the travelling story

(all times very approximate.)

12 pm CST: i leave my house for the airport
330 pm CST: plane leaves from XNA
630 pm CST/ 430 pm PST: plan arrives in LA
800 pm CST/ 600 pm PST: meet brian for dinner at panera
930 pm CST/ 730 pm PST: meet most of fellow ASC'ers at air new zealand check-in desk
(recieve tickets, go through security, arrive at gate, grab light sustenance wait)
1230 pm CST/ 1030 pm PST: plane leaves from LAX
1 pm CST/11 am PST/ 6 am ST (7/19/06): plane lands in auckland.
(cross international date line during 12.5 hour flight. confused yet? so were we.)

that's where it all goes to pieces in my head. we somehow ended up in sydney between 1000 and 1100 am on the 19th. in all, i had three flights to deal with:
XNA to LAX: 3 hours
LAX to AUCKLAND, NZ: 12.5 hours
AUCKLAND to SYDNEY: 3 hours.

i'll leave the mysteries of crossing the international date line to the physics masters. my brain explodes when i try to figure it out.
i'm finding i recover from jet lag quite well, as i am able to sleep almost anywhere and keep myself awake when i really should want to sleep. things get pretty funny when our group can't figure out how long we've been travelling.

thursday was a day of "keep the kids awake" with basic orientation, games, and food (um, TIM TAMS? where have you been all my life?). today was more intense orientation, covering classes, facilities, procedures, etc. after that, a handful of us decided to go downtown. nutshell: opera house, harbor bridge, beautiful, and tons of places to spend money, plus cool history i can't wait to see in the daylight.

upcoming posts!
-daily schedule (classes, etc)
-tour of housing
-opera house pictures
-service placement, etc
-straight-up stories!

OH! i forget this is about stories some times. i'm sorry about the length, but here's a quickie.
i live in student housing. it's neat, but not always the cleanest. some fellow ASC'ers from down the hall found a roach in their room and started flipping out. it was quickly killed. however, that made my roommate, becca, and i are squeamish to investigate our room, but investigate we must. while putting a suitcase inside an upper cupboard, we found one.
of course, our initial response was to flip. a few deep breaths and screwed up courage later, i climb on a chair with a shoe in hand to investigate further. the roach is still, and doesn't move when i blow on it. i squeak, thwack it with a shoe, and it bounces onto its back-- still no movement. blow again. nothing. becca hands me a pamphlet to scoop with and a grabs a trashcan for immediate disposal of said roach. i scoop, she holds, the vermin is away. we vanquished the (proabably already dead) roach! yippee for us!

all is well. leave some love!