At the Palace Backpacker hotel, I made a rare find: another 30-ish resident. Claudia is from East Germany, and she and I toured Brisbane together by foot.

Journal and photos by Nancy Olson

I woke up at 3:30 in the morning in a state of confusion. I thought it was morning. I mean, I thought it was a decent our of the morning and time to wake up. I was in a 9-person dorm, and one of the Swedish girls was talking in her sleep. I had a weird feeling that bugs were crawling all over me, too. I kept thinking something was crawling on me and biting me, so I couldn't fall asleep. Finally, I put my headphones on and drifted off.

I woke up again at 0800. I got up and went to the Internet cafe to post some more of my journals. The e-mail I'd sent to Steve Erwin's zoo bounced, so I sent it again.

Tired of the Internet, I left to do some window shopping and walk around. I need some running shorts so I can start a regular running program here. The problem is, I am too broke and too cheap to buy any. Everything in Australia is super-expensive.

I did my laundry and goofed off before returning to the Internet for more typing. Also, I had to Google these red dots on my skin. What are they? They don';t really itch, but they are definitely not appealing, and I want to get rid of them! Google didn't really give me any clues as to what it can be.

Back at the dorm, I met Claudia from Germany. She's 29, so it was nice talking to someone closer to my age for a change. The rest of our little dorm roommates are probably about 22 or so. She and I went down to the Backpacker grill in the building and watched the partiers dance and schmooze. In Australia, when the clubs play music, they also play the music video on a bunch of televisions in the club, so we watched music videos and tried to talk over the loud music. At midnight, we'd had enough.

Tomorrow, we plan to go to the park oand the botanic gardens and maybe do some biking or roller blading. It'll be fun.

Mileage: 0
Weather: Hot/Nice
Final Location: Brisbane

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