Toodaloo Bondi and Melbourne !

It's been a while since I updated. Again, so much has happened that I probably don't even remember everything. Last time I wrote we had stayed at Surfside Backpackers for about two weeks, well, we ended up staying for a whole month haha! It is just the best place ever, awesome people and the hostel itself was just great. It was, I have to admit more on the expensive side, now that Christmas and New Year is getting so close the prices shoot up even more. For the most part we payed around 166-190 euros a week, which was about 30AUD a night, but right now prices are up to 40AUD/night. When it comes to Christmas and New Year I don't even want to say how much they are!

I'm gonna go ahead and start telling things from where I left off and try to remember what we've done so far!

So, we had been in Bondi for over a week when I last wrote, the rest of that week we layed on the beach, drank some goon and just hanged out around the hostel. On Sunday we walked the Coastal Walk, which goes from Bondi Beach to Coogee Beach. I had heard it was long, but not THAT LONG! Jesus Christ it was something like 6-7km! I was wearing flipflops, ouchiee. Yea we took a taxi back to Bondi haha!

                               

Monday and Tuesday we spend on the beach again. What was also awesome about Surfside is that every Tuesday they had a PARTY BUS!!! It left the hostel at around 10:15pm and took us to a club in Kings Cross called The Gaff. I had some good Tuesdays haha! Every week Tuesday nights (and all the other nights we went out..) we always had major clothing crisises(?), because I didn't drag a whole lot of party clothes here... Me and Johanna mostly went through each others bags and clothing options and many times I was wearing her clothes and she wore mine haha.

Wednesday after our first Gaff visit was just a slow day, we did nothing. Thursday we took a bus to Bondi Junction again to go shopping for some party clothes etc since we were going out again. We went to a bar close to the hostel called BB's. Small place but pretty nice. We continued to Bondi Hotel. It's a hotel but they have a bar downstairs. That was the eventful night when the manager thought Emmi was too drunk because she was talking to some people and wobbling like she always does. So he decided to throw her out. Me and Johanna went outside to talk some sence to the guy, none of us was really drunk. What ended up happening is we got thrown out too because we talked back to the manager.....oooh boy.

Friday was one of those days that just flew by, so was Saturday until it got to about 6pm. There was a french guy at the hostel and it was his birthday, so a lot of us at the hostel went to the backyard to celebrate. James, an american guy who somewhat worked at the hostel bought pretty much all the booze so it was a cheap night haha! We had a lot of fun, but ended up staying at the hostel. Backyard always closed at 10pm and silence inside at 11pm. At least people were pretty much thrown out from the kitchen/eating area downstairs at 11pm.

Sunday was again slooow until later afternoon when we went out to the city to see Emmi's sister's friend Jenny. We were supposed to meet her sometime around 4pm. Well, it was raining and the bus stop was so full of people! We were lucky to get on one of the first buses that came. It was completely packed and on top of that it was rush hour. We pretty much didn't move. Usually it takes us about 30mins to get to Circular Quay, that day it took us 1h 40 min!! Unbelievable. It was incredibly frustrating.

Sunday was the day the rain really started. It rained for like 6-7 days. From Monday all the way through Thursday all we pretty much did was eat and watch movies at the hostel. It just rained and rained and rained. Good thing some english guys had a blockbuster card and I think James payed for them every time so we just enjoyed and watched the movies with them, lucky us ::)

Friday it still rained but we were a little more productive, yay! We once again headed off to Bondi Junction. Johanna had to return her Internet stick because it didn't work on her computer and I needed a new dress for the night. It was Friday so another drinking night at the hostel. First we went to BB's, from there we went to McDonald's to get some food. Everything closes at 1pm so we had to eat before continuing to Bondi Hotel haha!

Saturday was finally a sunny day again! We went to the beach but it ended up being a very cloudy day so we didn't stay for long. The original plan was to go to Blue Mountains on Sunday and leave for Melbourne on Monday but Johanna and me wanted to have some fun on Saturday and drink all the goon we had left. Goon is pretty much the only cheap alcohol you can get here, everything else is soooooo expensive! A bottle of Rekorderlig (those who don't know it's Swedish cider) costs 8 bucks (500ml)!!!? Seriously overpriced. Anyway, we ended up booking Blue Mountains for Monday and the bus to Melbourne for Tuesday.

