeristy student picked us up and took us to Geelong. We had thought we were going to catch a train to Warrnambool, but she said that hadn't been arranged, and convinced us to stay in Geelong until the Lorne trip. We agreed, and she took us to the "hotel", which was a hostel above a bar. We were not impressed. So, we carried all of our luggage up two flights of stairs, and put it into a room with 6 bunk beds, with no phone, TV, and the bathrooms are shared by the entire floor. They provided us with lockers to keep some of our valuables in. The one computer they had in the lounge wasn't hooked up to the internet at the time. We found a post office and purchased calling cards and had an adventure using the pay phones in a mall. We survived the night, and the next day a woman from Deakin met with us and we told her our concerns. They put us in a real hotel because we were worried about all of our luggage at the hostel. After that, things got much better. We are still trying to figure out customs and how to work the phones, heaters, bus routes, etc. But the people are really nice. We went out to a pub last night called the Bended Elbow. The girls and I shared a jug of sex on the beach. We couldn't figure out the bus so we took a cab home.
We need to look less American, people stare at us.
Hopefully another entry with pictures will come soon!