Beth and I stayed on Bondi Beach in a hostel. Originally we were planning to stay with these two Irish guys she knows (ha!) but they are leaving Australia in a couple of weeks so they didn’t want to pay an extra month of rent so they just moved into a hostel for their last two weeks. We stayed at the same hostel as them and had a great time. Apparently Bondi Beach is becoming known as “County Bondi” because so many Irish are moving in because the Irish government does such a poor job of providing jobs and welfare for its citizens that almost every young person with a college degree is basically required to move to find work. Sorry for that little rant – I have many, many issues with the way the Irish government makes decisions and conducts itself. But that’s for another day.
So we stayed in the same hostel as these two guys from Kerry. And about the rest of Ireland. I’m not kidding, probably 80% of that hostel was Irish people who had either just arrived and not yet found a place to live or were in a similar situation as Pete and Trevor (Beth’s friends) and just needed a place to live for a couple of days or a week before they moved on. (Trevor is moving to a different city in Australia and Pete’s actually off to America.) We caught them in just the nick of time before they left!
Sydney was definitely the most touristy city. We took a tour of the Sydney Opera House, which was AWESOME, and we walked around downtown Sydney, took free ferries out to different islands, etc. We really wanted to go to this immigration museum Beth’s dad kept talking about, but sadly never made it there. Just too much to do, I suppose. I’m trying to remember what else we did – saw the Harbour Bridge, took a ton of pictures in front of the Opera House – standard touristy stuff but it was really really fun.
Sydney was just… lovely. It was winter but 80 degrees, everyone was smiling and happy, it didn’t rain once… it was just AWESOME. And we knew people so we got to, again, hang with the locals – went to a house party where Beth and I were the only non-Irish people (everyone was SO confused when I tried to tell them I lived in Galway but was American… ) got to go to some cool tucked-away bars and restaurants… just again, really great. This was definitely the best time for me to go because I’ll never know that many people in Australia again, you know? And so much of this vacation was living how the locals live. Great fun.
So yeah, Australia was really, really fun. And then it was onto New Zealand, which was obviously very fun as well, but in a totally different way. Australia (especially Perth and Sydney) was laid back, sunny, hanging out with fun people and taking it easy. New Zealand was much more active… I can tell I’m transitioning into a new blog entry so I’ll just start a new one now.
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