So NOW I´ve got a job :D

Let me update you a bit more about my job situation...and tell the good news! On Sunday I got a phone call from Oxygen, that is another clothing store at Market City. Since I hadn´t heard back from Giordano yet I did an hour-long trial there on Monday afternoon. The trial was fine until I heard they pay their employees only $5/hour + some bonuses if daily sales targets are exceeded. There´s no way I´d work anywhere with such low wages! Fortunately I got a call from Giordano later that day asking if I could start working on Tuesday. So I had my first shift there yesterday. It was all good :) My bosses Craig and Mel seem nice, and so do the other people working there. It´s quite many students working as casuals, just like me. It was a busy day; I vacuumed, helped to set clothes on tables, served customers and learned to use the computer system (not everything, but the most important things). Craig got us candy and timtams, which helped me to form a good first impression of him ;) I worked for 5hours before going to a lecture. I´m working again tomorrow and on Friday and Saturday. I´m happy to be working on a store whose clothes I like. The first time I shopped at Giordano was at the Singapore Airport, and I was even given discount so I could have these two tops I liked. I´ve also bought quite a few items from Giordano stores in Sydney. The clothes are good quality (you can actually wash them several times without ruining them), pretty classic design and within a good price range. I got a long-sleeve T-shirt for free to wear at work, and I think I´ll purchase some more tops, as well :) (We´re expected to wear Giordano tops at work. For bottoms we can go for anything we like.)

I guess that´s enough about my new job... I haven´t done much apart from that and studying, though. Today was our last Olympic Games lecture and we got our literature review presentation marks. The presentations took place last week and the week before, and were allowed to last only for 7min each. Unfortunately they only count 5% of the total subject grade, since I got a perfect score of 5/5. I also got nice feedback saying my powerpoint presentation was good (structure & photos) and that I´ve got a strong and positive presentation style :) It was nice to get a good grade for a chance, after screwing up on some other exams/assignments. So now I´m all done with Olympic Games (we don´t have final examination) and my total subject grade is around 75%. To be honest, the subject was more demanding and time consuming than I thought, but actually ended up being my favorite one! I hadn´t learned about the sports industry before, so I found it interesting. I also enjoyed going to the Kuring-Gai campus every Wednesday and coming back to Chinatown to have lunch with Keiji before my Finance tutorial and lecture. Today we ran into Carla outside the shuttle bus and she joined us for lunch at this food court. I ordered combination laksa (a kind of Chinese soup with noodles, meat, prawns, fishballs, chicken and everything: I could´t even regocnize half of what I was eating lol) which was delicious :P

Allright, I think this is enough about telling about everything and nothing... I´m just in the mood I could keep writing this nonsense for hours, but I guess I´d better go downstairs to have some dinner and watch House and Medium. So Adios!

Blaah... and dancing

No more uni work for me today, please! I spent 4 hours writing an assignment for Global Strategic Management. It´s easy enough: just describing the general environment (PESTL analysis) and the industrial environment (Porters Five Forces) of Lancome, choosing a product in some country. To make it even easier I chose Finland. It takes surprisingly long to find relevant information for the environmental analysis, though.


My studying corner

On Friday we went clubbing with our Tasmanian gang. Denise was feeling too stuffed/tired/lazy to come so she stayed home. I had been having hard time keeping my eyes open since I got back from the gym, but Carla persuaded me to go anyways. I´m happy I did since we had a fun night :D We met up at Till´s; ate chips and M&Ms, they drank wine, I drank water and we played uno. At around midnight we walked to Cargo Bar in Darling Harbour. It´s a nice bar with an outside area viewing the harbour and an inside area with a decent size dance floor. They were playing good club music and we spent almost the whole time dancing. I met this guy from New Zealand who´s a mechanical engineering student in Perth at the moment, and hung out with him, too. It was cool being in a club completely sober, just dancing and hanging around :) The club was open till 4am, which is late for an Australian club. (They close usually around 2-3am.) Then we walked home and had fun listening to tipsy Carla talking lol.

