Intro to Darwin

It's the night before my camping trip to Kakadu National Park, and I should probably be packing for that instead of writing a blog post. You win some, you lose some.

It dawned on me the other day that I had yet to describe the place I'm staying at or tell you about the people in my group. First, I'll start with the city. Darwin is on the north shore of the Northern Territory in Australia. It's relatively small, with only about 100,000 people living here. Right now is really the only time you can visit because its the Dry season. Most areas become inaccessible during the spring and summer. I'm staying at a hostel that's on Mitchell Street, which is basically Darwin's main drag. The hostel is nice, it has a pool, a bar and wonderful bunk beds to sleep in. (Ok, so the bunk beds aren't that great, but anything looks nice after a 15+ hour plane ride.) There are 7 people in my Tourism group, including me. We're the smallest group, but I like it that way. We've had some quality bonding time these past few days, but more about that later. There are 4 guys (Jared, Pat, Matt and Jacob) and 3 girls (Hannah, Amanda and me). We all get along really well, so I'm really looking forward to exploring other cities with everyone.

Alright, now on to what I've been doing for the past couple of days. Wednesday was our first day of class and we got out early, so we decided to go to this fish feeding place that was advertised in a brochure I had picked up. I know fish feeding sounds lame, but this was actually really cool. You got to go into the water and the fish would eat the bread right out of your hands.

Here I am feeding the fish.

 

Here I am being grossed out when the fish touched my hand.

I tried to remember the types of fish, and there were milkfish, catfish, barramundi (which I ate today by the wharf), stingrays and a crocodilian something...there was also this crab that entertained all of us college kids for a solid 10 minutes. It was just the funniest thing to watch it try to catch the food. It's the simple pleasures in life. This was also our first group outing all together, so that's kind of cute.

Wednesday also happened to be the night of a big rugby game called the State of Origin. It's a best of 3 series between Queensland and New South Wales. We all walked down to Lizards to watch the game and our team won! (we were cheering for New South Wales because we go to University of New South Wales) I don't think I really understood any of it...I just cheered when everyone else did. It was fun nevertheless.

I've decided that each time I post I'm going to have a "Fun Story" section. Here's the story for this post. We discovered that we could see Crocosaurus Cove (a tourist trap along the strip) from our window and we could see crocodiles swimming around in their cage. This was our first croc sighting...so pretty anticlimactic. We also got to watch Aboriginal people perform for some group that was at Crocosaurus Cove. In short, we have the best room when it comes to creeping on people from the window. 

This has become kind of a marathon of a post, so I'll leave it here. In my next post I'll talk about my trip to the Mindil Beach Markets, and of course, my trip to Kakadu National Park! Guess I should start that packing now.

-Haley