Fun Weekend

Beach Volleyball....looks fun hey. All weekend long Surfers Paradise hosted a beach volleyball tournament with teams from all over the world and it was even broadcasted on tv! So we might have made australian television! hehe. We worked Friday and Saturday but Sunday we were able to come down and watch a few games. It was raining in the morning and a little windy so we dressed for the weather....like you would in Canada. Five minutes later the sun was blaring 30 degrees and the rain had stopped. I guess that happens a lot here. So it was a very hot afternoon of watching volleyball. The mens final was between Germany and Denmark (I was hoping there would have been a canadian team!) and wow were they ever good. They are all like 6'5 and can jump so high. The girls were ok, but not quite as interesting. They had the coolest guy doing the intermission show, he like did beep boxing or whatever you call it and was so so funny! He made these crazy sounds and sang and I have no idea how he did it. Monday we did not have to work until 4:00pm so we sat out by the pool and suntanned. I think it was the hottest day since we have been here, I wouldn't have been surprised if it was 40 degrees. We did not last very long outside but we defanitly have killer tans now....! Today I had to work from 12:00-4:00 and Tandri had to conveniently work 4:00-10:30 so he is at work right now and I am at home waiting for the Biggest Loser to come on tv. We are so hooked on this tv show and watch it everynight. It is soooo good but I don't think it is being broadcasted in Canada....to bad for you guys. Ohhh some exciting news.....WE ARE GOING ON A CRUISE!!! March 17th we leave Brisbane and travel on for 7 nights! Grandma and Grandpa too bad you guys couldn't come with me again...I know you guys would love this one! We travel from Brisbane to the whitsundays which is supposed to be one of the nicest places in Australia. The beaches look absolutely amazing. The third day is spent in Cairns, which was originally where we wanted to live. So that will be nice to see and explore that town! Port Doulgas is where we spend the fourth day and that is right beside the Great Barrier Reef, so we will get to do some scuba diving! The fifth day we get to see Willis Island, Coral Sea. I have not heard too much about this place so it will be interesting to see what it is like. The rest of the days are spent at sea. I had so much fun three years ago when I went with some family and I am so excited for Tandri to be able to experiance it too! We ended up finding this holiday because we were looking for a trip to the whitsundays but it was just way to expensive and so we started looking at other options. This way we can visit four other places instead of just the one. Talk about the perfect birthday celebration! It saved us so much money too. So until then we are working hard to save up some money and just hang out here. On our walk home the other day we just stopped to look at one of the MANY and I mean many real estate agencies to see what houses are like here. First of all, there are like no houses that we have seen yet. Everyone here lives in apartments/condos. The newest residential tower here is called Q1 and it is right outside of our window. It is the tallest residentual tower in Australia. They were advertising a one bedroom apartment- no furnishings, for $899,000. Can you believe that!?! That is like the price of 8 houses in dauphin! I defanitly like the small town living! So do not worry everyone....we will defanitly be coming home! hehe. I am off to sleep because we have to wake up early for work tomorrow. Good Night everyone!

Tandri and Brittni

We are Employed!!

Well we got to do something exciting this week! We were on our way to the mini golf course and got distracted by a photo store. I thought it was a photographer's store that he displayed his work but it was actually a studio where they take pictures of you. Beacause I love pictures so much I dragged Tandri in there with me while the sales lady proceeded to convince us how we would look "lovely" doing this. I was sold, haha. They do you hair and makeup and get you all ready and then take like a billion pictures. So Anyways, it was like the funnest day. The pictures turned out cool, but Tandri only let me put two of them on here. Since we never got to go golfing we decided to the next day. Sigurdur told Tandri that we need to go to a nice golf course where the grass is green! hehe Actually the state that we are in is experiencing one of the biggest drought season's that have happened. They are trying to preserve water in like everyway here. There even figured out a way to recycle the toilet water...ughh but don't worry they will not have that up and working until next year, and we will be gone! Its funny though on the toilets they have these two buttons for the flusher. If you go pee you press the half toilet button and if you go "the other one" you press the full toilet one. I guess this is another good way to preserve water. lol. So that would explain the lack of green in our golfing pictures. So we took Sigurdur's advice and went to a nice golf course in a town close to here called Robina. It's like around $115 to golf for one person but it was worth it. A lot more obsticles and hills and stuff to play around. But it was so hot we both got really tired out. Some more good news.....we are now employed again! We are both trained "sandwhich artists". We work at Subway and it is so much fun! haha. Its so easy and the people are really nice. It gets pretty busy so it is cool meeting everyone that comes in. We work with a girl who is from Ireland, and I'm pretty sure that is the hardest accent to understand. I just listen to her, smile, and say "oh ya" but I have no idea what she is saying. The best part of it is defanitly the food though. When we are working we get anything on the menu for two dollars, subs, wraps, and salads...only $2!! Thats amazing! ha. And free fountain drinks. If later we start to hate the job, we will probably stay for the food. mmmm It is so good. So now we are just planning on working lots for the next month or so to regain some money. We were walking home the other day and stopped at a convenience store for a snack and I picked up a chocolate bar and headed to the register. Three dollars later!! Yikes for a normal small chocolate bar its like 2-3 dollars! We were talking to a lady who owns a store here and she said that some things are more expensive here because everything is imported. It has such a longer way to come here then it does to Canada. But not everything is more expensive, just some things. It was a good $3 chocolate bar. So we are off this afternoon to work again, and eat some more. Have a good week!

