Made it!

After many, many hours, I made it to Melbourne last night (Monday). It was a very long trip, and I'm very glad that when I go back to Amsterdam I break up the journey by staying in Kuala Lumpur for a couple of days.

The flights went fine though. From Amsterdam to KL was my first time in a 747. It didn't feel that huge inside, but you can't really see down the whole plane at once. I had a friendly middle-aged couple sitting next to me, I had assumed they were Malaysian, but I think they were Indonesian. The woman was sitting next to me and though they didn't speak much English, we communicated sometimes with looks and such, like when she'd lean across me to peek out the window and we'd both shrug that there was still nothing to see, it was all dark out there. She was kind and a bit motherly, patting me on the arm sometimes, it was nice. The sleeping pills my doctor gave me were near useless. I was expecting to be knocked out for most of the flight, instead it was like my body clock won, telling me it was midday, not time to sleep, so I only slept a couple of hours. I snoozed a lot more during the second flight, but that was not going to help me get on schedule here. Oh well, I slept remarkably well last night. Feeling a bit sleepy and not with it now, but hopefully I get over it in a couple of days.

I was quite a wreck by the time we got to KL and I managed to doze a bit on some seats in the terminal (I had about 3 hours to wait til the next flight). The international terminal is pretty cool, a circle with four wings extending out with the gates, and in the middle of the circle are all these tropical plants that you can view through windows. The circle thing was a bit confusing though, I wandered around too much and in my sleepy state would lose track of what part I was at. I also swear I saw Floortje Dessing at one point, but I'm not 100% sure it was her, heh...

Our flight to Melbourne was delayed by half an hour because they decided to wait for some family who was late, not sure why we all had to wait. Also I would have had a window seat if they hadn't have showed up. I had moved from my middle seat to the empty window seat, so had another girl, but then the family ran on and we got booted back to our assigned seats. Boo. I evil-eyed them since they also made us late.

I slept on and off all the way to Melbourne. At one point though I went to stand at the back of the plane a bit since my back was stiff from sitting so long and I ended up chatting with one of the airline stewards (the purser maybe? he was dressed slightly differently than the other flight attendants). We talked for awhile, a good 30-45 mins about everything from my job and his job to why I was going to Australia to living in Amsterdam and why I don't want to live in the US to why Oregon is awesome. It was great and he was so friendly. Definitely a good way to kill some time, plus it helped wake me up a bit.

I also had gone to the back of the plane so I could peer out the little window on the emergency exit door. The map showed we were finally over Australia and I wanted to have a look. Our route took us over Australia from the NW corner diagonally across Western Australia, past Adelaide and across Victoria to Melbourne. So a lot of the flight was over the huge deserts of Western Australia. And it looked pretty much as I imagined: dry and empty and red. It did feel like we might have been flying over Mars. And the few times I peeked out, I never saw any sign of civilization; no roads or clumps of buildings. It's all just a lot of barren nothingness, and over such an unbelievably vast area.

Once in Melbourne, I took a bus to the city and then, because it was late in the evening and the hotel shuttle was no longer going, I had to take a taxi to the hostel. By chance there was a girl on the bus who was also going to the same hostel, so we shared a cab. We got some newbie cab driver, he had never heard of the hostel and was asking us to direct him there. We told him the address and I had a map so I said what the nearest street was, but he still was looking it up on a map when we were stopped at red lights. Anyway, the girl was really nice, an Irish girl with an Irish name I can't pronounce, and we ended up being placed in the same room. We didn't really hang out much, but it was nice to meet someone straight off.

I felt very weird once I was here, like I still couldn't comprehend that I'd be living here for months. It was like I'd been just going through all the stages of packing and going to the airport and getting through the flights, but not really realizing what the purpose was at the end of it all. If that makes sense. I mean, of course I know what I'm here for and what the plan is, it's just hard to realize it all right now. I was a bit overwhelmed when I got to the hostel, just so much newness and trying to fit into a small space with 4 other people and all of that, and I was having "why am I doing this?!!" thoughts, but I'm sure in a week or two I'll look back and laugh at that. I hope anyway, heh.

Anyway, off to look at the city a bit and probably nap later and get more settled. It's wonderful and sunny out, I sat on a bench munching what I bought for breakfast and it was nearly as warm as it has been in general lately in Amsterdam. But it's late winter. The only way I was reminded of that is that the trees are all bare. Hopefully we have a lovely spring.