One Step Closer to AARP Membership...

This is my first post as a 27-year-old. 27! That’s not a small number, folks. On the contrary, that’s quite a BIG one indeed. I wonder how much longer until I start having to pluck out the gray hairs… It can only be days now before I have to start seriously worrying about that, perhaps a few weeks if I’m lucky. Ugh. To any youngsters out there, I do advise you to enjoy your youth. One day you’ll wake up and you’ll be 27 and it’ll all start going downhill.

So as the savy amongst you may have deduced, I had a birthday recently. The birthday was pretty memorable actually. Climbed to the top of the Sydney Harbor Bridge! We started the day with some dumplings, and then headed up to the top.

The climb started during the day:

And finished up at night:

So we got the daytime, twilight, and nighttime views. Pretty neat! It was a group of 14 of us and the tour leader. It was also my first time taking a Breathalyzer! They make everyone do one before you go up to the top. No tipsy or buzzed folks are permitted to go up, although you are physically attached via cable to the structure the whole time anyway, so it's not like the drunk people could fall off. But good thing we didn’t get a glass of wine with lunch!

Post-climbing, we had some sangria back at Cheryl’s house, and I even got myself a nice birthday cupcake before heading out on the town for the evening:

Now we move on to the negativity. I have bad news, and I have TERRIBLE news. The bad news is that I have a roommate. Her name is Alex. She is from Adelaide. She has a fiancée back in Adelaide, and is here for work. She curses like a sailor though, and her vernacular reminds me of Helena’s less-than-classy speech patterns. They seem to be cut from a similar mold. She gave me a glass of wine the other night. She thinks I am “sweet.” I’m fairly certain that is her nice way of saying she thinks I’m a nerd, but that’s fine. She’s ok I guess.

Now the TERRIBLE news: The house has flipped. The tide has turned. Tom, Claire, and Moritz all left within 24 hours, leaving behind 3 newly empty beds plus the empty one in my room making 4. They filled them all up quickly. I now live in a party house with trashy idiots. Tom and Claire were replaced with another British couple. Their names are Jay and Jaz, I think. They are maybe early 30s, and their hobbies seem to include chain smoking, blasting horrible techno music, and drinking beer like 19-year-old American frat boys. The refrigerator where we all used to keep our fresh vegetables is now filled with cases of BEER. I’ve never seen so many empty beer bottles in my life. It’s disgusting. They’ve completely taken over the house. They even decided that apparently my food doesn’t require the 2 shelves that I’ve had since I moved here. I came home the other day and some of my crap was shoved onto the one shelf, and the rest of it was stashed in various other places to make room for their stuff. Very nice. Then there is the kid who replaced Moritz. I don’t know what his name is. I don’t really care either. He told me, but he (along with Jay ad Jaz) have crazy thick British accents that I cannot understand for the life of me. The Moritz replacement is a lazy unemployed pothead. He spends his days stoned on the couch. He does not know how to cook. He orders pizzas. Then he leaves the box wherever he finished. I am not sure if he is too stoned to get the pizza box to the garbage can, or if he is too stupid to know that empty pizza boxes should go in the garbage. Again, it doesn’t really matter. He’s an idiot. We will not be friends. I do not enjoy coming home at the end of the day to a domicile filled with empty beer bottles and that stinks like stale weed. If I wasn’t leaving in 3 weeks I’d look for other accommodation. These new people are exactly the sort of crap I feared would move in at some point, but I’ll manage. It’s allllllll part of the experience J

I finally got to Wildlife World in Darling Harbor. It had been closed for a while, and it recently reopened. I came across a rather large croc while I was wandering through, and we got into a fight:

Did anyone think that was real????? Did you???? No? Ugh. Nevermind then.

I also went up to a small zoo up in the Northern Suburbs, up by Macquarie University and Epping. It was called the Koala Park Sanctuary, although it had more kangaroos than koalas. They had the typical Aussie animals on display, but there were a couple of interesting things that made the trip up there worthwhile. One was the talking cockatoo! He was a big bird, and he could talk! I’ve never had a conversation with a bird before, at least one where the bird actually answers me in English. Granted, our conversation wasn’t super deep. We basically said hello back and forth. And I think he also knew how to say polly want a cracker. Either that or the bird was calling me a motherf*cker, so I’d like to think that he was actually talking about the crackers and polly wanting one. The other cool thing about the zoos was that they took their dingoes for walks! I got to pet a dingo. They seemed like nice enough little fellows. The kangaroos, wallabies, and wallaroos, however, do NOT enjoy watching the dingoes make their rounds, even though they are on leashes. I’ve never seen SO many animals so painfully alert all at once J.

Not much else to report. I’ve been on the internet researching things a lot lately, plus the gymnastics world championships is going on right now, so lots of stalking message boards and watching youtube uploads, none of which is really worth  writing oodles about on the blog.

This entry may not have been super exciting, but things should get more interesting soon. My mother and aunt arrive in a couple of days to visit for a spell, and then it’s off to cowgirl school and surf camp. That’s right, I’ll be heading off on my very own City Slickers-esque adventure, and then I will (attempt) to learn how to catch a wave. I’ve got some ideas for what will come after that, but nothing is anywhere near being set in stone yet.

Only a couple more weeks at HSBC! The call center has already started the process of moving over to Manila, so for parts of the day I don’t have to deal with the phones anymore! I’m thoroughly enjoying working in a phone call-less call center. It’s not too shabby!

The stoner kid is downstairs on the couch blasting music. I have my earplugs in, which does drown out about 85% of it, so it’s certainly tolerable. Wish me luck that in his stoned-ness he doesn’t feel the need to crank up the volume.