Tandri and Brittni

Crocodile Hunter Zoo

We got to go to the best place in Australia yesterday........THE CROCODILE HUNTER ZOO!! It was the funnest time we have had here! And yes I finally got to see a kangaroo. About time. They are such funny animals though. As you can see in the picture they kinda look like deer. They aren't as colorful as the cartoons make them either. lol. There was this huge area that you could just walk into and there was kangaroo's everywhere! They were pretty tame so we were able to walk up to them, feed them, and pet them and they would barely even move. They were pretty funny though when they hopped! They have these short front feet that they do not really use and then their back legs are long and almost have "springs" in them they described it as. They were so soft though, we went back a second time to play with again! My FAVORITE part of the zoo though was the koala bears!! They are just as cute and cudly as the T.V. makes them look. I guess they sleep 19 hours of each day so they were all sleeping just about the whole day we were there. Both Tandri and I got to get our picture's taken holding a koala, and we didn't even want to let them go!! They are almost like little babies, the zoo keeper just laid them in our hands and the koala's just snuggled up close to us and hung out. They have the funniest hands, two thumbs and then a big space then three fingers. Their nails are really long and sharp so they were a little prikley. We are trying to figure out a way to bring one back to Canada. Early morning we got a change to feed the elephants, which was so wierd! I thought that they would just such up the fruit through their trunk but they actually use their trunk as more of a finger and pick it up and bring it to their mouth. Their trunk was covered in snot...ewww. It was a cool thing to do though. We got to watch a show in the "Crocoseum" where they did tricks with parrots, eagles, and kookabaras, snakes, and of course....Crocodiles. The crocodiles were pretty boring just watching them in thier cage but in the show they were so much more exciting. They are so much quicker then they look and are

such big animals! They can jump totally vertical which was so cool to see. The zoo is totally dedicated to Steve Irwin. I remember when he died and we were still in Canada, and we just kinda "Oh thats too bad, he was a crazy guy." Here the total country admired him as their hero. He is like the biggest celebrity here and so his death was such a major thing. They had this row that was so long of messages that people had wrote to him. I guess when we watch the crocodile hunter on tv and he's doing tricks with the crocs its actually filmed in that exact zoo. His wife Terri, and kids Bindi and Robert actually live there and walk around. I was hoping to see them but I guess they are over in the states right now promoting Bindi's fitness video. We got to see so many more kinds of funny animals there. Wombats are like these super fat balls. haha. They have these short little legs and kinda reminded us of dogs. We also got to see a tasmanian devil, they were kinda boring though. A komodo dragon, but it just sat there and did not move. Dingo's which are wild dog's and look exactly like a big dog. Enchinda's are kinda like a big spiky porcupine, and possum's are actually pretty cute! So yesterday was such a fun day for us! Today we checked out Surf City Christian Church and it was pretty cool. They broadcast their service on tv so its like a Springs Church, for those of you who have heard of that. Check out www.surfcity.org.au. Then we got to go golfing again, except today was a little bit colder. It was cloudy and a little windy but it was nicer then playing in 35 degree weather. We are pretty tired from all of the excitement within the past couple days! For those of you who don't know.....Rachelle (Tandri's mom) is going to be featured in Canadian Scrapbooker for her scrapbooking room!!!! We are sooo excited for her! Hope you all are having a good week!

Tandri and Brittni

Beach Day!!

