Real friends visit you on the other side of the world.

I HAVE A RIGHT ANKLE!!! It’s not swollen, it’s visible like my left one. My knee is still swollen, but not nearly as bowling-ball like. But I am walking rather normally, and can bend my knee past 90 degrees. I’m doing squats for my physiotherapy every day. I even walked on a treadmill today (I’m not running yet, but I was never much of a runner any ways). And I’m not moping anymore (and believe me, I was moping).

In other news, I’ve had a very eventful two weeks and even had a companion: Katy came to visit! Katy, for those of you who read this but don’t really pay attention anything I say, was my freshman year roommate at Mizzou (that's us making monkey faces at the zoo. And she graduated this month! She left Sydney on Monday but the week and a half she was here was full-on. I was actually kinda glad to see her go because I was so tired. But even if she is living in my apartment for the next few months, seeing as I’m alive and well and not dead, it’s not like I’m haunting it so I won’t see her for a while. It was really good to see her.

But, speaking of haunting, we took a Ghost Tour of the Rocks, which was one of the first areas of settlement in Sydney and was a slum through the 1920s. It was really interesting. A little creepy, but very fun. Our tour guide wore a long black overcoat and bowler hat, and had a definite flair for the dramatic. He was good at telling some awfully gruesome ghost stories. Like the story of Mrs. Greenway, who after being discovered in bed with a sailor with her husband, was strangled by him. Only the screams that children hear aren’t exactly said to be her dying screams. Or the cabin boy who was the first person to be hanged in Sydney, at Observatory Hill. Or my personal favorite, the ghosts of those shanghaied from the Watson Bay Hotel. It’s actually where the term shanghaied came from, because people shanghaied from the Watson Bay Hotel often ended up in Shanghai. And I walked the whole way, which was two hours, so I was very pleased with myself!

We also went to a show at the Opera House, which I’ve been waiting to do for years. We were bummed there wasn’t an actual opera on; apparently May is a traditional break in the opera season. We saw Ting Tong, a Walk With the Goons, which was about the madness of Terry Milligan, creator of the Goon Show on the BBC in England and a Monty Python writer. The Opera House made us buy the playbill (cheap bastards, considering how much I paid for the tickets!), but the show was quite entertaining. And it was a thrill just to be in the Opera House, although I suppose that it’s the thrill of being a tourist as well. We had coffee at the Opera Bar afterward, because Katy was still jet lagged, but it was a great night. Except for the fact that the zipper of my dress ripped open at intermission, and I couldn’t fix it until after the show. Of course that happens when I’m trying to be classy at the Opera House.

We also went to the zoo and saw the marsupials and Asian elephants (I am, as you can see, shorter than a baby giraffe), and we went to the Barracks Museum, which had lots of nifty things from all the convicts. We had a long walk around the Domain and the Royal Botanical Gardens. And it was warm and sunny all day. Which was really really lucky because it rained every day for a week before Katy arrived. We went bar hopping at the Rocks and at Darling Harbour. And Katy spent a lot of time running around being a tourist while I was at my internship and uni classes.

But the topper was Melbourne.

I have been wanting to go to Melbourne since the last time I was here four years ago and was obsessed with The Secret Life of Us (an Aussie television show set in Melbourne that I could gush about at length but is now, alas, canceled). We, inadvertently, booked flights to and from the wrong Melbourne airport. For future reference, do NOT fly into Avalon airport if you’re ever in the pleasurable situation of being in Melbourne. It’s in the boonies about an hour drive from the city. Fly into Tullamarie Airport! We were on the airplane, and saw the city and got excited.... and then flew over it.

Katy’s dad has a friend and colleague who lives in Melbourne, and he and his wife were really super to us. Alan picked us up from the airport in the boonies (and drove us back), and helped us get acquainted with the city and took us to Philip Island to see the penguins. And I didn’t even know Australia had penguins. About 900 of them came to their nests at sunset on Philip Island- and it’s quite a nice set up. There’s bleachers on the beach so you can watch them come out of the water, and then you can watch them wander to their nests as you walk back to your car. These particular penguins are the smallest variety in the world, and are about a foot tall. We think the stuffed penguin Katy bought for her sister is bigger than the actual ones we saw (JakeMonster is getting a t-shirt).

Melbourne the city is really great. It’s nightlife is a little intense. Me and Katy were feeling not-hardcore enough (about music) to truly go into the clubs. Maybe we weren’t wearing enough black or have enough visible piercings. But we did find a bar with very cute bartenders and excellent and expensive cocktails called Ginger on Brunswick St.

