(Louvelle’s Apartment, Glebe (Sydney), Australia)
Another sleepless night on the plane. Lucked out and got moved to the emergency aisle, so plenty of legroom. No movies this time (although there was plenty to choose from), but an episode of 30 Rock. Also lucked out with my seatmate, Nicky, who was a Scottish gal who was returning to Australia to work in a tourism office of sorts in Byron Bay. She’d been travelling in Australia for a year previous, so she was a fountain of useful information.
Arrived in Sydney, more or less on time. After claiming Louvelle’s bag, and clearing customs, I headed out to where I expected to see Louvelle waiting for me. No such luck, so I parked myself and waited. She showed up less than five minutes later, as she’d been waiting at a different exit. From the airport we took a train and then a bus to her house, where I had a much needed shower, and quickly got settled. After the shower, we headed to a fair trade cafe in Louvelle’s neighbourhood (Glebe) for some breakfast and a beverage.
After (an expensive) breakfast we hit a local mall to look for some swim shorts and sunscreen. Before long, we were back at Louvelle’s for a few moments to gather up our swim stuff and head to Bondi Beach. The train to Bondi Junction was pretty packed. We stayed in the Junction to check out a few shops, as I’d still not found any swim trunks. Thankfully we found some board shorts right off, and headed to the bus which took us to the beach.
Bondi was fairly busy, with people sunning themselves and swimming. Not a ton of surfers on this day, however. We checked some stuff into a locker and did a bit of swimming and sunning. The water was cold at first, but after submerging myself the experience was improved immensely. At least the cold water was keeping me awake, as I was pretty close to going 48 hours with little to no sleep.
We stopped back at the mall on the way back from the beach so Louvelle could buy some curtains she’d spotted earlier for her room. As we were leaving the mall, something fell from the sky, grazed my head, hit my bag, and plopped on the ground. It was a not-so-small bird. It looked pretty stunned. It’s a backwards country – in Canada our birds fly, in Australia… not so much. Louvelle had a dance rehearsal in the evening, so I planned on staying up and transferring some photos online. I was hoping to stay up until 10pm or so, but after dinner, as I was sitting at the computer, I started to nod off. I was in bed at about 7:30 or so. At that point I’d been up for over 48 hours.