Sunday was a beach day and then earlyearly on Monday morning we took a bus to Bondi Junction and a train to Sydney Central Station where the bus to Blue Mountains left. Pick up time was 8:10am and we stepped out of the train at 8:09am, whoops! We ran a little at made it almost on time!

Bus trip took about 2-2,5 hours with 2 short stops. I was so tired I slept a good 30min-an hour of the beginning. Our first stop was Flat Rock, it was super high and the view was so pretty! The weather was perfect too, yay! Next stop was the famous 3 sisters. We looked at them from the top, the bottom, the side, everywhere! Going down the steps to the level of one of the sisters was so tough. I can definitely tell I haven't exercised in a while hahhaha. Not funny. The belly needs to go too, it has accumulated a little too much!

Flat Rock, Blue Mountains

                             

After the sisters we drove off to see Katoomba Falls. Not a very exciting waterfall, if it had rained more it probably would be nicer. After the Falls we drove to Katoomba city to get something to eat. We had brought our own stuff so we didn't get anything. Then it was time to head to the rainforest. We walked down like a gazillion steps, whooow. Some crazy people walked those steps back up, we took the scenic railway whatever it was called. It cost us 11AUD, definitely not worth 11 dollars, but it did the job of getting us back up.

On the way back we tried to spot some wild kangaroos, but we only saw one that was pretty much hiding in a bush. The rest of them were so far away on the shade that we couldn't really see them...We were dropped off at Kings Cross where we took a bus right back to Bondi.

Then it was Tuesday and time to check out. Check out time was at 11am, but our bus didn't leave until 8pm, so we hung around the hostel with the few cool people that were still left. This week pretty much all the fun people left, some left on Monday, we left Tuesday and the last good people left on Wednesday. It definitely made it easier to leave when we knew all our friends left too.

Now to Melbourne...

We left Surfside behind on Tuesday November 29^th. We took a bus to Melbourne (yes, a bus). It took us 12 hours to get here. The other finnish girl, Johanna, who we met at Surfside is travelling with us, at least for now, yay! Never know where life takes us. Anyways, we're staying in St Kilda in a hostel called Home Travellers Motel. People at Surfside told us that St Kilda is the place to be so here we are, but truthfully, nothing seems to be working out for us here. Sometimes I feel like Surfside was so good that nothing could ever be better, which really is not a good thing, because we still have so much to do and see! Just have to get over it. There's more though. I started to get sick while still at Bondi, just a sore throat and cauhg but during the bus ride everything got worse, I was extremely congested, caughing my lungs out and my ears felt really blocked. It wasn't long until my ear started hurting so much that I absolutely had to go see a doctor and surprise, I have an ear infection. Oh yay. I'm NEVER sick back home and now I have the worst flu+an ear infection. Melbourne definitely doesn't suit me well!! Ok I know I can't blame Melbourne for everything, but it seems like everything bad happens here!

Actually when we got out of the bus and walked to a taxi, the driver told us we needed to get a bigger taxi since we had so much stuff. Lucky for us a bigger one came up in about 5 minutes but that's pretty much all the luck we had. He drove us to St Kilda BUT dropped us off on a completely wrong street. I told him the address very clearly twice, but no. The street where he thought our hostel was was cut off at some point so he told us that we needed to walk about 100m to get there, well, the walk was quite a bit longer!! Good thing we found a map and found the street where our hostel actually was located......

We found our hostel eventually. We had booked 5 nights here and the guy at the desk told us that we need to change rooms after 3 nights. I don't know why since we can all still stay in the same room? What's also kinda dumb is you have to check out by 10am but you can't check into the next room until 1pm. Where's the sence in that?

