The very first day
The first day I got to the airport in Brisbane, it was still early in the morning. The sun was shining brightly in the sky and the students were really excited. Most of us were wearing light clothes and we thought we made the right decision. But right after we stepped out of the plane, we soon realized how wrong we were. The temperature was about 10 and I put my jacket in my suitcase. I was carrying so many things with me and it was almost impossible for me to unpack in front of the students. There was nothing I could do but to pretend that I actually liked cold weather like that.
According to the given schedule, we would be picked up at the airport by the home stay families and the students would be heading all different directions to spend their first weekend with their home stay family. It seemed we were wrong again.
The first person we met at the airport was Nathan. He was a tall, skinny man with dark curly hair. The students called him “190″ because he was 190 cm tall. Nathan was always busy answering his cell phone and he was waiting with us for a couple of students to pass through the costom. He showed us the way to our bus and let the bus driver took us back to the college. When we were walking our way to the bus, I got a bit worried that some students might catch a cold or didn’t bring enough warm clothes. Luckily, they were all fond of the weather here, or at least, they were faking that they liked it as just what I did.
Shafston owned a small campus right by the river. The campus might be small, the view was magnificent. There was a huge lawn in front of the main building and it went all the way to the river band. The river view would cost you 2 million dollars, Australian dollars of course, if you would like to have a house or an apartment by Brisbane River. While we were busying with our ports, Aussie way for luggage or suitcases, there were boats and City Cat wandering by. I could easily understand why the lawn was the favorite site for lunch or for picnic.
Melissa was the one that greeted us when we arrived at the college. She showed our way to the reception, and gave a short speech about the what might be happening in the following three weeks, like the life in home stay families, and first of all, the water shortage. It dropped a huge bomb when she said each person was allowed to take a shower for only four minutes. I wasn’t sure about the students, but I would need 15 minutes to take a shower myself! I would probably waste the first three minutes washing my face and bushing my teeth. Now I really believed I was going to have a hard time. However, the situation in Australia was really serious. Everyone was permitted to use 140 litre of water each day, and even so, they will run out of water in March, 2008.
Some students were picked up by their home stay families right after the talk and one of us would have to follow one group of the students to their home stay because just about three hours before our flight, they changed her home stay again, for the third time. That meant one of us might have to go with the girls and needed to take a taxi back to our own home stay while the other one must take all the cases and bags and go to the home stay with a totally stranger alone. I was not sure how much money it might cost to take a taxi and I was not sure how long it might take for us to travel in a foreign city. Luckily, our own home stay father, Greg Qinn, was a very kind man. He insisted that he should take us there and take us all back home. “It will cost you at least 100 dollars if you go by a taxi, but you just need to cook me dinner if I drive you there.” Tell me how could I say no to this lovely old man?
The girls’ home stay turned out to be a very nice place and a very beautiful house. The parents were in their fifties and they seemed to be decent and patient. It was an incredible house with a big swimming pool, a back yard garden, a lovely dog, the cannel view and two boats parked in the canal. Right, they owned two boats. Jesus they are rich people. Anyway, the girls were happy there and we were sure that they would only say good things about their home stay to their parents.
Just when we were checking, some boys called and that was when we found out that the international cell phone SIM card provided by ISI didn’t work and we had trouble both receiving and making phone calls. Greg suggested that maybe we could buy a SIM card from one of the local cell phone companies and it would save us a lot of money too. When we were at the shop, we didn’t have many choices, and I just chose the one that I am using in my own cell phone number, Vodafone. Another chaperon bought the other one a couple of days later and I was very happy to find out that the one I chose was actually a lot more cheaper. I charged 29 dollars in my SIM card, and I got 130 dollar credits on it. We made an international phone call for two minutes and we were only charged for 7.6 dollars.
The house, the house was beautiful, and I loved it at the first moment when I saw it. It was a big two story building with green green lawn in the front. The smell of the house was so sweet and lovely. That was where I met Joselyn, at the front door. She was already making afternoon tea when we got there, and the dinning, the lunge, the living room, the back yard and the pool was all so pretty. I would love to live in a house like that! After Joss fed us with the tea and the sandwiches, she went right away to prepare for a big dinner. I couldn’t remember what we had for the first dinner, but I can still remember that if we were to eat like that for the following three weeks, I would put on a loooot of weight when I got home.
We were terribly exhausted after the long flight, the long day and the big dinner. I barely unpacked my luggage and I went to bed really early before nine o’clock. The next day will be our only one day off and I really wanted to be energetic to be able to enjoy every minute. I needed a good night sleep, but the night didn’t turned out to be a very quiet one.