I and Carla

Work update

I´ve been so busy writing about other things I haven´t had the chance to tell what happened with the job I was supposed to get. First they promised to call me the next day after the staff meeting, but since they didn´t I went there the next day. I was told I could start working after coming back from Tasmania, and they promised to call me. But since I heard nothing from them after our trip I went there to ask what was going on. I was told they don´t need me after all, not at least until they start serving dinner next month. But, on Monday when I was walking to the gym (I always walk past Peace Park Cafe on my way to the uni, gym or anywhere in the city centre) the boss, Darren, started talking to me. He asked me to come to do some training on Tuesday morning, which I did. I was there for 2 hours, just helping everyone. I asked a few people how they liked working there, and their responses were along the lines "no comments..." Everything seemed pretty unorganized, and I heard no one who had been at the staff meeting was no longer working there. This girl I talked to told she doesn´t get shifts but they call her whenever they´re busy enough to need her, and she gets paid only $13/hour. So, after being there for 2hours I was told I wasn´t needed anymore. I was given a $20 note and sent home. I decided to keep searching for another job...

Since I had already assumed working at that cafe wouldn´t work out I spent last Thursday at the Broadway Shopping Centre (which is our "home mall" just a 10min walk from Geegal) going from store to store, asking if they needed any more staff. I did the same this Thursday at the Market City which is a mall next to the UTS Haymarket Campus. I go there every now and then between my lectures. They´ve got a floor of brand outlet stores that are my favorites! They´ve also got fresh food market from Friday till Sunday. I usually go there every Friday after my lectures to buy cheap vegetables and fruit. Anyways, I handed out my resumees at several clothes stores there, too. When I was in Giordano I decided to buy this knitwear, and asked for a job when I was paying for it. The guy, Craig, told they´re actually looking for casual staff. Then he called me half and hour later and asked me to come for an interview the next day. I did, and had a proper interview with the boss. We sat at a cafe and he was asking me questions and telling me about the company. He said I could start working in around a week and promised to call me later about my starting day and signing a contract. That was yesterday and I haven´t heard back from him yet... I hope it´s not a common thing here to promise people they´ve got a job and then just neglet them :/

Besides searching a job I´ve been working on uni stuff... I finished my Olympic Games literature review about ambush marketing. The writing process was actually really interesting. Ambush marketing means non-sponsors´ attempts to weaken the position of official sponsors, that have paid enormous sums for their sponsorship rights, by creating a false impression of involvement to promote their own products. My work paid off and I got 85% on the assingment. The average score was only 65% and I think I was the best in our class :) In general, I learned quite a lot about the sports industry during the Olympic Games. It´d be interesting to learn more about sports marketing! I didn´t do well in the mid-term exam, though. I got only 71%, which was a disappointment :/ I also really screwed up a finance group assingment :( The rest of the group consisted of first year students and they pretty much let me do all the work. I made some mistakes that led to a low grade of 53%. Fortunately it´s not worth that much as a part of the total subject grade. So, now I´ve got only one or two weeks of lectures before final exams. I also have to write an assignment for Global Strategic Management and finish my part of our International Marketing major project.

When not doing uni stuff I´ve been working out at the gym and shopping. Carla and I seem to have devoted Thursdays to shopping ;) We´ve gone to Myers a couple of times just to admire the expensive stuff they´re selling there. It´s close to Pitt Street Mall that´s got more affordable stores. I enjoy going to the city centre every now and then, just to remind yourself you´re living in a cosmopolitan city; walking around and checking out different stores, sitting in some nice cafe, being surrounded by (fashionable) people... That´s something I really like about Sydney!

Shopping at the Broadway Shopping Centre

My Birthday!!