Anyway, we got here on Wednesday morning around 9am and had to wait around until that 1pm to get into our room. We were sooooo tired after that 12 hours on the bus! It was impossible to get confortable enough to sleep...So when we got to our room we jumped into bed and slept. Well, tried on my part. I woke up and turned my head and that's when my left ear just popped and started hurting SO BAD. It was around 4:30pm and I had to wake Emmi up and tell her to come with me to the reception to get me a doctor's appointment. I got one for 9:40pm. What I did was take a couple of painkillers which actually helped A LOT, thank god for that. I couldn't have handled that pain for 5 hours!! When I went to the doctor he took a look on my good ear and decided it was fine, then he looked at my left and went WOOOW that's gotta be painful! I was like yes, definitely painful. What I have is called otitis externs, it's an ear infecton caused by water that's gotten stuck in the ear (or something like that). So swimming in the ocean at Bondi most likely caused it. I got a prescription and now I have to put ear drops 3 times a day for 3-5 days.

Ear drops...

                                                 

Thursday and Friday we just pretty much slept in the room, took a little walk around to go to the store to get food, and on Friday we stopped by the post office because Johanna had to send a big package of clothes home and I needed to send the doctor papers etc to my mom so I can get the money back from the insurance company!

On Friday night Emmi and Johanna wanted to go out to the city to get a few drinks, I was still feeling sick and kinda tired but I was a champ and went along! We took a tram having absolutely no idea where we were supposed to get off. We actually managed to get out at a pretty good spot in the city. We walked around trying to find a nice place to drink but with no luck. A guy we know from Surfside is actually in the city right now too and Johanna had his number, so she texted him and asked where to go. He actually came with us and we ended up in a pretty nice club. I can't remember the name but I remember it was packed and the drinks were SUPERDUPER expensive. One cider and a long island ice tea were 34 dollars! 34 DOLLARS??!

We left the club somewhere around 1:30ish. We walked to the street and tried to get a taxi for like half an hour with no luck at all! So we walked up to the station where we got off of the tram and found out there was a looong line for taxis, I guess that's why they didn't stop at the streets..The line was super long but we got on it because that was the only way to get back. It took us 45minutes to get a taxi, but we had fun at the line. Couple of guys from Surfside are at a farm in Mildura (in northern Victoria) and one of them called Johanna (absolutely wasted and he is from York, England = very hard to understand even when you're right next to him) and told us to go up there to work. Thursday and Friday we had actually very actively looked up farm work from Gumtree (a site where there's a lot of different types of jobs etc around Australia) so it came in at a good time. We got back to the hostel at like 3am.

Saturday, Saturday, Saturday... Me and Emmi had booked a Great Ocean Road Day Tour for Saturday and the pick up from the hostel was at 6:55am. So coming back at 3am meant we really didn't get many hours of sleep... And to add to that we had to pack our backpacks because we had to change rooms! So we woke up, well the alarm went off, at 6am. I actually got up at 6:25. We actually made it in time. We checked out, put our stuff in the storage room and right on time the bus came! Johanna stayed behind, slept til that 10am when she had to check out. Later that day while we were on the tour she checked into the new roon and put our stuff there too.

Great Ocean Road. It was pretty nice. The weather wasn't the best possible one, it was cloudy and COLD and it rained every now and then. Luckily the rain always came when we were driving from one spot to another so we didn't actually get wet. Our tour guide, Cameron, was pretty awesome so it made it a lot better. He was probably about 30 years old and he had a massive beard and he was funny too! I was so tired on the way there and between the stops I fell asleep on and off but I got out of the bus and saw everything, so it was ok! We got out of the bus sooo many times. We saw many of the highlight spots including Bells Beach, Apollo Bay, Cape of Otway Lighthouse, Loch Ard George (picture on the right) and 12 Apostoles. We started driving back at 6pm and it would've been a 3hour drive but we stopped to eat. And he dropped people off to where they were picked up from and we were the last ones so we got back to the hostel at 10pm! Long day. And Sunday is Johanna's birthday (the big 1-9 !! Our little junior.) She had started drinking at like 4pm so she was pretty wasted when we got back haha. We were supposed to go out somewhere in St Kilda to celebrate but me and Emmi were absolutely pooped and so tired and Johanna was so drunk that we ended up just walking up the street to get her food and stayed at the hostel.

                                                                                                      

On Sunday we slept until like 2pm. We took showers and at some point we got up and walked to Subway to get the first meal of the day. After that we went to the pharmacy (or chemist as they call it here) because I needed to get nasal spray so I could actually breathe through my nose! We stopped by Cole's (a grocery store) to get some more tissues (I'm blowing my nose like every 5minutes.......) and chocolate for Emmi. When we got back to the hostel it was around 7pm. We decided to stay at this hostel for one more night, because we thought we were going to take a bus to Mildura on Tuesday. The only room they had available is a double room which is 99AUD/night, but we had to pay 20 dollars extra for a mattress because there is 3 of us.

