Last Friday was a calm day, touch (basically a girl’s version of rugby where the play stops when the player with the ball gets touched…I think full on tackle would be more interesting!) instead of soccer in the afternoon, then dinner and a movie with Kathleen and Chris, an Australian guy we’ve gotten to be good friends with. I watched Green Street Hooligans for the first time, so now I want to go to England for a soccer season and be a hooligan more than ever, except maybe with a few less fights. There was a bonfire on the beach that night, so the three of us went to North Gong Beach after the movie and found more of an acoustic/drum dance with fire twirlers, rather than a bonfire. Still, there were hula hoops, and I hadn’t been to the beach at night until then, so we had a good time just hanging at the beach and came back at a reasonable hour.
Saturday, at the crack of dawn, I woke up to collect Jackie from the airport and explore Sydney, the first time for us both. We made contact in the airport around 7:30am and went straight to the hostel to drop our bags and begin the day, which started at the Sydney Botanic Gardens. One thing we noticed, other than the gorgeous trees, loud birds, and pretty harbor: there were so many people out jogging! We decided can only hope to live in as active a city when we grow up. If we make it to an active city like that, we’ll be even more excited if we actually participate in those early morning runs! One of the most memorable sight-seeing moments of the day would have to be coming over the hill and seeing the Sydney Opera House in the distance across the water, the Harbour Bridge (ew, Australian spelling!). It’s happening less and less frequently as I get used to living here, but sometimes it still takes my breath away and makes me giggly that – oh my God – I really am in Australia! This was another of those moments. Of course we took heaps of pictures then just enjoyed the sunshine as we looked at the beautiful city of Sydney.
We continued our walk through the gardens and made our way to the front of the Opera House, which is just a cool building. We got on a ferry to take us to Watsons Bay where we stopped at a lookout over the rocks and a cliff face. From the lookout, you could also look back over the city and see the bay with the bridge behind it. Pictures certainly don’t do the view justice, and words can’t really describe the beauty of everything we saw in Sydney throughout the day, but I’ll try my best to describe it in some way or another! Jackie and I ate at Watsons Bay, just your basic “fish and chips,” with gelato for dessert, all of which were delicious. After walking around for a bit, we decided to catch the ferry back so we could see the rest of the city, our first stop being one of the libraries in Sydney right next to the harbor. We spent a decent amount of time in the library, considering that there are libraries everywhere, but who can resist a huge library in an old-fashioned building in the middle of the city?
Once we could draw ourselves away from the library, we sought out the Rocks, the oldest part of Sydney with great architecture and cool shops and cafes. We found the small artisan’s market that’s open on the weekend and spent a decent amount of time just looking at all the cool crafts and listening to the guy performing with his guitar at one end of the stalls. They had such cool crafts, mostly Australia oriented kinds of things (go figure!), and I definitely plan to go back for some souvenirs. We made our way back south toward Darling Harbour for some shopping before going back to the hostel and cleaning up for dinner. We managed to find a Chipotle-esque Mexican place (quick side note: I miss Chipotle so much, it’s kind of ridiculous. The things I would do for a bowl, lime chips, and guacamole! Parents, if you’re reading and want to greet me at the airport with a burrito in hand in a few months, I’ll be forever in your debt.) and had a beer that rejuvenated us after a long day of sightseeing, so we made the executive decision to catch the train back to Wollongong instead of staying in the hostel overnight. Turns out the spurt of energy didn’t last long, and we both fell asleep on the train on the way back and called it an early night when we finally made it to I-House.
Jackie and I had another calm day on Sunday just walking down the beach and around downtown Wollongong. We went out at night, but not many people from I-House were out so we trekked back to the house fairly early, having a great bonding session along the way. I unfortunately had class in the morning but came back for Jackie in between to show her around campus. We had a slight misadventure on Monday night as we sought out Indian food along the beach, only to find out that the restaurant is closed on Mondays. We passed North Gong pub on the way back and contented ourselves with burgers and fries (probably the closest to an American burger that I’ve found! Not that I’m completely preoccupied with food…) before heading home for the night.
I skipped out on classes on Tuesday to go to Crooked River Winery with Jackie during the day Tuesday where we tried some incredible wines and ports. We both bought a bottle of wine and appreciated the beautiful scenery of the mountain that outlines the valley where the grapes grow. Behind the hills sprawling from the mountains, you can see the ocean and the city of Gerringong. These pictures are great, but they don’t even begin to do the view justice. When we finally left the winery, we got on the first bus that came by the Gerringong train station (there was track work, so buses were being used in place of the trains). Turns out it was going the opposite direction than what we wanted, so we took a detour to the end of the line in Bomaderry where we had tea for the hour while we waited until the bus turned back around to go the direction we wanted. Despite our unplanned adventure south, we made it back to I-House in time to go to a friend’s trivia night fundraiser event. We didn’t excel in the sports section, but we held our own on entertainment and general knowledge type questions and had fun competing against the other fifteen tables. We stopped for tea at a friend-of-friends and played cards for the rest of the night before getting dropped back off at I-House. It was another night of laughs and fun, and I was so glad to get to share the great people I’ve met here with someone from home!