It was my 24th Birthday on Tuesday. Next year is gonna be scary since I´ll turn already 25 - it´ll be closer to 30 than 20 :o Anyways, I hadn´t had such good Birthday celebrations since I was a kid... Since 4 other people from Geegal had their Birthdays late May, too, we decided to celebrate together. Nign Nign, Carla and Denise formed the party committee: They planned the party and even printed invitations to put outside. The party took place in our flat on Saturday. I was supposed to write our marketing case in the afternoon but was too excited to concentrate. So Carla and I went to Coles instead to buy party food to offer everyone. We had chicken ceasar salad, chips, candy, and cake. Nign Nign bought us some dumplings they had made in flat 6. By 9 o´clock our flat was full of people, mostly from Geegal but also from Gumal. Till had baken a cake and everyone song "Happy Birthday" to us, and we got to blow a candle together. I got such great presents :) Carla, Denise and Till gave me Eternity Moment parfyme by Calvin&Klein. (I use it every day now and keep smelling myself lol) Shinae got me a cute little bag and a small mirror. I also got more chocolate to add to my stockings, from Cameron and Renar. I guess people here have began to notice I love chocolate :P The party itself was a ton of fun! People played drinking games, talked and just hung around. I don´t think anyone ended up leaving for clubs, so I guess they had a good time in our flat. Someone burned food in another flat, which caused the fire alarm to go off, so for a while everyone gathered outside to wait for the firemen to get here. As the night passed on, I ended up getting fairly drunk... To be honest, I don´t remember half of the night. But I was told I was overly positive and happy and did nothing that stupid. I remember performing the swan move with Carla, though ;) And drinking shots of straight vodka. Later that night I got a great idea to call Sonja on my cell phone. Fortunately I´ve got prepay because calling to Finland for 23min on your cell phone isn´t that cheap. So at least I won´t be surprised by a huge phone bill. It was great talking to her after such a long time <3 I really should call my family and friends in Finland more often. After finishing the phone call I started missing everyone, though, and spent the rest of the night talking to Tim. I think I went to bed at around 3am.

Party people :D

I and Carlos

On Sunday I woke up at 11pm to go sailing. UTS Union has its own sailing yacht, and students and staff get to book it on Fridays and Sundays. It´s pretty popular, so I had made the booking already a couple of months ago. I wouldn´t necessarily have booked it for the next day after our party, though, if I had known we were going to have one. I was feeling really tired and still a little bit drunk when we took the train to Edgecliff and walked to Double Bay Wharf. It was me, Tim, Moy and Cameron going. The weather was absolutely beautiful: warm and sunny :) We had to call our skipper Alistair when we were ready to go on the wharf, and he came to pick us up. The sailing boat is medium size and has two sails. There´re beds, an oven and a toilet inside. To get out of the wharf we used the motor first. It was a crowded day on the sea because of a sailing race. When it was time to start sailing, there was hardly any wind. So we didn´t move a lot, but sat on the boat and enjoyed the sunshine and nice views. We headed towards Manly but didn´t get really far. We got to help the skipper with the sails, and everyone got to stand behind the roar (is that a word?) Cameron didn´t have the best time, though. He got seasick and kept throwing up to the sea. After nice 3hours of sailing we were took back to the wharf. I learned a bit about sailing but can´t say I really understand it, though. I really enjoyed it and am considering booking the boat sometime again. It´s relatively cheap: only $30 per person. After coming home from sailing I just relazed watching Ugly Betty. It was Tim´s turn to cook flat dinner and he prepared really delicious chicken with chips :P

Moy, I, Skipper Alistair and Cameron

Tasmania: More hiking

Monday 14.5: We woke up at a decent time to drive to the east coast of Tasmania, to Friendly Beaches. We started with the longest walk of the day. First we climbed some stairs up to a lookout, then down to this smaller beach. It didn´t take long to walk to this another, longer beach. Both of the beaches were beautiful with white sand and long coastlines. We got to walk for a while on the beach before finishing the walk with a part in a forest. The lady at the visitor centre had told us it´d take 5hours to do the walk, but we completed it in around 3hours. It was the same thing with almost all walks, though, both in New Zealand and Tasmania. I guess they time their walks according to some pretty slow walker. Anyways, at the end of our walk this cute little wallaby came up to Denise and ate a piece of bread from her hand. It wasn´t scared at all! We did two shorter walks later that day, just walking to some lookouts. When it started to get dark we drove back to Launceston, to the same hostel. We spent the night watching TV shows and just hanging around...

Carla, I and Denise at the beach

Denise and wallaby

Funny traggic sign: Kangaroo lifting a car

Sunset

Tuesday 15.5: We had a couple of hours time to walk around Lauceston before having to return our car. So we walked to the town centre, where I had a cup of coffee at Glorias Jeans while the others did some souvenir shopping. Then we walked to the harbour, and back to our hostel, after buying cookies from Subway. We had to fill up our car with gas before returning it. Not wanting to put in any more than necessary, we left it quite unfull. So we had to go get some more gas close to the airport, in a small village called Perth :) Returning the car was a bit weird since the company doesn´t have an office at the airport. We were just told to leave the car at the parking lot, put the keys inside and leave the doors open. So that´s what we did before heading to the airport cafe, where we played yazzi and just hung around before our flight. The flight went well, and after taking the train home Carla and I went to Coles to buy some chicken to cook a real dinner! We had been eating only bread and noodels for the whole week...