Today we got up around 9:30 since we had to check out by 10 and move to our private room for the next night. We were going to book the bus to Mildura today but as it happens, it was already fully booked! The reason we didn't book it on Sunday is that we had applied to a job at a horse farm about 300km west from Sydney and they had actually answered our email. So we wrote them back asking if they would still take us to work for them if we went to Mildura for a couple of weeks. But today when I checked my email there was no answer so we thought we'd just book the bus and see what happens later. So what ended up happening was that the bus that left on Tuesday wasn't available so we had to book another bus for Wednesday=we had to book another night. At first we accidentally booked the bus for Thursday, so I had to call them to change the booking, that was another 12dollars. The bus tickets were 114AUD/person. Otherwise the day has once again been full of nothingness. We didn't do anything, except go to the store to get some food. Tomorrow we're suppsed to get some laundry done, stop by the post office so Emmi can send her post cards and then go to the bank to finally open bank accounts for me and Emmi so we can get payed for the work we do!! And we also need to get Tax File Numbers, just have to figure out how to do that..

I think that's finally all for now! Next time I'll update I will hopefully be at a farm, I just don't know where yet. You'll just have to wait and see! Byyeee :)

All pictures (c) Emmi Hartikainen

the update - finally !

Where to start? We have only been here for 11 days and so much has happened! Good thing Emmi has been diligent enough to keep a diary every day so we know what happened and when! Maybe more like she knows. I updated mine using hers so I have it now and I intend to keep it every day so I won't have to write about 10 days at once. It really wasn't an easy job! This first week and a half has been so full of events that I had no idea what happened and when, so when I wrote my diary I kept asking Emmi what happened then and then, and what did we do after this and that haha! Thank god for the diligent Emmi!

We arrived in Sydney on the 29^th at around 9pm after traveling for 30 looooooooong hours. Stop-overs went fine, planes were on time if not ahead of schedule so there really wasn't any hurry in either places, almost too much time. Immigration to Australia went fine, and before we knew we had our backpacks and pretty much walked into a cab to take us to the first hostel! Hostel was called Base, located on Kent Street. The ride took about half an hour and cost us 50 AUD. We checked in and dragged our already heavy backpacks to the 4^th floor (because we didn't see the elevator that was right in front of us...Oh well, good exercise!). The room fit 8, all female, and surprise surprise there were 2 girls from Finland in our room! They were from Vaasa and way more swedish speaking than finnish. The hostel itself wasn't all that fun, people seemed to just hang out in their own rooms and not really socializing with other people.

Sunday morning we woke up around 10am, with little to no jetlag at all! I was stunned. Flying East is always harder (at least has always been for me) and I was waiting for a night of no sleep and extreme exhaustion the next day but none of it happened. I guess we really timed our sleeping well on the planes, a definite yay for us! So we got up and decided to take a walk to see the most famous attraction of Sydney. I am of course talking about the Opera House. I always imagined it to be huge and all gorgeous, but in a way it was kind of a dissapointment. It somehow seemed very small and I don't really know how to explain it, but it didn't quite meet my expectations. I'm in no way trying to say it's not worth the while to go see, it definitely is, I just think I expected it to be something more. After the Opera house we took a walk around the Royal Botanic Garden that is right next to the Opera House. And of course we also saw the Harbour Bridge, can't miss that one! After all that we walked around the Circular Quay and checked out some stores, but nothing found it's way home with me. Yet anyway haha!

Monday morning we checked out of Base and took direction to Bondi Beach. We didn't book the hostel until late Sunday night (with tiny bit of panicing, oops!) We hadn't gotten the confirmation email when we left so it was kind of a crazy moment because we didn't know if they were gonna take us in! Our reservation had luckily gone through and he had just sent the email to me so we got in! The hostel is called Surfside Backpackers, it's located on Hall Street right next to the beach! We literally have to walk like 200 metres and we are on the beach. I ♥ Australia.

