Landings, adventures and musings

Well, I arrived safe and sound in Australia. The last few days before I left  I endured an overwhelming amount of goodbyes, all as equally sad and hard, from the Barbeque I had with friends and family, coffee and lunch with friends, multitudes of family ringing from the UK to wish me luck ... the hardest  of all was at the airport, saying goodbye to Mum and Dad. It was an emotional goodbye and ridiculously hard to walk through the departure gate, but I did it.

After the goodbyes, we joined the long queue at customs for passport checking, bag scanning etc. Our flight was scheduled to depart at 3.15, so we joined the queue at customs at 2.15, making sure we would have enough time to stroll to the gate, we didn’t factor in the length of the queue, but we continued, oblivious of the time customs would take. We came out the other side, checked the gate on our ticket to realise we hadn’t been assigned one, and continued on in a leisurely manner towards a screen to check the gate number ... FINAL CALL flashed  next to flight number NZ739, our flight. We all paused in shock, then coming to our senses we sprinted through the departure lounges, luckily everyone moved out of our way. It was all a bit of a blur really; we made it to our gate, inevitably the last ones there. Panting and out of breath we handed our boarding passes over and made it on to the plane. The crew obviously knew that we would be the crazy loud people as we were seated on the VERY last row at the back of the plane. As we took off, we said our last goodbye, to the green grass, the tall trees, the cooling breeze and New Zealand.

Three hours and seventeen minutes later, we bumped down on to the Australian tarmac, home for the coming 11 months. We made our way off the plane, and proceeded to collect our luggage as it came banging down the ramp onto the conveyor belt,  we stood around waiting for Katie’s guitar to come after our bags, we waited and waited and waited until the baggage claim area was empty, it seemed that it wasn’t coming. The increasingly anxious Katie asked a security guard where it could be, and to all of our relief there was a fragile baggage claim area. And there sat a guitar case. We proceeded out and passed through the doors to see the bubbly smiling face of Sarah, one of the NET staff.

Katie and I have been hosted at a home in the suburb of Indooroopilly (you will have to excuse the Aboriginal names, as I am still trying to get used to them, it may be an impossible task). We currently have 4 host-siblings, 3 boys and a girl, all extremely loud and excitable, but it’s a nice change from the quietness of my home.

The first full day that I was here, Katie and I went on a hunt looking for the humble and cute abode of Christine and her home stay buddy, the loud and awesome Canadian, Dana. They have been living around the corner from us for the past nine days, we just didn't know where about, so we spent half the morning walking aimlessly around looking for a small sign of their house. After about an hour and a half we found it and knocked on the door to find only their host mum home, and a message that they had gone down the road to the local koala sanctuary. We eventually found Christine and Dana among the Dingo's, snake's, emu's, kangaroo's and every other wacky Australian creature.

Since then I have been attending the 'BEAT' school of music, and I have been loving every minute of it. I have been cramming my head full of awesome new songs for the coming year and I have assured myself that by the end of this year I will be able to play the guitar. I have attended hands on vocal workshops, worship leading workshops, music ministry workshops, performed with a group of 'NETters' and attended the awesome 'HEARTBEAT' worship night. The school of music was an awesome 4 days of getting to know some 'NETters' in a small amount because the next few days will be packed with an overwhelming number of new people and faces.

Since 'BEAT' I ventured out to bustling Brisbane city and joined a group of 'NETters' to a man-made beach along the river, where we just had fun and got really sun burnt (well I did anyway). I have had a relaxing few days off.

Today however we had orientation day where we met a large portion of the 'NETters' and did all the legal paper work for the oncoming months. So today was a hectic mass of people, when I say mass, I mean 45 people, trying to sign all the necessary documentation.

Tomorrow I will be heading out to 'camp' for the 5 week training program about an hour north of Brisbane. I can't promise when I will be next available to update my blog but I will try to keep it updated as much as possible.

God Bless