Sunday, March 4, 2007

I haven’t written these past few days because I have hardly had time to breathe! Friday I had classes all day and went straight to an Irish pub with the med students afterwards. I stayed there for a while, then headed to the other side of campus to get some dinner with Len, Sadiq, and a bunch of other med students. I didn’t want to be out too late (since I had a very full day planned for Saturday), so a bunch of us just went back to St. Paul’s college common room and watched a classic Australian movie called “The Castle”. I think Dad would really like that movie. Also, Len made us all appetizers- kangaroo sausages with teriyaki sauce- but he didn’t tell us it was kangaroo until we were mostly done chewing!

This is at the pub. (L to R: Lester, Jackie, Janice, Bryan, Bi and Len)
Cronulla Beach (this is a picture of of the ocean pools that they built on the shoreline).

The next morning I got up pretty early (especially for a Saturday). I met Janice, Sadiq and Brooke at the aquatic center and we headed to Cronulla Beach for the NSW Surf Lifesaving Championships. Cronulla is about an hour on the train (southeast) and is where all those riots happened a few years ago. But, it is an AMAZING beach!! We missed our first train, so we didn’t end up getting there till after 10am. Alphabet (Brent’s friend who is the rescue director for north Sydney) met us at the beach and showed us all around the competition. He took us to the VIP area and to the administrative area for a while (since it was air conditioned). It was definitely the hottest day I’ve had since I’ve been here and we were not very comfortable. After watching the comp for a while (and winning a gold medal in the rescue tube relay- see picture), we headed to one of the restaurants to get some lunch. I had some really good fish!!

In the afternoon we spent a little time on the beach and swimming in the ocean (while Alphabet took care of our stuff). The waves were HUGE but really fun! About 5 minutes after we got out of the water, they closed the public swimming area because the surf was too big!

This is at the end of the paddleboard race.

This is Brent's friend, Alphabet, and me in the VIP area.

At about 5pm we headed back to the city and Janice and I rushed home since we had plans for the evening. We had tickets to a puppet show at the Opera House (a Canadian contact that Mom gave me had told us about it). It ended up being a pretty strange show (put on by a Canadian guy too), but it was still pretty neat to be at a show in the Opera House.

After the show, Janice and I met up with Len, Sadiq and Jacqui at a German Pub in the Rocks. I had a mango beer- which was actually pretty tasty. We didn’t stay too long since we wanted to check out the Mardi Gras stuff. It wasn’t that exciting or anything- but there were some pretty crazy costumes- and we did see one guy getting arrested and another guy try to snatch a girl’s purse (unsuccessfully).

It was really hard to get a bus, so we walked most of the way (and finally got a bus once we were almost all of the way home). It was a very late night.

Today I woke up around 11, but it was boiling hot so I didn’t sleep very well. I met up with Janice and Brooke at around noon and we headed downtown to run some errands together. At about 4:30pm I decided that I needed to go for a swim- so I headed back towards the pool and met my friend Tom there for a few thousand meters. The pool was really busy and I was really dehydrated, so I didn’t feel too well, but it was still nice to get in the water.

Here are the waves at Cronulla Beach...! Remember that pictures always make the waves look way smaller than they are!