Cairns, continued

I have been in Cairns for 5 days. Actually I like this place. The weather is not as hot as I thought before I came here. It could be hot around noon, but in the nighttime it's very comfortable. Although it should be rain season here, but so far it has rained only once last night.

This is a tourist's city, especially Japanese tourists. There on the streets are a lot of Japanese tourists. You can see Japanese signs everywhere, even in the Woolworths supermarket. When I went to find a job at a hotel, they asked me if I can speak Japanese; when I handed in my resume at the Grunt job agency, they asked if I can speak Japanese as well. There are 3 cities in Japan namely Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya with direct flights to Cairns, no wonder there are so many of them here.

This is also the first place in Australia I find there is a night market like that kind I found in Singapore. The scale is smaller that that of Singapore of course, but you can find souvenir shops, clothes and decoration shops as well as more than 10 food shops in the night market. There is a good thing about having dinner in the night market, everynight evening after 8:30 the 4 cafeterias offer meals originally priced at around AUD$12 at a great AUD$5. They will give you a plastic plate and you can put on as much food as you can. That is really a bargain. I tried twice with different cafeterias, and they were both not too bad.

Cairns city place is not very big, but it has a big shopping mall with more than 100 shops, a main street from the shopping mall to the esplanade where you can find a man-made lagoon to swim in, a lot of tour shops you can book tours to the Great Barrier Reef and rainforests, a lot of pubs, backpacker hostels, restaurants, souvenir shops, boutiques, and 2 Global Gossip internet places where you can use the internet for AUD$1 for the first hour, etc. Generally you won't soon get bored with this place.

I met 3 Taiwanese friends here. One of them I have known since in Darwin, she has left for Osaka yesterday, and will return to Taiwan next week. The other twon are a girl coming here just for holidays and has left for Brisbane; the other is a boy who's been in Australia for 2 months only but has been to many cities already, he has left for Mareeba, a twon about 60KM out of Cairns, for work. I think there are not many Taiwanese people here, I'm also leaving soon, but I'll return months later.