Tasmania!!

This past week we got to go visit Tasmania! Every time we told people we were headed there, they kept telling us two things: 1. it's beautiful there and 2. it's freezing there! Well, it was definitely beautiful, and surprisingly wasn't too cold which was nice. We got to go with a school group- long story short: the lady that works at the place we've been volunteering at (Janet), her husband works at a school, and suggested we join his class on this trip. It was just him and his class of 12 seniors in high school. They're more of the rougher kids (we heard some interesting language on the trip...), but they were nice to us and loved talking to us about America. It was definitely fun. Mainly it was great because it was a super cheap trip for us, but we found out why it was so cheap- we were staying in a hostel.. haha. Granted, it wasn't that bad (just that we weren't expecting it), but I'm super impressed with all of you people who spend months in hostels across europe. I don't think I could do it.

Here's a cute little house that we saw in Hobart, which is the capital of Tasmania (known to the locals simply as "tassie"- pronounced 'tazz-ee.') It's a very historic place.

This is called "the Tazman's arch." Getting out of the bus we had no idea what we were about to see, but it was definitely worth it! The picture doesn't really show how cool it was- the water was like wayy down there.
For every 100 pictures of scenery I've taken, there's one picture of me and Jen...
On the drive up to the summit of Mount Wellington, we saw this waterfall. So naturally, we filled up our water bottle with it. Yum!

Here's a picture of Hobart kind of, with Mount Wellington in the background. See that cloud covering the top? You're about to see the view from within it..
So here we are at the top. It was a clear day, but this cloud totally enveloped us by the time we had been up there for like 5 minutes! It was an incredible view though- what you could see of it at least.

The class rented a small bus to do all of our traveling in, and we ended up sitting at the back, and we became bff with these 3. We nicknamed ourselves the "BBC"- back of the bus crew. In the back is E-Man (short for Emmanuel), and in the front is James and Stacy. James lived in America last year, and he and Stacy are going back for a visit in a few weeks, so we had lots to talk about. E-Man has lived all over the world, including various desolate parts of Africa, and speaks 6 languages. Fun times. We taught them how to play "this is so much fun," and "boom, snap clap." They loved it.
Oh, and pure joy- we got to visit the famous Cadbury factory in Hobart- which is the largest chocolate factory in the world. Cadbury is Australia's chocolate, and it's way better than anything we have in America I must say. Here we are kissing the iconic Cadbury Freddo the frog.
On the last day we visited this adorable little historic town called Richmond, which probably had a population of like 500 people (all of Tasmania kind of felt like that). This bridge was built completely by convicts, and it's the one of the oldest bridges in Australia. Super cute.
Here's the view from atop the bridge. Such a pretty spot!
We're off in the morning to go camping up the coast 7 hours away for a week, so I'm sure we'll have some interesting stories when we get back! I'm praying that there will be showers there...