Well this is our first official "At the beach" picture! In the background is Surfers Paradise. It is basically all along the coast, it only goes inward like maybe 7 blocks. So it is more of a coastal city. We had quite the interesting day at the beach! We found out very quickly after we got there that you are free to wear whatever you want....or nothing at all! I guess a lot of the girls don't want tan lines so they decide "Hey why even wear a top!" so that was a bit awkward. There were kids everywhere, and men, and ughh. So gross! We did convince ourselves to go swimming in the actual ocean today though. As we walked upon the beach you could see a whole bunch of "Stingers" that had been carried up. We took a picture of them because we thought they looked so cool! They are like mini jellifish and I guess they attach themselves to you and sting you quite hard, we have been told that it hurts a lot! There were so many washed up on the beach so we couldn't even imagine how many were in the actual water! You have to swim out pretty far to get into deep water though. There are a lot of sand hills that you have to walk through. We are officially done at B Smart, and we are so happy! It was just way too boring. We are ready to start working somewhere exciting! Today we just spent the afternoon shopping around and sitting by the water. I love it here how you can go look through all the stores and shop but then you can do it all again the next day and it never gets boring! haha. We then went and got a big load of grocerys to stock up the fridge. Luckily we found a cart lying in the road on the way home because it gets so tiring walking so far with all the grocerys. So here we are walking down main street pushing a grocery cart full of food. We have also gotten hooked on the show "The Biggest Loser" so we had to be home in time to watch that! Sitting out in the sun all day really tires you out so we are just spending the night relaxing watching some tv and reading. We have heard that the weather is soooo cold at home, so I guess we decided to come here at the right time! We wish that you could all come here and visit and see what we have been blabbering on about! I am so excited to hear all your replies and that people are actually reading this thing! We have so much fun telling you what we are up to each day. We really miss everyone though! And we absolutely love hearing from you and talking to you. I got to talk to Tami today and it just made my day so much better!!! We hope you are all doing well! Love Tandri and Brittni

Another week gone.....

Well the last week hasn't been to exciting for us....though we did get that job that we went to the interview for! So every morning we have been at work at 7:45a.m. and working until 3:00p.m. We worked for B Smart Communications which is an independant broker company who monitors all of the major phone companies here. So it was our job to call people and tell them about what the phone companys are doing to them. I guess they have to pay $30-$40 a month for line rental...I dont think we pay that in Canada. So it basically consisted of sitting on a computer all day and getting hung up on. It sucked but we thought we would stick it out because the hours were good, until we got our first paycheck. lol. Its based on commission and so its impossible to get a good wage until you are pretty experianced at it. So we decided that was enough and tomorrow we are going to find a different job. Everywhere here is hiring and so we are just going to find something that is more exciting. It has been really windy here the past couple of days because it is the cyclone season right now. We are too far south to get a cyclone here but up north they are having crazy rain storms and in one day they got a meter of rain...can you imagine that?!? They dont cancel school here because of snow, they cancel because of rain! It has already destroyed buildings so its a pretty big storm here right now. We are just getting the winds but still its so hot out. Saturday we went to the next town which is about ten minutes away called Broadbeach. They have this HUGE shopping center thats half inside and in the middle its cut out and everything is outside. There are so many stores and so much to look at so we spent the whole day there. We then went to the movie theatre here to see Dreamgirls...it cost us $30 for two people! A little bit more expensive then home! Today (Sunday) we went golfing again at the same course we were at before. Tandris golf club fell apart today as he was taking a shot, and it went just about as far as his ball did. haha. So tomorrow we are going to job hunting and see what we can find. Then we are probably going to lay on the beach and have a picnic. We havent gone swimming in the ocean yet because we are still too scared! Last week they shut the beach down that is only like 10 minutes away because there was a hammerhead shark...so we are hoping it did not make its way down to our beach! We are going to buy some body boards and try that out too....surfing looks way to hard. We have been looking on the internet a lot of places to travel while we are here. The family that we met a couple of weeks ago live in McKoy, Queensland which is right by the great barrier reef and they have invited us to come and stay with them for a couple days. McKoy is way north so while we are up there we are going to go to Airlie Beach which is also in the Whitesundays which is about 74 islands that are absolutley beautiful! We are so excited to go see that part of australia.....we just have to decide when to go! We have talked to so many people about where to visit and what to go see and there is just so much to do here I dont even think in the next five monthes that we are here we are going to be able to see it all. I can't wait to see whats next to come......

Tandri and Brittni