We got into our room, left our stuff and headed right to the beach for a walk. The wind was pretty bad and it wasn't all that warm, but somehow I still managed to get a nasty tan line from my shorts....And up until now (9 days later) they are still there! Not that bad though, so I'm hoping they will be all gone sometime soon! Here's some Bondi Beach surprises that we found from the beach hahha

The hostel is so much better than the last one. Immediately when we walked in you could just see and feel the way more relaxed feeling and the people here are way more talkative and social. After a few nights you know that practically everyone here smokes, and every single night some people are drinking and partying! Party peopleeeeee!

Tuesday was dedicated to layng on the beach and trying to get a tan. I just slept and read my book while Emmi went crazy over all the surfers and lifeguards trying to spot the ones she knows from the tv show Bondi Rescue. She ran around the beach line taking pictures of random surfers, a real stalker! ;)

I had forgotten to put sun screen on my face and SURPRISEEE there was a red face looking back at me from the mirror. And I mean red! I didn't just burn my nose, it was my whole friggin face, ouch. Just to put it out there, if you forget to put sun screen on some part of your body, it will burn. Regrettingly I have to say there's more to come about that...Oh boy.

Tuesday night we spent hanging out down stairs with other people staiyng at this hostel, some girls from England gave us our first taste of the Australian magic drink, the GOON. It's just wine that comes in a box and the thing about it is it's super cheap. And also tastes disgusting so you have to mix it with something. But it's cheap and very effective on getting you drunk, so everyone drinks it.

Wednesday was also a beach day. It was yet again a windy day and at times it was so cold! I spent the day laying down while Emmi again stalked and photographed the surfers and lifeguards. I never watched the show, so I'm not all hyper and excited about spotting the ones that appear on the show, but who would really say no to checking out some hot lifeguards? That's right.

Later on wednesday I discovered that I had forgot to put sun screen on the backs of my knees (kneecaps?, polvitaipeet in finnish) and also my ass. Oh what fun it was to try to walk normally, it was painful to even move! Emmi was having a blast laughing at me trying to put clothes on and move, so at least it was fun for one of us!

Thursday was the first rainy day we had here so we decided to head to Bondi Junction to do some shopping with a finnish girl, Johanna, that we met while staying in this hostel. The mall was huge, I think it's one of the biggest if not the biggest one in all of Australia. We walked around for a couple of hours, I bought a cute dress that you will probably see in some pictures later! Clothing stores close at around 5:30pm here, which is really weird, when do people have time to shop if they work or are in school??

On Friday the weather was looking better and we headed towards Taronga Zoo to see some cute Aussie animals! We walked around for a couple of hours feeling like little kids since we got so excited about the animals! Emmi took loads of pictures.

The rest of the night we spent with Johanna and some others in the tv room watchin Jackass 3, which was sooooooo funny!! I got some really good laughs out of it hahahahahhaahha. Crazy guys.

Saturday was another beach day, yay! Later on we got back to the hostel and cooked chicken cesar salad with Johanna. Then it was time to start drinking since the plan was to go out to Kings Cross. Well, plans change haha. We hung out inside and drank with some other backpackers and at 11pm they kicked us outside because they had to close up. By that time the magid drink had done it's trick on Emmi and whoooops I got the role of the baby sitter. We sat outside for a few more hours and then headed to McDonalds and BiteBox to get some food before going to sleep.

Oh and we also booked another week at this hostel, yay! :)

On Sunday we walked along the beach street because Emmi wanted to buy a new bikini. Well, prices were sky high so no bikinis for her! We kept walking and found the Bondi Market. It's only here on Sundays, so we walked in and took a look. Or as the aussies say, we took a aptain Cook haha! They had some nice looking clothes and other stuff but for some reason I wasn't on the buying mood so I didn't get anything. Emmi got a pair of sunglasses.

We got back to the hostel and went out to the beach with Johanna, Anssi and Suzie (from Skotland). We were there for a few hours and then it started to rain so we headed back to the hostel. When the rain stopped me, Johanna and Suzie went out to Pizza Hut to get pizza, Emmi went to McDonalds since she doesn't eat pizza (seriously who doesn't eat pizza?! Weirdo). We went to the tv room to eat but the movie that was playing sucked so we headed to our room. It wasn't long until Johanna came to our door and said ''we are going out.'' And so we did. We went to Bondi Hotel that's practically right down the street. We got some drinks and sat down to play some drinking games such as Bitch and Blood Coin (verikolikko), from which the latter got some attention, obviously it's never been seen around here before!