Tasmania: Sunny days

Saturday 12.5: Cameron had told us to go to the Hobart Saturday Market, so we walked to the old part of the town. They were selling a bunch of stuff: vegetables & fruit, souvenirs, fudge, jewellery and all kinds of Tasmanian made things. We spent a couple of hours just walking around. I bought a Dutch ollieboll, which was delicious :P I also got a piece of this really thin fruit thing. After walking back from the market we started driving along Franklin-Gordon Wild Rivers National park and did three short walks there. We saw rainforest, a hanging bridge and a waterfall, but nothing really special. We decided to drive to Cradle Mountains to spend the night. We didn´t arrive there until at 8pm, when the only backpackers place didn´t have any cheap rooms left anymore. So we had to take this cousy cabin, which was so luxurous! There were two bedrooms, an electric fireplace, TV with satellite channels, nice kitchen facilities and even a spa :) We watched a document about the Eurovision Song Contest in Helsinki. It was weird but really nice hearing Finnish! Till and I cooked a meal with noodles, tuna and vegetables, and we spent the rest of the night watching a movie. On our way Madeleine had received a sad phonecall. Her grandpa had died and she had to make a decision about whether to fly to Holland for his funeral. Her dad got her a flight leaving on Wednesday, so she´s in Holland now.

Hobart Saturday Market

Hanging bridge

Waterfall at Nelson River

In the rainforest

Sunday 13.5: We woke up pretty early. Even though the cabin was so luxurous, it was cold in our room during the night. I slept on a douple bed with Madeleine and she kept pulling the blanket to herself. Me, being half asleep, just kept wondering how the blanket was getting smaller and smaller lol. We watched a movie before heading to the visitor centre. There were plenty of hiking options in the Cradle Mountain National Park. We decided to go for Marions Lookout walk, that took 4 hours. We climbed as high as 1250m from sea level, which was proper exercise. It was worth it, since the view up there was just beautiful! We were again really lucky with weather. According to Lonely Planet (Till´s German one; both Carla and Madeleine had forgotten to bring theirs) it´s sunny only 1 out of 10 days at Cradle Mountains. The sun was shining the whole day :D Our walk began with intensive climbing up the mountain, followed by a flat and rather wet part. We finished with downhill, which was annoying. Even though it´s more work going uphill I definately prefer it. Denise completed almost the whole walk carrying a present from Till: She carried this rock with her and got an ice cream as a price.

A view from Marions Lookout

Mountains

After finishing the walk we drove to Launceston, which is one of the biggest towns in Tasmania. On our way there we stopped to buy strawberries from this farm. They didn´t have fully ripe strawberries, but I got a box of half-ripe ones for free. The farmer and his two daughters were really friendly, giving the strawberries and even inviting us to have a hot drink with them. We didn´t stay for drinks, though, but drove to Launceston and booked a hostel. I met this Finnish man there! He had just moved to Tasmania with his wife and little son. We had a good chat about differences between Finland and Australia, including questioning their house building skills (some houses aren´t build that well here). He also told me about this plan to build a huge plumpmill in northern Tasmania. They´re being consulted by Finns. And his wife told me there´s a Finnish bakery in Brisbane, where you can buy proper rye bread, pulla and karjalanpiirakka. I´ll definately go there when I visit Brisbane!

Tasmania: chocolate and penguins

First of all, I´m sorry it´s taken me so long to update my blog. I´ve had quite a lot of uni stuff to do since I got back from our holiday in Tasmania. But I´ll do my best to write about our trip, and hopefully the whole story will be finished in a couple of days.

