Little Adventures from April/May

                Hello again!  I know in my last post I promised I would post again sooner rather than later, so here it is!  Over the past month I’ve been doing a lot of lounging in the house TV room watching movies, but I’ve also been on a few fun adventures!  The cool thing about studying abroad for this long is you get a chance to really live here.  As in not just doing touristy things all the time (though those are a lot of fun,) but you get to do pretty regular things that make it really feel like you’re living here.  Other than Tasmania, I haven’t travelled too far out of Sydney, but Sydney is such a cool place, I’m pretty fine staying right here.

Paddy’s Markets

                Apparently Paddy’s Markets are a staple here in Sydney, and they’re super famous for some reason.  I never really knew why, because it seems like it’s just some kind of permanent flea market in a huge building in Sydney’s Chinatown.  But one day I had a lot of time and nothing planned, so I decided to take the bus down to check it out for myself.

                Turns out, Paddy’s Markets are famous not for being a huge flea market, but a really weird flea market.  Next to all the massive souvenir shops you could find regular things like a fully stocked vegetable market, electronics shop, and walls and walls of cell phone cases.  But next to those were also stalls full of costumes, wigs, creepy masks, and weird fetish lingerie. Walking between these huge displays of literally anything you could think of was kind of an awesome experience.  I didn’t take any good pictures, so I found some stock ones on the internet to do the talking here.

                Since the Kosciusko Fiasco, I’ve been trying to save money, of course, but somehow with all these weird and wonderful stalls leaning over me, I couldn’t help but buy a few things for my friends back home.  They’ll have to wait till I get home to see what it is, but I can tell you it isn’t kangaroo testicles.

Holland House

                One of my best friends here, Yvonne, is from the Netherlands, where I assume everything is colorful, everyone wears wooden shoes, and if you take too long of a walk you’ll find yourself in another country.  I think only some of those things are true, but Yvonne found out about a place outside of Sydney that is a pretty authentic representation of what Netherlands is like!  It’s called the Holland House, and it’s just this huge store/restaurant/museum dedicated to everything Dutch.

                So on a boring day, I went with her on the hour bus ride to this place to learn what Dutchness was really all about.  Turns out, it’s a lot of what I thought.

                But really, the stuff here was really cool!  Yvonne gasped at pretty much every food we saw, saying she remembers this stuff from home and her grandma used to cook using this and how did they even get it here?  Some of the stuff looked super good, like schnitzels and huge boxes of chocolate sprinkles, but they’re also apparently obsessed with dark licorice in the Netherlands.  Enough so that there was a whole aisle devoted to licorice candy.

                There was also a tiny restaurant inside Holland House, where they basically sold two things: schnitzel and poffertjes.  I didn’t know what either of these were, but Yvonne insisted we order both.  We were super hungry from the long travel there, so we did!

                As it turns out, I fucking love Dutch food.  Pofffertjes turned out to be mini pancakes doused in sugar and syrup, while schnitzel is basically just a fried sausage on a bun.  They were both hella delicious.

               

                During a conversation on the bus, Yvonne was also shocked to find out I didn’t have a deep fryer in my house.  Apparently it’s just a common thing in the Netherlands to have a fryer in your kitchen next to regular stuff like the stove and microwave, because “frying things at home is so much better!”  I thought Americans were the ones obsessed with fried food, but turns out I was wrong.

Surfing at Maroubra

                Since our surfing lessons, some friends and I have wanted to try out our surfing skills somewhere without an instructor. Because we’re super cool and Australian now and we can just do that here.  So we asked around the house and borrowed two abandoned surfboards that some ex-residents left behind, and grabbed a boogie board that Mizuki apparently found on the side of the road once, and got on the bus to Maroubra beach to try and surf.

                Maroubra is awesome because it’s huge, the waves are great, and it’s pretty much always empty save for a few surfers.  Needless to say, we felt super cool carrying our surfboards down to the sand and into the waves.

                So we didn’t do too well, seeing as it was only our second time surfing ever, but it was still a lot of fun out there.  We learned from each other, and improved a little with each wave. By the end, we had all stood up at least once!  Also we got some cool pictures of us because that’s basically half the reason we went surfing anyway.

                We ended up exhausted and cold and wet and full of sand, but after a hot shower and comfy clothes, we all felt super awesome and accomplished.

AFL Game

                On UNSW’s campus, we’re super close to a lot of cool things outside of Sydney.  One of those things is a huge stadium, used for all kinds of weird sports like cricket and Aussie football.  So because it’s so close, and the tickets are pretty cheap for these games, the people at International House got a huge group together and we all went to an Australian Football League game one Saturday.

                Our team was the Sydney Swans, and I completely forget who we were playing, but I don’t think anyone really knew what was going on anyway.  Australian football is also very misleading name, because it’s nothing at all like soccer or American football.  It’s kind of soccerish in that there’s never timeouts and the players are always running and tripping each other, but it’s also close to rugby because they can’t throw the ball forward at all.  Basically they just threw and kicked the ball and climbed on each other and tackled people with zero pads and when the crowd cheered, so did we.