We stayed at a backpackers called The Nunnery in Fitzroy, which was actually once a nunnery. We chose it only so we could holler at each other “Get thee to a nunnery!” every time we were headed back to the hotel. We even got upgraded to a room with two single beds instead of bunk beds because they stuffed up our reservation (or we made the incorrect one, whatever). But it was very charming, they’ve done a good job of preserving the feeling of the place. Homey, but not to Catholic and scary.

And the shopping in Melbourne is definitely nice. There’s lots of very pretty boutiques that we could not afford- we had the most luck at Myer (which is like Dillards but Australian). I bought a coat as my major purchase. The Arcades are really fun, and I got an amazing hot chocolate in a shop at one. And there are TRAMS! It’s the most amazingly interesting form of pubic transportation- and one of the oldest tram systems in the world. The trams were really cool.

What, I dig the trams.

While I wish we could’ve had more time in Melbourne, some things can’t be helped. I can always go back. I think it’ll be the next Australian city I live in. Haha.

Katy, if I’m forgetting anything, let me know!

This is why I shouldn't be allowed to dance

Friday night I went to a party thrown at a friends house for the 20 April birthdays hanging about in our little community of crazy international students. I was dancing, and there may have been cheap wine coolers involved. And we were about to leave anyways, but I thought, one more dance couldn't hurt.

I have rarely been more wrong. Because about one minute in, my knee dislocated and I fell over. And that was the end of the party.

My friend Tam, while I was freaking out because my tibia was no longer in line with my femur and not underneath my patella, made me straighten my leg and pop it back into place. Someone got me ice. And eventually, I was helped off the ground and slowly hobbled back to my place. Which is where the cheap wine coolers come in because I'm fairly certain that they helped in my mobility that night.

And then I spent the weekend on the couch, with three cushions stacked up for me to elevate my knee (which was about the size of a small bowling ball), bags of frozen peas to keep it cool and my laptop propped on the cushions so I could watch the entire first season of The O.C. I'm a little ashamed of that last bit, but that show is like a religion: opiate of the people.

And that was how I spent my weekend! My knee is better, but stiff. And now only about the size of a softball. OK, maybe a little bigger.

I have a feeling that I'm not going to be going salsa dancing any time soon. Which, by the way, there's a really cool salsa club on Darling Harbour that's free entry on Thursday nights. We went for the first time the night before my knee dislocating.

Moral of the story: NO DANCING.

A small sidenote: my video about living on 40 litres of water for 40 hours is completed and up on the web (which is a little scary for me so please be nice.) You can view it by clicking here.

Missing Posts in Shots.

I am attempting to get back in every one's good graces by posting too many pictures of my latest adventures. I actually just worked on my feature story for class for an hour or so (about blogging, ironically) and it disappeared. Reminded me of Crash Different, because, excuse my language, the file was fucking gone. So I'm posting pictures. Or attempting to.

These first three are of the 75th anniversary of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, which was a really cool day. I got to walk across the Harbour Bridge with about 100,000 other people without any cars on it. Which And we got temporary tattoos. In lieu of a huge fireworks display, they opted for lighting up the Harbour Bridge at night, which viewed from Mrs. Macquarie's Chair is quite the sight.

My free trip to Byron Bay was awesome (see pictures below!). The overnight 12 hour bus rides were not. But Byron is a nice little hippie-ville on a great bay. Non-locals call it the berg of "thongs, bongs and sarongs." It's the most easterly point of Australia- up by the lighthouse it literally looks like the Edge of the World. I got to kayak on the ocean and there were dolphins about 10 feet from the boat. I also got to remember how awful of a surfer I am: I can catch the wave, but stand up on the board? I can barely stand up on dry land without falling over. Not that you didn't already know that.

OH NOOSA!! It was a really really great week. I've discovered that the best way to take pictures of myself is to take pictures of my feet, so there seems to be many photos of my feet covered in sand. Saves me the trouble of finding someone else to take my picture. So, I stayed with Rachel, my former youth exchange counsellor and her husband Phil and their nine year old niece, who was also visiting. Noosa has changed a bit, there's a 7-11 there now! And a real shopping mall (complete with Big-W, which is Aussie for Wal-Mart, ick). But I took their niece to the beach with me, and went for walks on the Noosa River (it's still salty and flows inland, which freaked me out when I first arrived) and caught up with host families.

I did go to the Rotary meeting (7 am Thursday morning). I forgot how early that was. OH! A note on those horrific school uniforms. Four years ago, everyone was so reassuring about them. "Everyone will be wearing the same thing, and it makes getting ready easier..." blah blah blah. NOW I heard more than once: "those uniforms from the Lutheran College are so unattractive!" I knew that. I had to wear it for a year. And I knew it was fugly.

