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!
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| 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 29th. 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.
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| 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.
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