Thursday 10.5: To begin with, I could introduce our traveling group: Me, Carla, Denise, Madeleine (Holland) and Till (Germany). Madeleine and Till live in Gumal, an another UTS residence on Broadway Street. We arrived in Hobart, which is the biggest town in Tasmania (120 000 residents), at 11am and picked up our car at an office at the airport. Then we headed to Port Arthur and stopped at various lookouts having quite imaginative names: Devils Kitchen, Tasman Blowhole, Tasman Arch, Remarkable Cave... All of them were located in Tasman National Park. Most of the caves/holes we saw had been formed by water and erasion, and some of the cave roofs had fallen down forming just deep walls. I think pictures will be better for describing how the rock formations looked like. When it got dark we drove back to Hobart, where walked a couple of blocks to Woolworths to buy some groceries.

Tasman Arch (I think)

Friday 11.5: We decided to split into two groups: Madeleine and I would go to visit Cadbury Chocolate Factory while the others would go hiking at Mount Wellington. First we all drove together to the mountain. We were under the impression there wouldn´t be a road all the way up to the top, but as we kept driving we actually reached the highest point. I´m glad we did, because otherwise Madeleine and I would´ve missed some spectacular views! It was really windy up there, but the beautiful view over Hobart was worth walking around the parking area. I realised I had lost my new camera and began quite worried about it. So Madeleine and I left the others to do a walk down the mountain and drove back to the hostel to look for my camera. Fortunately someone had turned it in at the reception and I got it back :)

From Mount Wellington

It was a 15-min drive to the chocolate factory. Since they had guided tours leaving every 10min we decided to have some cappucino before going on a tour. We had to wait a short time before our tour, and that´s when we got our free chocolate samples. They were just mint freddos and small bars of normal, white and hazelnut chocolate. We did a good job collecting 23 bars from the basket and stuffing them to my bag :P The tour itself lasted for almost an hour and half. Since it was Friday afternoon some of the lines were closed, but we got to see most phases of the production process: putting melted chocolate in shapes, cooling them, wrapping, packing etc... I can´t remember what all the processes are called. Seeing and smelling all the chocolate made us feel like crabbing them from the lines and eating them! Unfortunately they had stopped giving samples during the tour 4,5 months ago because of hygienic reasons. Anyways, chocolate is made of cocoa plant that grows in New Guinea, Ghana and Indonesia. They produce as much as 120 tons of chocolate a day at the factory! It´s only a fraction of how much they produce at the biggest Cadbury factory in Birmingham, though. After the tour we were given small boxes of a collection of chocolates, and we got to purchase some at discount prices.

Cadbury chocolate truck

By the time we had driven back to Hobart the others had already walked there and were waiting for us next to the highway. We drove to Kettering, where we ate our lunch sandwitches and took a ferry over to Burry Island. We could bring our car over, so after the 20-min ferry trip we drove to this lookout that was at the point that combined the southern and northern parts of the island. Then we drove to Adventure Bay to check out their accomodation offering. They had some reasonable priced little cottages, but even though Denise was going to sleep in the car (she slept in the car every night) this lady would´ve made us pay for her, too. So we decided not to stay there over night. Instead we took a walk along Grass Point Track, that went along the beach to Penguin Island. We saw heaps of wallabies! The sun was already going down on our way back and we saw a beautiful sunset at the beach.

At Burry Island

Madeleine, Denise, Till, Carla and I

A wallaby

Sunset at Grass Point Track

Since it was dark we drove back to the lookout we had been earlier, to see penguins. They come out of water when it´s dark and wander over the beach to sleep in the bushes. We waited down at the beach for quite a while before we saw the first penguins. We were lucky to meet this local couple having a flashlight, since we wouldn´t have been able to see much with just Till´s cell phone light. Once the penguins started to arrive they came either alone or in small groups. It was hard trying to take pictures of them because it was so dark, they were quire far away and moving. They were really cute, though :) After seeing enough penguins we took the ferry back to the mainland and drove back to Hobart, to sleep in the same hostel we had been the night before.

A penguin

I´ve got a job!!

