Hi neighbors!
Please join me in welcoming my son Alex to Vox! He's leaving tomorrow for a semester in Brisbane, which he plans to blog about. Any comments will be welcome, to encourage him to continue… š
And the goodbye is for my "little" boy – although you've been away from home for 4 months before, it's never been on the other side of the planet, so it might be a little harder (speaking for myself, anyway). Thank goodness for Skype and email and blogs!
Where have the days gone? 
Email and happy hour are excellent for keeping contact with the kids.Don't think we could stay away as long without it.Hope you get to visit as well after Alex has settled in.
We just have to figure out the timing on when will be the best time of day to Skype.
Yes, we are planning to visit at the very end of his stay, in November. I'm already very excited about it!
Wish him good luck from xmangerm.
Good luck to Alex! I'm sure he will enjoy Brisbane – a little more tropical than DC (though today the humidity here is jungle-like!).
I use Skype all the time to talk & message my children and when my husband travels we use it too. It is great.
When you go I hope you get to see more than just Brisbane.
I have been thinking since my comment – perhaps the hardest thing Alex will find is the metric system. When I came here and had to go "backwards" I found figuring out the temperature and how much meat/cheese I needed the hardest things!
Thanks for the well-wishes! Unfortunately, we only have two weeks available for our visit in November, so we plan to just travel by train or car down the coast from Brisbane to Sydney, with a day or so in each of those cities, then a week in New Zealand.
That's a good comment about the metric system, although he did learn it in school and used it in science classes – and we've been to Europe several times too which helps give us a feel for the relative sizes of things. So hopefully it won't be too difficult.
As of right now, I see by Qantas' website that his plane should be landing in Cairns in about 1/2 hour – I'm assuming that he got on the plane in San Francisco last night, made his connection in Sydney and that he's ON the plane to Cairns š When he called from SF last night, he'd met some other American students who are in the same program (AustraLearn), so I assume they're helping each other figure out the connections, though he's a fairly seasoned traveller, so I'm sure he's fine. [He'll be in Cairns for a few days for AustraLearn "orientation" – hitting the beach I think really.]