For the last week I have been really hung up on the fact that here instead of gummi bears, they have jelly babies.  The little jellies are shaped like babies and I think it is the weirdest thing.  Who would want to eat babies?

 In Australia, Tasmania is the butt of most jokes.  Since it is isolated from the rest of the country, people say that everyone there is related.  Most of the jokes have to do with people having two heads, one tooth or just being bogan (hillbilly).  The first person I met there was the shuttle driver from the airport to the hostel and he was definitely bogan.  When he smiled and only had one tooth I wanted to laugh so hard because it was exactly what everyone had told me.  Luckily, every other person I met there was normal.  

I flew in to Hobart on Friday and immediately made my way over to the Cadbury chocolate factory to meet up with Allie and two of her friends.  I hadn't eaten all day, so I proceeded to eat my weight in free chocolate and then felt incredibly sick afterwards, but it was really fun.  They have a store in the factory where you can buy all the Cadbury chocolates for really cheap.  Of course I bought a ton and have eaten half of it already.  I also decided to buy this giant box of Cadbury Raisin Brunch Bars for $12, thinking that the box was filled with individual boxes of the bars.  When we got outside and opened it, it was just a giant bag filled with unwrapped bars.  All four of us ate these bars all weekend and somehow I still ended up bringing home like 100!

I also got to drive on the wrong side of the road in Tassie.  Saturday morning we rented a car to drive to Cradle Mountain.  I was the first one to drive and ended up driving the whole 5 hours to Cradle Mountain.  The roads were crazy small and curvy.  It was a little bit scary, but we made it and driving on the wrong side of the road is much easier than I thought it would be.  My biggest problem was that everything in the car is flipped, so I kept hitting the windshield wipers when I was trying to use my turn signal.  We also saw some sort of road kill, about every 10 minutes.  It was pretty gross.  We were also really sad because we wanted to see a Tasmanian devil, but we didnt see any live ones.  We also thought it was so funny that all of the big towns marked on the map were not big towns at all.  We would think, okay we are coming up on a big place and there would be a few restaurants and buildings and then thats it.  Even Hobart, as one of their biggest cities, was not a real city.

By the time we got to Cradle Mountain, it was around 2 pm.  It was really cold and we didnt have time to do a really long hike, so we just did a 2 hour hike around one of the lakes.  It was one of the most beautiful places I have ever been.  I actually texted one of my friends from Tassie and told her that I was going to move in with her because I loved it so much.  We were driving back to Hobart when it got dark and the stars were so amazing.  Earlier last week I had gone to the beach with a few people at 6am to swim and look at the stars.  It is weird that theres different stars in the sky.  I kept looking for the big dipper.  Not being near a big city though, the stars were absolutely amazing.  

Sunday we drove down to Bruny Island just off the South East corner of Tassie.  Again, we kept laughing at how small everything was.  One of the big places to see on the island was Blighs Museum.  The whole museum was about the size of our living room at home.  We did get to see a penguin though.  We mostly just drove around the island since it was raining and really cold out.  Back in Hobart, we went on this ghost tour of one of the old penitentiaries.  It was pretty dumb, but the scariest part was the fact that the guy giving the tour looked EXACTLY like one of the photos of a prisoner names Isaac Daly.  He might have been the only ghost there.