So, tonight I'm off to an April birthdays party! Despite my feature story disappearing, I am trying to make a good evening of it. Hope the pics make up for my absence.

I'm not lazy.

OK, that may be a lie.

I've been slacking. I should be writing about the amazing time I had at the Harbour Bridge Walk. Or about my free weekend at Byron Bay (which is where I'm going to go slack for two years after I get my masters degree). Or how about the night I was thisclose to going to Tokyo? But I am going to post this.

It's going to be featured on the main page soon!!

And yes those are my feet. I was shooting the photo illustration for the opinion piece I just linked above. Or attempting to. This shot was an accident. But I kinda liked it.

School Daze

OK, so I'm exhausted. How about you?

I started my internship this week. Which means that my alarm goes off at 6:45 am, and I haul my bum out of bed at 7 am, and then I get on a bus at 8:10 am, and I arrive in Balmain at 9:15 am. I then research all day, with various other fun bits in between, and hop on a bus around 6 pm and depending on the route I take home get back to North Ryde anywhere between 7 pm and 7:30 pm. And this is Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, except that Wednesday I leave the office at 1:45 pm because I have class at 3 pm. But the point is that it's freaking early in the morning and a long commute and we all know how I love being awake before 11 am.

I'm making this sound a lot worse than it is. It's not actually bad at all. In a way, I like getting up and doing something productive. It makes me feel like I'm not completely wasting my limited time here. Do now, sleep when you're dead.

And I like my internship. It's in a really cool suburb that has great Thai food and an amazing strip of shopping. And the bus ride gives me time to keep up with the readings for my two classes. Or, just listen to music on my iPod. Whatever. But please don't get me started on my classes. I sat though a lecture on the history of the computer yesterday for my multimedia class. Which is much better than what I'm sure I will endure on conducting an interview tomorrow. I should've signed up for 20th Century Australian Lit. Or something where I'd be learning something. OK, I shouldn't really say that. Did you know that the first computer took up three levels of a standard city-sized office building? I didn't. And I do need to take the writing class. I just don't want to because while I am capable of reporting I simply dislike to. And I am learning how to code HTML, which I suppose will eventually be useful.

I think I just need to stop being a J-School snob.

So, this weekend is not only every chick named Erin's favorite holiday, but also the 75th birthday of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. It should be a pretty nifty day. The city is closing down the bridge to all traffic. But the thing is, they decided to sell something like 200,000 tickets to walk across it on the birthday and everyone's hacked off about it. I know I am, because I didn't know they were selling tickets and now I can't walk across the bridge on it's birthday. But I am going to go into the City and take lots of pictures. It should be pretty sweet.

We ended up having a huge pasta party last night. We invited a few people over for dinner last night, and ended up with about 15 people in our apartment! And we still have leftovers. But it was a good time. There's a small movement to institute Wednesday Night Dinners. Which would be amazingly fun because 1. big meals are cheaper, and 2. the bar everyone else goes that night stinks. And speaking of food, I found really tasty grapes for A$2.94 per kilo! Which is probably the most bang for the buck I've found around here. Things are expensive. I've been job hunting.

In other news, another one of my roommates is moving out. Apparently walking 10 minutes to class is too much of an inconvenience. Or I smell. Actually, I think Adam smells (he's the roommate who hasn't moved out yet!) So, if we don't get another roommate, it's going to be the two of us in a 4-person apartment, which isn't too bad at all.

MARDI GRAS!!!

It’s a different vibe in Sydney during Mardi Gras than in New Orleans or at Carnivale or other cool places with massive festivals and topless women. In Sydney, you’re much more likely to run into men wearing nothing but a g-string. Because in Sydney Mardi Gras is known as a homosexual festival, with a huge parade on Oxford Street and general insanity ensuing throughout the city. But everyone dresses really crazy, with special fondness for feather boas, regardless of sexual orientation, and has a blast. It’s just a huge party! My personal favorite sight was the Surf Lifesaving float, with a bunch of dancing men in speedos and surfie caps (I have one of those caps!). Or possibly the group of drag queens dressed as different incarnations of Kylie Minogue.

But we left the parade and followed a bunch of people to the other side of the city. They chose an outrageously expensive restaurant, and me and my flatmate Adam, Yuki from across the hall and Anne-Marie from the next building decided to find a McDonald's. We were feeling the urge to be as stereotypically American as possible. And it was a mission to find one! We walked all the way back to where we were! But it was yummy. And really cheap, which was nice.

