Time is flying by here. I cannot believe I have already been here for over a month! This week I was lucky to celebrate my 21st birthday and my friends here made it as special as it would have been at home. I am also lucky enough to spend the weekend in Cairns, a popular launching point for the Great Barrier Reef. I am more than thrilled to experience the beaches, the reef, and the tablelands. I’ve found in my short travels here, interestingly enough, that the Jetstar planes make me very nervous. They’re smaller than your average plane and as such they are a lot more sensitive to turbulence. They also seem to rock a lot and this is especially noticeable during take-off and landing. I always know I’m going to be fine, but I find myself more nervous than usual on these planes.
In preparing to come abroad, I brought both my regular phone and an old phone of my mom’s. I was told to keep my regular American phone and just use it on Wi-Fi and to get an Australian SIM card for the other phone. Unfortunately, upon arriving I found that the older phone didn’t work. As such I had to put the Australian SIM into my American phone and keep my American SIM card in a safe place. I decided to go with Optus for my plan, upon recommendation from a friend. Since I do not have an Australian bank account, my only option was to do a prepaid SIM plan. Most plans come with unlimited SMS and calling within Australia as well as unlimited international calling to selected countries. Unfortunately, I believe the recipients of my calls would still be charged international calling rates, so I get limited use out of this. On the plan, I also get a certain amount of data and extra credits depending on how much money I want to pay that month. It’s decently cheap and I rolled over almost 3 GB of data last month. Last month I paid $50 for 8 GB of data and $12 of extra credit. This month I decided to top up with less and paid $40 for 6 GB of data and $10 of extra credit.
There is plenty of technology available in Australia. My laptop actually broke 2 days before leaving home and I unfortunately didn’t have enough time to replace it in the U.S. I went to Chadstones, the largest mall in the southern hemisphere, to go to the Apple store. I ended up purchasing a laptop but it was about $200-$300 more than it would have been in the U.S. There is Wi-Fi available all over campus, but not too available in public places in the city. There are also printers and scanners available on campus, but unlike Northeastern, we are not given a set amount of dollars. We must pay to print per page; it runs about $0.12 a page.