I´ve been looking for a job for almost the whole time I´ve been in Sydney. I gotta admit I haven´t been really active in my search, though. Anyways, on Thursday when I was coming back from the the gym I walked past this new cafe and saw a sign saying they´re looking for new staff. I stopped just to read the sign more carefully, when this guy started talking to me. It turned out he works as a bartender at the cafe, and he promised to mention me to his boss. So on Friday, when they were having a promotion day (free coffee and cake) I went there with my resume and talked to the boss for maybe 5min. He was very busy talking to his cell phone all the time, and just told me to come to a staff meeting on Sunday morning. So that´s what I did today - I couldn´t sleep last night because I was so excited about getting to know if I actually got the job - to find out I´m now employed :D I met the rest of the people working there, who all seem really nice. We were told about some practices, but since it´s a brand new cafe there´re still many things that need to be worked out. We wrote down our days and hours of availability and were supposed to receive a call about our work shifts today, but no one has called me yet. Maybe I´ll stop by there tomorrow to ask. Anyways, I´m really happy and excited about starting my new job :)

Today the housing service offered us a free lunch in the courtyard to celebrate the end of construction. Geegal has been under some major construction since I arrived, and we residents have been bothered by noise starting early in the mornings, not being able to hang out at the courtyard for over a month and most importantly not having our balconies until last week! But now the construction is finally finished, and we got our lunch: various dishes of Chinese, sushi and Indian, plus fruit for desert. It was delicious :P Followed by some ice cream that Carla, Joyce (her Dutch friend who´s visiting here this weekend) and I had in Darling Harbour. I´ve been eating like a pig lately (both real food and treats) but haven´t gained any weight, which is weird. I´m enjoying it as long as I can, though, since I love eating :P


At the finished courtyard (first picture taken with my new camera)

Getting a job came just in time considering I´ve been shopping quite a lot lately... A week ago I went to Market City intending just to buy some vegetables from Paddys Market, but decided to collect my student discout card from the info desk, too. I saw that Events outlet store was having massive sales and ended up spending almost an hour there trying on different dresses. I bought 3 dresses and a top for $106. If I had paid full prices they had would´ve been over $650 together! One of the dresses is a strapless full lenght evening gown made of dark brown satin, and I´m planning on wearing it at the next acadimic ball, which I guess will be Kaplaaki´s Anniversary Ball. Then on Thursday I was surfing online looking for discout digital cameras. I had lost my crappy HP-camera at the harbour cruise, and didn´t really care since I had been planning on buying a better one anyways. I found this good Casio camera on sale, and Carla joined me to pick it up from an outlet in Caterbury (after having coffee and pastries at Breadtop Cafe). It was about to close at 5pm and we were still in the train at 4:53, but once we got out of the train we sprinted to the store and made it just in time! So now I´ve got a brand new cool camera. It has a bunch of different settings (like sunny day, motion, snow, dark, close-up etc.) and it´s smart enough to choose the best setting automaticly. I´ll be having a good time taking pictures in Tasmania!

Formal dinner and Dutch Queens Birthday

Snif. I spent so much time writing about New Zealand but no one has commented :(

So, I´ve been back home for over a week now... I´ve been mostly just trying to catch up with uni work: writing assingments, working on group projects and studying for my Olympic Games mid-term exam. I also got some results. I got 26/30 for my Finance mid-term exam. All of my calculations were right but I messed up on the multiple choice section. We got 13.5/20 for our Olympic Games group presentation, whose topic was security at the Olympics. I thought we did a pretty good job, but apparently the tutor didn´t think so :/

Last Friday we had the UTS Residences Annual Dinner. The housing services offered all residents a free formal dinner at the Great Hall in the UTS Tower Building. The dresscode was fun/formal/fabulous (or something along that line) so people were dressed quite differently. Some girls had real evening gowns, while some had gone for more creative costumes. Most of us were wearing cocktail dresses. Anyways, everyone looked really nice :) I had decided to wear this Chinese looking dress I had bought from Singapore, and even though I was a bit concerned about having long sleeves it turned out to look just fine. The dinner started at 7pm with a welcome drink and we were given one more free drink during the evening. (Which is quite a contrast compared to the number of shots we get at formal academic balls in Finland. But on the other hand, we pay for the tickets.) We got really nice food indeed: salmon salad for starter, chicken or lamb with smashed potatoes for main course and chocolate mousse or cheese cake for dessert (I had both :P ) There was some program - speach by the vice chancellor, a few other speaches and toasts, a dance performance - but most of the time people were just sitting on their tables or walking around. They had made sitting charts to separate people from their old friends, which I think was a nice idea. I was seated with American, Canadian, German and Indian people, and it was nice seeing some new faces. Many people changed tables to sit with their friends, though, and I ended up eating dessert with Carla, Shinae, Tim and Till. There was a live band playing. Carla tried her best to teach me some ballroom dancing :) The music was fun to listen to, but I had no idea how to dance to some of the songs so I just sat down listening to them. Because of not being offered more free drinks I decided not to spend my money on any drinks that night. Some girls had apparently had a few too many, since I heard quite a few of them throwing up in the toilets. Gross. After the party was over we headed to Bar Broadway. I stayed there just for maybe an hour before walking home with Renar, Moy and Carla. The rest of our group stayed out till 5am. All in all, it was a fun night, and I enjoyed the formal dinner athmosphere!