Monday was a really slow day. Emmi woke up early and went downstairs to read since it has started to get SO HOT in our room at night/morning. I woke up, grabbed my book and went downstairs to read too. We sat outside in the backyard for a while but it was just too hot! I finished my book, now what?! It was such a good book (The Hunger Games), I need to get the sequel to it..I just haven't seen any bookstores around here, weird.

After finishing my book we went to Iga, the local grocery store to get Emmi a new shaver since hers was stolen... I noticed that someone had gone through my stuff too, zippers in my backpack were not where I had left them! Luckily nothing has been taken from me.

We also stopped by the beach but it was so rainy and cold that we came back pretty quickly. Emmi started to write her blogpost and I got bored, so I went outside for a few drinks with some fun peoples!

Tuesday morning we woke up to a super loud noise coming from the neighbours. They are doing some kind of a huge renovation on the house and decided to wake us up, oh yay. We looked out the window and the sky was blue! So a little change to the original plan of going to the Sydney Aquarium earlier in the day. We headed to the beach, stayed out until about 3pm and then after that caught the bus to take us to the Aquarium. We got off the bus and the sky was looking like it was gonna start raining any second. And sure enough the sky exploded on us way before we reached the destination of the day. Thank God there are plenty of canopies in the city centre. The water was literally coming horizontally.

We stood under the canopy for like 20minutes waiting for the rain to ease up a little so we could move. We weren't that far from the place we thought we were gonna get into the Aquarium. Little did we know it wasn't exactly there. Stupid misleading maps and directions. The rain stopped and we started walking again. It tooks us like 15 minutes to actually find the Aquarium that was supposed to be so visible from everywhere, yeah right! Well anyways, we found it and there was a nice person behind the ticket desk and he let us in as students, so it was cheaper, yay! :)

So we strolled around and saw all the nice fishes and some awesome sharks! Emmi was going peanuts over the sharks, sharklover. By the time we were done it was raining again. So we sat inside the Aquarium for about 10 minutes and then left. We were starving, so on the way back to the bus stop we stopped at a grocery store and got some food.

Today (Wednesday), it was all cloudy again so we headed to Bondi Junction, because I really needed to find a book store. I wanted the sequel to my Hunger Games book, and after looking for a bookstore for a while we found it! And all the better they had the books yay. I ended up getting both of the books I didn't have from the trilogy, so now I'll have something exciting to read for a while. I'm excitedddd yay!

After I got my books the mission was to find some loose comfortable tops and a long sleeve loose shirt to through over them when it gets a little colder. I found some tops but no long sleeve shirt, so mission partly completed!

We got back from the junction, ate and now we're just hanging around the hostel. Our reservation in this hostel ends on monday the 14^th, but I think we might end up staying for a 3^rd week hahah! We love it here, and there's awesome people here, so why not? In the Sydney area we still want to check out Manly beach and go to the Blue Mountains. We're also supposed to meet up with Emmi's sisters friend Jenny, who is also in Sydney. And my american aunt Robin told me she has a friend living here so I might be meeting up with her too!

Finally I got yall updated, you're welcome :):) Everything is going great in this part of the world, and we will be looking for some farm work around the Melbourne area soon, so that's where we will be heading next!

One more funny thing about Australia that I just have to share with you guys haha. Probably many of you have seen the Star Wars movies, or at least little pieces of them. Well, in the movies there's the star troopers, the guys in the white suits, and they have the guns that make the funny TSUP noise when they fire right? In here when the pedestrian light turns green, it makes a sound just like that! Hahahah. It's just a funny thing we keep talking about when we're waiting for the light to turn green. It always makes me think of Star Wars!

 More pictures HERE, and we also made a youtube channel where you will hopefully be seeing some behind the scenes material ;) click HERE for that.

All pictures by Emmi Hartikainen

34 hours!!

34 hours left until it's time to leave my home sweet home here in Finland (if my counting was correct..)! I'm starting to get soooooo excited!