On Wednesday, I went back to classes while Jackie checked out Nan Tien temple before we met at uni to go to UniBar, yes, the university’s bar on campus! We had a drink with Kathleen, Chris, and one of his friends before Jackie went back to I-House and I went to my last class. When I got out, Jackie and I finally went for the Indian food that we were absolutely craving – and it didn’t disappoint! The mango lassi and chicken tandoori were heavenly, as was the garlic naan. We came back in time to get ready to go out to the Grand, but it was another quiet night and we came home early again. Jackie and I got up on Thursday to walk the beach and watch the waves, which were bigger than I’d ever seen them. There were plenty of surfers to watch, so we hung around for a fair bit and generally marveling at the fact that we were sitting on an Australian beach watching people surf on a quiet afternoon. We went back to Crown Street for some shopping before going back to I-House for dinner and pregaming for the week’s big night out, Hostage’s black light party. I-House filled up more than one party bus, and I finally got to show Jackie what going out in Australia is like. The club stayed pretty crowded the entire night, and the handful of I-House people were among the last to leave when the club closed, at which point Jackie, Mitchel, one of the Colorado guys we hang out with often, and I walked to Macca’s for a late night meal where we ran into another group of I-House friends who (thankfully!) offered us a ride home. Some of us split off to watch a movie in the Red Room to wrap up the night and went to bed.
Friday proved to be another quiet morning and Jackie and I packed up for our weekend trip to the Blue Mountains. Kathleen, Jackie, Mitchel, Cassie (a fellow Hoosier! not that I’m technically a Hoosier, but still), and I caught the train for what was an unforgettable train ride. After transferring trains in Sydney with our heavy, irritating luggage, we made it onto one of the older model trains to Katoomba Station, where our directions told us to get off. Turns out, it was the wrong stop, which we only found out after getting off the train in the foggy, cold mountain town with all of our luggage (which included food for eight people for the weekend) and trekking a quarter-half mile before realizing that the hotel where we were meant to check in was nowhere in sight. We doubled back to a small pub to ask directions only to find out that we needed to go another few stops into the mountains. So, we waited another forty or so minutes for the train to take us three more stops up the line into the Blue Mountains.
The stop where we actually got off was called Blackheath, and it was just as foggy and dismally cold as Katoomba, but even more dead. It was only around nine o’clock, but all the shops were closed up, as were a number of the restaurants. This is very atypical for the states, but things tend to close up much earlier in Australia than in the US, but there was still an eerie feeling with the fog and our lack of confidence in our directions. We made our way down the street of antique shops to what looked like the single traffic light in town and found the hotel where we were to pick up our key for our cabin. The five of us struggled our way into a restaurant/bar under the hotel sign and were handed our key and roughly drawn map by the woman behind the bar, amid endless stares from the fairly crowded bar and multiple “Are you moving in with all those bags? Hehe” kind of remarks. Once out of the bar, we deciphered the map and started our way to the cabin. Within a minute of walking, we were in complete darkness with streetlights far and few between and a stray car whizzing by on occasion. I don’t know who said it first, but it really felt like the start of a bad horror movie: five American college students in the mountains of a foreign country with all their luggage and a sketchy map who just left a townie-type bar where they were mocked before going outside to look for their cabin in the cold, dark, foggy night. We eventually found our street and walked all the way to the end, looking for our cabin number among the little cottage-y houses, then realized that the road stopped. Two small dirt trails led down the hill at the end of this road under a street lamp, and we could see a few lights down the trail, though they were obscured by the trees which started the forest that went we don’t know how far because the lighting was so poor. Cue creepy, high-pitched violins for the horror movie music…
…and then the relief, because nothing bad ever happens on the first night of the college students’ vacation in these kinds of movies, of course. We found our cabin tucked in a group of smaller cottage/cabins just before the end of the road and finally set our bags down. My shoulder had gone numb before we made it off the train’s platform forty minutes prior, but I was thankful for the relief. Until we realized that one of the bedroom doors, the room us girls had claimed, was in fact unlocked This shot would show the girls exchanging anxious glaces, then one of them saying something reassuring or a joke like, “oh what are you worried about, an ax murderer?” and everyone laughs and clams down, not yet understanding the dramatic irony. This conversation actually did happen, but we were too eager to get food, so we locked the door, cranked the thermostat, and headed back into town for a dinner of burgers and fries (the part where the Americans feel at home and at peace with something familiar despite the scary setting, lulling them into a false sense of security).
When we got back to the cabin, we realized that it was as cold inside as it was outside and bundled up while we tried to figure out what was wrong with the heating, though we never did get it working all weekend. When Elana and our two other friends made it to the cabin over an hour later (they’d left Wollongong later to avoid missing class), they found us curled up in blankets and sweatshirts, asleep on the couch with a rugby game on the TV. Some party animals we are! We eventually got our energy up and had a great time playing games and hanging out for the night before turning in to prepare for our hike the next morning (shown in our horror movie as the montage of the students laughing, joking, and having fun while the killer/monster lurks outside, the parting shot of this scene being of us sitting around the kitchen table, our laughter muffled as the camera zooms away from the window and the eerie music starts up again).
I’ll leave our adventure there for the time being since I’m lucky to be hosting Jenn this week, and we’re getting ready to go to UniBar for a cheeky drink before my last class of the day, because who doesn’t want to get a beer on campus at the university-run bar? More to follow shortly – I promise! Apologies on the delay with this post. From now on, I’m going to try posting more frequent, shorter posts. We’ll see how that goes. Thanks for following, and take care back home =)
Here and there,
Kiley
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