Denise, Moy, Carla, Cameron, Shinae, Madeleine, I and Tim


Carla, Denise and I


People dancing

It was the Dutch Queens Birthday on Monday. It´s one of the main public holidays in Holland and they´ve got big festival celebrations. Carla invited me to join her and Madeleine to go to Scubar, that advertised having a Dutch night. They didn´t really have one, though. We had been expecting at least Dutch music and maybe some special drink offers, but it seemed just like a normal Sunday night. There were some Dutch people there wearing their orange shirts, though, and we spent most of the night talking to these four backpackers. It was rather interesting being the only non-Dutch, but I just pretended like being one ;) I couldn´t understand what they were talking about, though, even though I can recognize a few words every now and then because they are similar to German. They were polite talking to me in English, though, so I didn´t get bored. This guy (who wasn´t a backpacker but on a business trip) kept buying everyone beer and since I hate beer he bought me two vodkas with lemonade/grandberry. Unlike normally, I got really tired after drinking them and decided to walk home when the bar closed and the others headed for another club in Darling Harbour.

Carla, I and Madeleine wearing orange boas

NZ: Going home

Sunday 22.4: It was pretty cold in the room when we woke up. We hung around for a while before driving to Christchurch, that completed our loop around the South Island. In Christchurch we found a nice hostel: Frauenreiseheim (or something like that, anyways it was a hostel meant only for women). The main building was an old style house and the rooms looked stylish, as well. They had the largest movie collection ever! Carla and Denise started to watch Bridget Jones, and I decided to walk to town centre. To be honest, Christchurch was nothing special. First I checked out the cathedral, which was beautiful but not as impressive as for example St.Marys Cathedral. Then I crossed a river and got to this market place. They were having Sunday markets outside and I walked around. There were many little kiosks selling cheap food from different countries, all kind of New Zealand made stuff and arts. I found this little fudge store that had free samples; Ended up spending quite a while there sampling the fudge ;) On my way back I stopped at some clothes stores but couldn´t buy anything because of having no money left. When I got back to our hostel we decided to leave for dinner to celebrate our last night in New Zealand. We had picked a restaurant serving various kinds of deserts from Lonely Planet, but when we got there we decided we wanted to have some real food instead. So we ended up eating at this Japanese restaurant, which was a good choice. My salmon was so delicious! We were so stuffed after dinner, and just walked back to the hostel and watched Bridget Jones 2. We were also doing laundry (it was free, unlike in Geegal) and had some problems with the dryer.


The cathedral and some monument


Monday 23.4: Carla had a different flight back home, and Denise took her to the airport at around 5am. I stayed in the hostel sleeping. Later in the morning Denise and I watched a movie, whose name I forgot, but it was a good one. We also drank several cups of free hot chocolate :) We were supposed to leave for the airport, but we hadn´t finished the movie yet so we kept giving ourselves "a few more minutes" until we really had to go. We got gas on our way there and returned the car some 15min late, which they didn´t care. We were given a ride to the airport, where we spent some time looking at stuff at stores and eating our dinner leftovers. We were also planning on spending our last $NZ12 on ice cream or something good, but we had to pay a $25-fee to get out of the country, so we were left with $2 with which we purchased a chocolate bar. We flew via Brisbane, where I finally had french fries! I had been telling Denise and Carla I´d eat french fries during our trip (I hadn´t had them for over half a year) so I had to do it before we returned home. We arrived in Sydney at around 10pm and had to wait pretty long for our luggage. It rained so much, and I actually got to use my new raincoat walking home from Redfern, that I hadn´t once needed in New Zealand :)