Get out your popcorn and Coke Zero (official sponsor of our trip, as we have drunk a lot of it), this is going to be a long one. I am gonna split this into two, first Sydney, then Byron Bay. I normally would neglect to write because nothing special has happened. On the contrary loads have happened since the last entry, but a restriction on internet access has made “updating the blog” exchangable with “searching for jobs” and “filing for tax number” which we felt you would understand :D
Now, we arrived in Sydney on the 20th of September and even though we arrived quite late, we quickly hurried over to the Sydney Harbor to have a look at the bridge and the iconic Sydney Opera House, which were beautifully lit and had loads of teeny tiny seagulls flying around them. The seagulls are disturbingly small, the Norwegian seagulls could eat them as a snack between meals. :D
Our hostel in Sydney is OK. It lacks the charm that made us fall in love with Sleepy Sam’s (Singapore), and we feel more like we are on a conveyor belt in a large factory. There are seven floors (we’re on the sixth which apparently is called South America) and there are loads and loads of people either coming to Australia or leaving. We shared a room with six others where there were new people everyday, although we managed to bond with an Irish girl, Leah, who is very sweet and talks a lot. She is staying in Sydney looking for a job in an office (she remarkably has a major as an accountant, something which we both found astounding, she doesn’t seem like a numbers kind of person at all) so we have made a deal to see her for New Year’s when we are planning on getting back to Sydney to celebrate.
A good thing about our hostel is that it provides guests with a free tour of the city. Thinking this would be a good opportunity to get to know people, and an excellent chance to get a promised pint of lager at the end, we set out expecting the whole thing to take about an hour… how wrong we were… 5 hours later we sat down in the hostel bar (named Sidebar) and took a well deserved break.
Joe, the guide (picture above), gave us a very thorough walk of Sydney and gave us loads of interesting tips (and loads of dry jokes). Apparently we are lucky for coming to Sydney after the Australian bicentennial in 1988 because half of the sights we saw were gifts from nations of the world (or McDonald’s) for that celebration. We had lunch on the stairs of the Sydney Opera House, which is as gorgeous up close as it is on pictures, majestic and stunning, and were told that the designer (apparently Danish) didn’t think of white sails when he designed the opera house, but rather the peal of an orange… You think about that one till I come home and explain it (unsuccessfully;). We also tried out the toilets in the facility, but were disappointed as they were nothing compared to the ones in Orchard Street, Singapore.
Trough the botanical gardens we met cacadoos (above), spiders and flying foxes (aussie for bats, pictured below). The bats were hanging upside down in the trees in broad daylight. Evidently they eat leaves all night, which intoxicates them and hang on the trees drunk all day. We were warned that should we experience a bat falling down, we can laugh oh yes yes, but I it starts crawling towards you, GET THE HELL AWAY!!! Now, bats can’t take off from the ground like a bird, but has to have a drop to be able to fly. If it happens to think your leg is a tree it can crawl up in, you might get infected with a deadly decease that some of them carry. Last girl it happened to was in isolation for two weeks before they were sure she didn’t have the disease.
The rest of our days in Sydney were spent doing practical stuff like taking our RSA’s (a six hour course about alcohol law in New South Wales (NSW). ANYONE serving alcohol needs to have one), getting our Medicare cards (so that we don’t have to pay for a normal doctor’s appointment, which saves time dealing with insurance companies) and bank accounts (Commonwealth; because they have the most ATM’s in Australia and Australia, being a bit behind the times, still charges your account if you withdraw money from another bank’s ATM?!?).
We decided quickly we wanted to get away from Sydney, not because we didn’t love it, because we think it is one of the most gorgeous big cities we have ever seen, but because we DO still think it will be easier to save money in a more rural community. So we bought our train tickets for Byron Bay, a surfers paradise 13 hours north along the east coast, 2 hours from Brisbane. There was a lot of snoring, baby crying and general annoyance on the train (and being the stingy girls we are, we didn’t opt for a bed so were sleeping in a chair) which made it difficult to sleep. But after 13 hours, the last two of which were in a bus with a bright yellow sunrise entertaining us (well at least Trine who was awake), we reached Byron Bay at 5.50 in morning were we are planning to stay for the next 3 months.
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