I am Lauren, going on a one month study abroad across most of Australia. 14 students, one professor, and one TA from Virginia Tech are "studying land and water use" [sightseeing] in Australia for 31 days. This is where I shall document the experience. Today: day -2.
Packing has become even more daunting than the 17 hour plane ride or the month in a foreign land.
The bag has to be as malleable as possible [so it can be thrown over shoulders, in laps, on boats, in trunks, revealing much about what our bodies will be doing too]. Mom and dad seem to have really enjoyed the shopping prep, buying all sorts of face-sunscreen glue-stick items and whatnot. I'm still just dazed that in 48 hours I'll be in the Dulles airport, meeting my group for the trip [or 13/15ths of the other members, two are meeting us in LAX].
Anyways, I'm really doing everything I can to put off packing. This is for 3 reasons: 1) packing will make my room incredibly messy, as I reevaluate every item I attempt to place in my deceptively small duffle bag, 2) I can pretend it's going to be easy until I actually get underway, and 3) If I save it until last minute, the longest hours of the waiting process, those immediately preceding an exciting event, will fly by in packing-panic. So my dresser is buried in a microfiber towel, sun screens, clif bars, a travel hammock, and the endless packing list Dr. Geyer made for us. The group's favorite part of this list is that clothes are listed under the "optional" category. From those items on my dresser though, I can tell this is going to be a really spectacular trip.
We're traveling over most of the eastern and central parts of the continent, hitting Melbourne, Sydney, Darwin, Carins, Brisbane, and more that I cannot list because as I said, the itinerary is all the way over on the dresser.
I plan to make fairly regular updates to this blog on the trip, though I won't be taking a computer so I'll be relying on the internet cafes of the cities to grant me access to all of you. The prospect of being largely free from social networking is really enticing though, so no complaints here! I just hope to properly capture the crazy things I see, both in prose and in pictures! Because who wants me to talk about a kangaroo when they can see a picture of me pretending to be kicked by one. or a picture of me actually getting kicked by one.
Anyways, the next post should be after some physical progress toward the continent of Australia, likely meriting a more exciting post. But as for the current, pre-trip state of things: I'm stoked to see both Australia and if packing will be as hard as Geyer makes it out to be.
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