All day today I have been doing laundry, one load after another...I haven't really given any thought to packing and what to take with me, which pretty much means no sleep for me for the last night here! I will be packing and unpacking through the night! Oh what fun. I HATE packing. I'll have time to sleep on the plane anyway. 

I just printed out our travel itinerary and it had the flight times in it. After the first short flight to Milan (flight time 3h 5min) it starts to get to some scary numbers; Milan-Hong Kong 11h 35min and Hong Kong-Sydney 9h 10min, yikes! I consider myself as a somewhat frequent flyer on the longer flights and they are really not that fabulous. Spending 7-8 hours on one seat trying to get comfortable is not an easy job! I have gotten lucky a few times, when flying on a really big plane that's not totally packed I've had the luxury to spread out to 4 seats and actually sleep!

Anyways, I always get so rambly with the writing, sorry! Tomorrow is the last day to get the last minute things done, I know I'll be running everywhere the whole day! Unlike Emmi who actually gets things done early and doesn't have to do the ''last minute run-around''. I have to check on my driver's licence, get some Australian dollars and buy some last minute necessities. And last but not least, pack my backpack. And I decided to take my laptop with me, so yay for that! Now I just have to figure out how to carry it around because I don't want to take my actual laptop bag. 

Something I have yet not mentioned is the hostel we will be staying for the first couple of nights. It's called Base, located pretty much in the center of the city. We heard some good things about it and decided to give it a go. 

One last things for all of you that speak and understand finnish, Emmi writes her own Australia blog, link to it HERE. Check it out! That's an order :)

''A passport, as I'm sure you know....

...is a document that one shows to government officials whenever one reaches a border between countries, so the officials can learn who you are, where you were born, and how you look when photographed unflatteringly.'' -Lemony Snicket

It's almost time for me to once again grab my passport, show the very unflattering picture to some government officials, and head towards new adventures. But unlike the many times before, I won't be heading to the United States of America but the paradise down under, Australia. Yes, Australia. Finally! The place I have always wanted to see and experience.

Also different from the previous travels to the US, I won't be traveling alone. With me, will be travelling a girl I've known for manymany years, a fun, crazy person who answers to the name Emmi. How we met? We rode horses together for years. She was supposed to do this trip a year ago with another friend, but ended up staying in Finland to study photography for a year. So I told her if I don't get into medical school this year, I would go with her. And here we are!

2 days left in Finland, and faithful to my old habits I have some very busy days ahead of me. All this just because I can't seem to get things done before I absolutely have to. ''I still have plenty of time to get them done'', yeah right!! It wasn't until today that I finally got my backpack. You really can't go travel around Australia with a suitcase... Tomorrow and Thursday I will have to do all the laundry, run around town to get the last minute things I need and the hardest thing of all, decide which clothes and shoes I'll be taking with me! I am definitely not a light packer so it will be very hard for me. It's just impossible to decide! But i won't ramble any more about that, it would be endless!

I have yet not decided whether to bring my laptop or not. I really really want to, because it would make it so much easier to update this blog and for Emmi to update hers. And also easier to access the internet if and when needed (fingers crossed for free Wi-Fi !!). I just don't want to risk losing it or breaking it and what have you. Also my laptop is kind of on the heavier side, and dragging it around the Oz is not very appealing to me, but we'll see. I definitely know what my parents would say to this...''Don't take it, you don't need it, you'll find other ways to access the internet if you need to, it's so not necessary'', oh boy what to do.

So as I mentioned before, 2 days left until take-off = we will be leaving this Friday, October 28th. Our first flight leaves from Helsinki-Vantaa airport at 8am. Stopovers in Milan and Hong Kong. And then after about 30 hours of traveling, we will arrive in Sydney at 9pm local time on Saturday, which means 1pm Finland time since Sydney is 8 hours ahead.

But I guess that is all for now, HOPEFULLY you will be hearing from me quite often, so let's hope Emmi will keep me in line with updating as often as possible!!

And oh, here's us:



Emmi on the right, me on the left. Not the greatest of a pictures but oh well, at least you get a sense of what we look like, just in case somebody reading this didn't! And the hairy one in the other picture is Emmi's dog Roxy, we baked togerther, she was a very helpful sous chef!

Bye for now! :)