G'day! :)

I have no idea where to start.. EEK...prepare for ramblings!

flying into Sydney was absolutely amaaaaazing... a lot greener than I imagined and the water was so calm it almost looked liked a massive expanse of grey/blue land.. the sun was just breaking through the clouds and the light on the water was so beautiful. I managed to get a couple of hours sleep on the plane after watching "The Hangover" and laughing my head off! I stepped off the plane and imagined I would be faced with sweltering heat but it was actually quite cool! Can you believe that after months of hassle and worry about bringing all my pills and injections into Australia... I declared that I had prescription medicine when I arrived at the airport, the customs officers asked me the names of the medicines, which i listed (including the prohibited one!) and they just waved me through!! I shouldn't complain really because its a good result but just frustrated that i went to so much unneccessary effort to prepare!! I got a bus to my hostel and luckily was able to check in to my room and dump my bags then met up with Becca ( a a girl I met in Kyoto, Japan who is now in Australia too) and she helped me to get orientated and we went to Darling harbour. As we were walking across the bridge we saw people painting on canvas and stopped to watch... a lady told us about it being a 'realise your potential festival' and asked us if we wanted to do a painting.. every painting that is completed, they take a photo of and American Express donate money to charity. American Express also paid for the canvases, easels, paint etc.. I now officially am a fan of American Express! We had to paint some sort of symbol so I chose to focus on a small section of the necklace I was wearing to represent my travels and in the background I painted 4 different coloured swirls representing water, mountains, earth, sun on my travels. The background was bright pink as I think that is quite an exciting colour! Darling Harbour is so pretty (despite the abundance of sky scrapers and modern buildings) so we were really lucky to be able to spend the morning painting there for free.. and we got to take our paintings for free too! I have ripped mine off the frame and will send it home as i quite like it! After that, we had lunch and walked to the Opera House and Circular Quay. Becca showed me a really cheap supermarket called Coles which was about a 20 minute walk from my hostel so I went and stocked up on VEGETABLES (wooo so excited about vegetables! haha) and pasta and tinned tomatoes and went back to my hostel to make enough veggie pasta for lunch and dinners for days! Friday morning I met up with Becca again and we went to Manly - wow, what a gorgeous place and so chilled out too. The ferry ride over was gorgeous and when we arrived, were greeted with rows of beautiful old buildings in different pastel colours lining the streets by the beach. the beach was a beautiful expanse of white sand and as we walked round the beach head, found a little secluded bay which was amazing... really calm waters and much quieter than the main beach. We had a swim there which was absolute bliss - loads of brightly coloured fish darting around in the water which was such a pretty turquoise colour. We lay on the beach for a while and then went for more of a walk and then headed back to Sydney. Becca went back to her hostel to meet her friend Alex who'd just flown back from Gold Coast and I went back to my hostel.. as I was waiting in queue for the reception desk a girl came up to me and asked me about my i-to-i tshirt I was wearing.. she invited me out for drinks with her and her friends later and turns out the friend she is travelling with lives opposite the Bluebell pub in Liss! How weird is that.. she rides her horses past Barefoots all the time apparently! We then met a friend of hers who lives in Sydney but used to live in Steep, near petersfield and then a friend of hers who is Australian but her boyfriend had just sailed from Tahiti and he actually comes from Stroud, near Petersfield! It is such a small world! We went to a bar in Darling Harbour and had a few drinks and a boogie, met loads of other random people and then headed back to the hostel. One of the people I met was a guy called Andre who has spent the last THREE years travelling the world to discover the best surf spot.. lucky sod. Favourite place = Belize I will add that to my list of places to go once i've won the lottery.
