One of the longest dayssssss of my life. I got little to no sleep Tuesday night, and then zero Wednesday night. It is now Thursday at 10 pm in Melbourne, so midnight NZ time, 4 am Pacific.

I left Dunedin at 915 pm Tuesday night and took a Knightrider bus to the Christchurch airport. Rather than just my head being on swivel because of a crazy driver, my whole body was. The stereotypes are dead on about guys that have to drive semi trucks and buses at night. He was on some combination of drugs because he was insane. He looked like he had just blown about 25 lines of booger candy and only had about ten teeth: "I don't give a shit about none of yalls bags, i got no responsibilities, make sure yall grab the right ones." I didn't even mention the amount of stutters and stalls in that quote. It takes four hours to get from Dunedin to Christchurch, but for some reason it took us 6.5. You meet some of the wildest characters on earth at NZ gas stations in the middle of the night, let me tell you.

By the time we reached the airport deliriousness was in the distant past. Our group collapsed on the airport floor with our bags as pillows. We were waiting for the international terminal to open at 4 am to check in and catch our 6 am flight to Melbourne. Accidentally slept through the opening and had to wait in line behind the whole city of Beijing to check in. That sucked. All of our flights between cities are at 6 am because they were the most economically efficient so I will be a zombie for a lot of this 19 day adventure. I "slept" the entire time on our flight from Christchurch to Melbourne so I was somewhat recharged for the day. We landed at eight and met up with Paiges twin sister by 10. I am so glad we don't have to pay for accommodation for a few nights in Melbourne. Saving me a good 100 bucks.

We had our priorities straight and went to the food market after dropping our stuff off. This place had the largest plethora of food I had ever seen in my entire life. Fresh vegetables, fruit, baked breads, meats, cheeses, nuts, dried fruit, EVERYTHING. I have never seen so many different kinds of meat in one place. Kangaroo...I am going to fry some up Saturday night for dinner. No joke at all. There were at least 15-20 different kinds of every single food group. Ridiculous. There was also a flee market. I would say it was like a 6x6 NYC block area. Definitely my favorite few hours of study abroad. I wish I were with my Dad because it was totally the kind of thing we would have loved together. As in, wake up at 8 am and dont leave til 8 pm because we are trying every single thing we could put in our mouths as fast as possible. They also had live ducks and chickens you could slaughter yourself. Almost bought a duck for eight bucks so I could let it go in honor of the U of O. I could tell by their faces that the locals weren't feelin it.

I walked around the city pretty much all day probably clocked north of ten miles on the ground. Melbourne University has 44,000 and the campus is amazing. The food is soooooo good everywhere I turn. I will not be able to eat the sushi at home I can already tell. I had prawn pizza for dinner for four bucks, are you kidding me? I hate to say this because I love Dunedin and New Zealand so much, but if I were to do it all over again, after one extremely biased day, I would have lived in Melbourne. This place is perfect for me. 3.8 million people, but it is very accessible. Reminds me a lot of San Francisco in terms of the art, food, public life, and transportation.

I am have hit the wall and feel like I am floating so that is probably a sign to crash. Paige and her identical twin are going out to bars to meet all of Abbeys friends, I am sleeping. Tomorrow is Good Friday here and its Easter weekend which means absolutely nothing to me, but apparently the city shuts down. Not very happy about that. I am going to the beach during the day tomorrow and am gonna just post in the sun. There is a missing ozone layer here so I plan to coat my body in SPF 45 sunscreen.

Goodnight guys. I'll try and check in before I leave for Gold Coast/Brisbane.