                I can’t possibly hope to understand the rules even after watching a full game, but it was still really entertaining! 

Catmosphere Cat Café

                I FINALLY MADE IT TO THE CAT CAFÉ.  I’d been wanting to go since one of the first weeks I was here, and I finally got a group and a time to come with me!

                The place is called Catmosphere Cat Café, and it’s all space themed and really adorable.

                For $20 here, you get a hot drink, some cat-shaped cookies, and two hours in the “cat room” with the “catstronauts.”  Honestly, it was kind of an expensive cup of peppermint tea, but it was the experience that counts.

                The cats were so adorable and basically cleansed my soul after being away from my kitties at home for so long.  Also they all had sci-fi themed names like Obi Wan Catobi, Princess Leia, Darth Beauty, Battlestar Galacticat, Mad Max, and Princess Turbocake.  While some people in the group left early, another American girl Erin and I stayed for an extra hour playing with the cats.  It was truly a spiritual experience.

Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park

                Australia is basically made for outdoor adventures, so of course I go on hiking trips once every few weeks.  Ku-ring-gai Chase is a very oddly named national park about an hour and a half away from us by train, but known for its wealth of micro-ecosystems and Aboriginal rock art found all through the park.  So Sarah and I finally got out here on a day we both don’t have class, and hiked around for the whole day.

                There’s really not much to say that the pictures can’t say themselves.  During the day we walked through the scrub, the mangrove forest, and little patches of rainforest, as well as ancient Aboriginal sites and artworks. 

                The park is beautiful, and also full of yachts for some reason.  There’s a river that runs through the park, but I’m not sure if and where it connects with the ocean or anywhere else.  But I guess it’s a popular place for really rich people to dock their huge ridiculous boats because there were a ton there.  And one of them was for sale.  And I may have made an impulse purchase and surprise I’m dropping out of school and living on a boat next year bye.

Misc. Sydney Places

                Sydney is a big city that’s full of very outdoorsy and usually pretty young people.  So of course, there are a ton of overpriced hipster restaurants, stores, and bars all over the place where white girls flock on the weekends to take Instagram photos and Snapchat videos.  These were some of the places I visited.

                Buffalo Dining Club

                The three American girls that I went to this place with apparently heard about it from a Buzzfeed video, so that gives you the idea of what it’s like. The inside is super tiny, but also rustic and probably Instagrammable I don’t even know. 

                This place was known for their wines and cheeses for a long time, and they do indeed have a lot of weird cheese that we tried and really liked.  But the main attraction for white chicks was that their special pasta dish is served inside a wheel of cheese, where the waiter swirls the pasta around the cheese then dumps it into your bowl. It’s a cute way of serving, if it didn’t involve 5 pink iPhones pointing at the damn cheese wheel the whole time.

                But it was pretty cool anyway.

                Organism

                We found this place when the burger place we were looking for was packed with a line out the door.  It looked cute and was relatively cheap considering the area we were in (everything in Sydney is so overpriced it’s ridiculous,) so we tried it out.

                The inside was also tiny and cute, and the food was really really good.  The only problem was that before we ordered, the waitress told us that the only thing we were going to order out of the 6 things on the menu was a “seasonal” item and only served in summer.  (It was some kind of waffle sandwich?  How is that a summer thing???)  Then about 20 minutes after we ordered, the waitress came back to tell us they didn’t have enough ingredients to make one of our dishes.  Hipsters, am I right?

               

                N2 Extreme Gelato

                Continuing on the trend of quirky and overpriced (but still very cool) places in Sydney, this one was probably my favorite.  It’s a gelato shop that cooks up these really funky gelato flavors, then makes them in front of you behind a glass panel while wearing lab coats and goggles.  They need them too, because they use stuff like liquid nitrogen and huge funky mixers to make this stuff.

                They even included a syringe full of hot fudge in some of the flavors, which was honestly my favorite thing I’ve ever seen.

                Morning Glory

                There’s not much to say about this place other than it’s an Asian imports store in the middle of Chinatown (where everything cool is,) and there were minions everywhere.

                We were drawn in when one of the girls in our group heard her favorite K-pop band playing from inside, and we walked out with some awesome Japanese mud face masks!

                The Argyle

                Anyone who knows me knows I’m a pretty introverted person.  The term “going out” makes me cringe and want to wrap myself tighter in all my blankets.  But here there’s a group of my friends going out to bars and/or clubs every weekend, and I never join them beyond hanging out at the house before they leave.  However, this one time, Sarah convinced me to come be sober with her when a bunch of our friends went to this fancy nightclub in the trendy Rocks neighborhood in Sydney.

                We got in for free because one of us knew a promoter for the club, and we also got $10 vouchers for drinks, which were honestly kind of shitty.  But the venue was super cool, and we felt like rockstars hanging out at this club in the middle of Sydney on a Friday night.

                I even found out while looking for those stock pictures above that Daft Punk even DJ’d there once!  So that’s pretty cool.

               

           So that’s all I have for right now!  According to the countdown on my phone, I have 43 days left in Australia, and that number is going down at a terrifying rate.  Hopefully I’ll have a lot more adventures to share before my time is up!