We eventually met up with my other flatmates Doriana and Phil (and a few other people), by way of a pub by the Maccas, at a club where we danced until after the last bus left the station. We left the club at 4 a.m.! After hobbling back to QVB, we realized that the last bus left at 3:20 a.m. on Saturday nights (why there wasn’t special accommodation for the special event I have no clue). The city was still almost as crowded at 4 a.m. as it was at midnight, although we got away from Oxford Street to avoid the bulk of the crowds. So we called two cabs (there were eight of us) to split back to campus. Only one showed, and then the others thought we could get a free ride, so I hopped in a cab with Adam, Yuki and Anne-Marie and got back to the apartment at about 5 a.m. Turns out, the others ended up waiting at QVD for the 7 a.m. bus (honestly, I’d have rather waited for the bus and saved the money). But the cab was about A$40, which isn’t too bad split among 4 people.

I should also mention that me and my roomies FOUND A$280 Friday night. We were walking from the bar at the Rocks (which is the oldest part of Sydney and has some wicked cool pubs) to the bus stop at QVB and found a garter belt stuffed with money. We didn’t count it that night, but in the morning we were really excited. For the record, we did attempt to find the owner, but there was literally no one around. So we dubbed it the “hooker money” and bought drinks with it all night for Mardi Gras, and spent it on the cab ride home. We still have a fair bit of it left, so we’ll most likely either split it or save it for next weekend. Or Wednesday night. Whatever.

I know that I’ve been mostly writing about parties and pubs and clubs and drinking and having fun (which I am, by the way) but it’s really not as terrible as I make it seem. I do have uni stuff, I’m freaking out about one of my classes (it’s a magazine feature writing class and I am a terrible reporter and the professor is making us have our sources sign a permission slip and they had to explain the inverted pyramid to these kids on the first day of class and it just leaves me with a small rock in the pit of my stomach etc. etc.). And my internship starts next week. And it’s been raining for the past two days, and it’s actually kind of cold here today. But it is mostly wonderful. But I am not always partying it up. Just most of the time.

Adventures in finding one's way around

We had a bit of an adventure last Saturday night, trying to find a proper club in which to get our groove on. We started at QVB in the heart of the City, and walked to Chinatown for dinner. After wandering for a bit, we ended up having a really nice dinner at a place where only the patrons spoke English. But the Mongolian beef was amazing, even if they charged us about A$3 per person for white rice.

We had heard that the place to be on Saturday Nights is Oxford St, and being brave Americans (and Japanese and German, as the case may be) we decide to walk. Which really is a good idea. Unless you're wearing the heels I was wearing. Can you say blisters? But I managed to survive most of the night until the very end when I was walking on rough pavement screaming expletives in the hopes it would stop the burning in my feet. Anyhow, we made it to Oxford St. to find that while it really is the place to be, it wasn't exactly what we were looking for (what is electrofunk, anyway?). While we were wandering about, this guy and his mate stops us and asks if we need directions. He was also a North American and said we sounded like recent transplants. He didn't know much about dancing clubs, but could help us out if we were looking for a cool bar (which after walking from Chinatown, a bar wouldn't hurt). So we had a drink with them at a cool place called Velvet.

We did ask around a bit, and found that George St. was really the place to be for our kind of club (in case you were wondering, we were looking for hip-hop music) so after saying good-bye to our bar guides, we hopped a bus (the driver was nice enough to not make us pay because that would've held up traffic) and landed back at Market & George. And you better believe we found a place to be. And paid heavily for it! The cover was a bit pricey but it was cool. A little hip-hop, a little retro, nice and dark and crowded. It was awesome. No joke. Danced for hours. Until my feet felt like they were on fire.

And that was my evening clubbing in the city. It's been a lot more chill this week. Everyone started classes, and so far I've had a grand total of ONE class. My internship interview went well, though. The internship coordinator gave me a lift to the the interview. I've actually been staring at the Sydney public transport website trying to figure out how to get there on my own steam. There's a bus involved, but then I think I have to walk about a kilometre to get to the actual work (which stinks cos I'm lazy). I know that the only way to do it is to just go and find it but it's a little intimidating. And I prefer to be prepared.

Oh, it's Mardi Gras this weekend! We're going into the city for the parade! And the monstrous party they hold afterward. It's one of the largest Mardi Gras in the world (I think it's behind Rio, somewhere in France and of course, New Orleans).

I was going to go to Manly beach today, but they kept on forecasting rain and it's only now starting to get cloudy. Perhaps tomorrow after my SECOND class. But, I got my hair chopped off instead of going to the beach. And I do mean chopped. Oh, the mystery!