Nick in Cairns

This is the first time I've used an internet cafe. There is one free internet cafe (attached to a tourism shop) down the road, but it's always crowded so I'm paying by the hour for the convenience of using the hotel's internet cafe.

Speaking of tourism shops, there are so many of them in Cairns. I don't just mean shops selling discount plush koalas, either, though there are enough of them as well. I haven't seen this sort of thing before.
Every street on every block has one (or more) of these. They're shops that just organise packages for tourists. And they're always full of people. There are so many tourists here. Some of them try to masquerade as official information points, with the blue "i" symbol, but they're all the same. They're all small, one-room, hole-in-the-wall shops, but they're thriving here.
I'm going to try counting them all sometime...

I arrived in Cairns yesterday evening after a 2.5 hour delay at Rockhampton airport (make it 3 hours total wait at least, since Brett and Melanie did such a good job of getting me to the airport early :) ) . Thankfully I brought Fluxx, so I initiated Rinku in the game to pass the time.
Rinku, Deepani, and I met up with Russel and cohorts for dinner last night at a woodfired pizza place. Very nice food of course, but they're pretty much all the same (same for just about any cuisine, I guess).

Today, I got up early (hear that, Sarah?!) to help out at the conference opening - some big problems there that I'm not going to rant about because other people are going to be doing more than their fair share of ranting in the days to come.
Rinku, Deepani, Xiaolong, and I spent the rest of the day wandering about Cairns, which I'm getting the hang of. That's not hard though, because the city centre is very well laid out. It's just a grid of roads bordered on two sides by the sea, that's very easy to get around.
We went swimming in an artificial lagoon in the afternoon; went to a Thai restaurant for dinner. I love being spoiled on conferences :D
There wasn't anything else (productive) for me to do though, so no guilt. Today was just workshops, and I only registered for two tutorials that are on tomorrow. So tomorrow it starts.

I've got some good present ideas already though. In that sense I've been productive today :D

Time for me to give Sarah a call. I have to make sure she hears all this from me instead of reading it in my blog ;)