Saturday morning I headed to Paddington like I said in my last post which is a really nice area - Sydney is like loads of little towns/villages rolled in to one big city, it is such a great place and has SOO much character. I went to the Saturday markets there and bumped into Becca and Alex so we walked to Hyde Park and around the area and then went seperate ways but arranged to meet up in the evening. one of my roommates, Isabel (from Belgium) was feeling a bit lonely so I invited her out and we all went to China town which was great and we had a bite to eat and then walked around Darling harbour. Sunday I decided I would spend the morning sorting out my oversized bag and have put aside loads of stuff I will only need for NZ and India and I'm going to leave all that in a bag at the hostel I'm currently in... The last hostel wanted to charge me $450 to store a small bag for 3 months, likewise for all the so-called backpacker service companies! Anyway in the afternoon, i headed for Coogee beach by reccommendation of P-Thom and was not dissapointed - a really lovely beach! Hoooowever, between siting on the grass and moving to the sand, I managed to lose my phone!! I went and asked the lifeguards where somebody would hand it in if they found it (and were nice enough to hand it in) and they called down to the lifeguards on the beach... turns out somebody had handed it in a few minutes previously! I was so relieved! Unfortunately the first thing they do when they find a phone is call whoever is listed as "mum" SOOOO poor mum had a call from a strange australian guy at 3am! Whoops, sorry mum.. I like to give your heart a good testing every now and then!
Monday I was picked up at 8am by my first organised tour bus!! Oooo! I was introduce to Mad Brad the wilderness explorer and we went to the Blue mountains and the tour was such good value! I thought I wouldnt like a organised tour but it was really good. We saw so many things including waterfalls, aboriginal carvings, wild kangaroos and wild cockatoos. The scenery up in the blue mountains is breathtaking! We went to an unofficial lookout point of the valley which had no barriers/nets/bars and the biggest sheer drop I have ever seen....it was very windy so it was a little nervewracking being stood up there given how clumsy I am and how uneven the ground was!! I survived anyway! We walked down and up something like 600 steps to get to a waterfall which was worth every step! There was also a great view of the 3 sisters rock formation which according to some strange aboriginal legend is 3 girls who were turned to stone. They fell in love with 3 men from a different tribe and so war broke out and an aboriginal witchdoctor turned them to stone to save them from being killed (with the intention of reversing it once the war was over) but WHOOPSIE the witchdoctor got killed instead so that buggered up that plan!! We got dropped at the nearest dock to the foot of the blue mountains national park and got a boat ride back to Circular Quay in Sydney which again was beeeaoooootiful! Along the route I saw loads of mega flash houses with their own private beach and jetties etc... OOOOH I WANT ONE! I got back into Sydney at about 8pm and ran to my hostel to pick up my backpack and call the hostel I was moving to.. anyway turned out their check in time was 10pm so I had dinner at the other hostel (met a really nice girl called Gloria and swapped pizza slices!) and loaded up my bags like a donkey and set off... up hill....knackered and exhausted for what felt like an hour long walk to the new hostel in Surry Hills suburbs. I definitely slept well on Monday night! The new hostel is in a lovely old building with loads of character and people here are cool and friendly...
Ummmm yesterday afternoon I went back to coogee, did a bit of sunbathing and then went to the supermarket and bought another mass of veggies and some rice, queued for ages to use the kitchen (you have to queue for everything in this hostel but it is loads cheaper!) and cooked a veggie biriyani nom nom nom. I think I am turning vegetarian haha not really .. Peter don't panic, it is just cheaper! Today I went to Newtown a funky artsy area of Sydney which was brilliant... so many cool little shops including one shop which was lined floor to ceiling (almost) with buttons... pink buttons, blue buttons, yellow buttons, gold buttons, any colour you want, they have got... patterned, plain, big, small, bobbly, flat, material, stone, plastic, metal... Seriously, i have never seen so many buttons in my life and dont ask my why I loved it, i have no need for buttons but i thought it was fab. There were lots of great little record shops and even a cool little cafe/bistro where you can take along your own LP's. In the afternoon I went to the Botanic Gardens by Katy's reccommendation.. thanks Katy! They are awesome... so pretty and there were loads of bats there which I thought would freak me out but they were mesmerising and actually kind of cute-looking! I was sat outside the sydney opera house trying to work out what time it was in england and obviously looking miserable in my deep concentration when someone walked past and said "oh dear, how can you be sad when you have that in front of you" and pointed to the opera house! I said i wasnt sad, just deep in thought haha! We got talking and turns out he is from Exeter but was taking part in a round the world sailing race which had left at Gosport and he'd just done the Perth to Sydney section for 14 days. He took me to the Opera House bar and plied me with champagne and talked about random nonsense. Once again I am sure I have loads more to tell you but I am getting a numb bum so I am off to bedxx