Welcome to Sydney

Arrived at SYD, taxi to Lauren and her boyfriend Pat’s place in Brighton Le Lebanon*. (*Brighton Le Sands)  It’s a cute little suburb next to Botany Bay with a lot of Lebanese and Greek influence (read: a 3-for-1 cultural experience package, complete with kebabs! Yay Australia!).  Lauren and I haven’t seen each other for 4 years, but it could just as well have been 4 days.  She’s fantastic as usual, and we’re right back to girly banter within minutes. Pat is the nicest, most generous person of any age, gender, race.. actually he may not be a part of the human race. More like the Rare Angelic Race. 

After 14 hours of plane contraption, I was ready for a little 'yog' the next day. Well. That Sydney air is so pure and the water so sea level-y that after a week of altitude training in Sun Valley, I ran 10 kilometers without even realizing it! (that’s almost 6mi for you Imperials).  I think running is one of the best ways to see a place because biking and driving are so fast you have to worry about hitting things, while walking doesn’t cover enough ground for my short attention span.  

I was ready for more adventure, so Lauren and I headed out for Newtown, the Haight Street of Sydney.  We had run into a few train platform obstacles, namely not being able to find the correct one, when an older rosy-faced lady came to our aid.  She was headed for Newtown as well and would be more than happy to point us in the direction of all the local pubs, whether or not we had asked her to (we hadn’t.)  She proceeded to spend the entire train ride bitterly complaining about those ‘disgusting young couples’ taking over Newtown. “Those young couples are just everywhere you look now, in shops and pubs and ughh young couples living in Newtown these days.”  Lauren is exactly one half of a young couple although she lives 15 minutes away from Newtown, so I guess we were exempt from the lady’s wrath. Ha.

We ate lunch at Moo’s, a fabulous chain hamburger joint. I got a Wagyu burger which is high-class Japanese beef. I don’t ever need to pay for that stuff again because, although it was awesome, they serve Australian Angus Beef everywhere--even at Mc Donald’s!  Here is a really attractive picture of me before eating it:

Also, for those of you familiar with my 18^th birthday, here is a fun story: Lauren and I were shopping along in Newtown when we came across a store owned by one of the stars of the TV show ‘Hoarders’. You know, where they are complete pack-rats and shove any trinket, tool, blanket, card, dress, toiletry, etc. into nooks and crannies of their house? Well this shop was like somebody from China had brought over the contents of him and his 16 neighbors’ houses and hustled it up into a 7-aisle shop.  Anyways, we spent almost an hour scrutinizing the goods and I successfully located an (almost) fully functional converter for my laptop, as well as this gem:

A RIPSTICK! For those who don’t know, the Ripstick is a fascinating piece of hybrid transportation technology which combines the platforminess of a skateboard with the wobble-y-ness of only 2 wheels, with the axial turn capability of utter nonsense, which makes for the carving-like motion of a surfboard. Just Google it. In any event, a Ripstick is the singular gift I received from my straight-faced parents on the night of my passage to American Adulthood. Thanks, Mom and Pop!

That night, Pat and Lauren had tickets to see a Wayne Brady show in Newtown.  I didn’t. But I figured I could poke around some of the pubs that lady mentioned and pass the time talking to some of the young couples.  Turns out, the lady was wrong—or maybe 8:00pm is too early to go out for young couples—but the pubs were occupied by middle-aged Aussies, highly involved in their own gossip and catchings up.  It took me about 20 minutes to realize this was not how I wanted to spend the evening, so I sauntered on back to the theater and, God bless the Aussies, they let me walk right into the sold-out show—for FREE.  I may have missed the opening act, but I came just in time to see this: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=Bqgjii7P4a4) Wayne Brady improvising a song to Beyonce’s ‘Single Ladies’. Beyonddddddd hilarious.  Found this on the street afterward. #Fate.