woah

just worked out that i work 2.5 miles to and then from work every day! 5 miles a day! no wonder my legs and bum are wrecking

COMMENTS!!!

give me more comments people, its nice to know that someone reads this occasionally :) i have changed the settings so anyone can comment u dont have to sign up. woo!

iv been told my photos arent cheesy enough, so heres some good old full frontal ones
annabel & tomlauren & me & hayleyme & tanvi & darylllauren at home clubsteph & me (i must be brown cuz now my make up makes me look like a dork)hayley & tomme & daryll, bondimichelle & friendsme, annabel, lauren, hayley, steph, michelledrinking games around the kitcehn tableme, michelle, annabel, tom, jamie, jamesme & yannmichelle, me, hayley, annabellauren, james, annabel, jamie, hayley, michellecrazy swedes in surf camp tees

u wouldnt know i was in australia i tell ya now! the weather for the past 4 days or so has been awful. somehow last saturday we thought it was going to be the hottest day yet - 35 degrees, so we got all excited and packed up to get to bondi as early as possible.... and it was miserable! luckily it didnt rain (or hail) like last time, but it was really overcast and windy. we attempted to sunbathe for a couple of hours still but ended up having to redress and i went to warm myself up with a cuppa!

since then it has just been raining and overcast constantly!!! on sunday i went to soundwave festival http://www.soundwavefestival.com with jamie for a bit of MOSHING or otherwise, and we had to buy these stupid plastic poncho things or we would have got soaked it was pretty crazy. deftones were headlining and they were incredible, we were literally RIGHT at the front cuz the festival was actually pretty small and the stage they were playing on was pretty tiny really. i was wearing flipflops tho so i was pretty anxious bout my toes as theyr always constantly battered from walking so much (and also cuz last week when we were out i was stupidly wearing flipflops again and got my little toe trodden on TWICE and the skin ripped off it. mmm) but i managed to keep my toes in tact throughout the set which was cool. did however lose them briefly [my flip flops, not my toes] when we were running madly up a hill to try and chase the only guy selling ponchos tho. we also saw mxpx, unwritten law, parkway drive, hatebreed, +44, thrice, juliette & the licks and flyleaf so it was a bit of a blast from the past! ace day tho.

Photos:

im just at work at the moment at yet another job. this ones alright though, just boring office stuff... i dont seem to actually have anything to do at all, iv been on the internet all morning. im allowed to listen to music as well and we get free biscuits so its pretty cushy. the sales job was just rubbish. to be honest though i think if i had more patience and time it could still be a really cool thing to do, but i dont have enough time at the moment to waste a couple of weeks trying to get good at something and in the meantime earning absaloutely no money. last wed we went 'out in the field' to a market at penrith to try and sell this eftpos machine thing, and it was actually really fun and i made a sale straight away. so i thought wow this is ace this job is just for me. but, markets are incredibly different to proper shops as i found out on thursday! shopkeepers just dont want to talk to door to door sales people!! and i didnt realise how depressing it would be to get no after no after no all morning and having to keep walking into the next store with a happy smile and giving a really positive and enthusiastic impression about this bloody pin machine which i really dont care about. it just wore me down and i made zero sales = zero dollars. so i quit. im glad i tried it tho.

the job im doing at the moment is meant to just be admin but theres nothing really going on. its for a solicitors called Native Title Services who basically fight for aboriginals to keep their land, which is cool, wont ever get a job like this back in england. iv just had a chat to one of ladies here and she wants me to interview this anthropologist guy and then write an article about him for their monthly newspaper.

theres so many things iv forgotten to tell people about, and i havent updated my photos and stuff for absaloutely ages! promise i will do as soon as i can. oh, last night something a bit crappy happened. basically, someone walked in our front door and stole a girl called tanvi's speakers, phone, mp3 player and camera (including the chargers! what a cheek) so we all had a bit of a panic. because its so hot our front door just gets left open to cool the place down otherwise its an absaloute sauna, so although there were people in the house at the time in the tv room and in the kitchen, whoever it was just walked in straight into tanvis room cuz hers is the first u get to on the ground floor. we were down at the local scottish pub at the time but we were only there for about an hour cuz it was rubbish, so we were pretty shocked to return to that! the police came round a bit later when id gone to bed and apparantly they are going to do fingerprints and stuff but its not very likely that thats gonna do much. i keep my ipod, phone and camera on me at all time, and our room is upstairs pretty far away from the front door anyway, but even still its been a bit of a kick in the teeth especially for tanvi! wer gonna make sure the door is locked at all times now! which means that the house is gonna be unbearabley hot.

another sunny day at bondi....

new house! & job

Wahey 7 of us moved into a house in ultimo on friday and its great! theres like 26 people in the house at the moment, and room for 30 so its kinda wierd... obviously iv never lived with so many people before! no matter what time ur up theres always someone else around, its cool. all the people who are already there are proper nice and its ace, this one guy tom works at an ice cream store where he gets free ice cream so wer basically living off his suppplies at the moment! pistachio ice cream is the best. another guy, darryl works at a sweet shop... thats something to look forward to. That pic above is of our dining room/kitchen, ill get some more photos soon!

I went to a first day of work yesterday for this company called face2face, it was meant to be like raising money for charity on the streets - not collecting money but getting people to sign up. i kinda said yes to that job as well as another one at the same time, and want the other one more but that one started training today so i thought id go to the face2face one for one day just to see what its like and get some money. It was alright, id probably do it if i had no other jobs lined up but i dont really fancy being stood on the street for 8 hours a day having people ignoring u and walking straight past u 90% of the time.

The one i went to today was the sales & marketing one and it was pretty good actually. i was only in training for 2 hours ish, but im 'out in the field' tomorrow. im really excited about it to be honest, i mean maybe ill be crap at it and get no money at all (cuz its comission only... which is a bit crap) but i think its a really interesting field to be honest. like, my boss, naimh is proper funny and she started out as a backpacker like me 3 years ago and found herself in this job and loved it so much and now she is the head of the company, and how much she enjoys it really shows. shes really passionate about the product and the skill of selling, which is what intruiges me... like its playing with the customers mind it really is. its all psychological, to be a good sales person u just need to make the person think that ur doing them a favour, and that they want it, and that they are in control. iv got loads of info about it to read through, and she taught me the basics of like body language and how to lead the conversation and stuff to put soemone in the right frame of mind... and tomorrow wer going to a one off market thing which should be a bit mad considering iv never done it before, but ill be there with naimh and some of the other people, so hopefully ill pick it up.

Im on the free computer at IEP so id better go cz theres a bit of a queu!

Ooh, alex got into sydney uni!! so hes coming on thursday!!!! i only found out like 2 days ago cuz i hadnt read an email hed sent me about 3 weeks ago. stupid. but this is ace, itl be nice to see someone from home !

surf camp photos

surf camp

Sorry i havent updated or even emailed anyone for a while, we went to surf camp for 4 days on monday morning and we were in a really remote area down a massive hill so there was no internet or signal at all.

Surfing is SO INTENSE. i dont think iv ever done so much exercise in my life!! after the first day we were all absaloutly knackered, every bone and muscle in my body ached, we were in bed by 8.30 on the first night, thats just how tiring it was! and the second night was meant to be the big crazy piss up night (we all trekked up the mega hill to this old peoples bowling alley- come - bottleo, it was so wierd) and we ended up playing this mental drinking game called tippy cups with these americans and these absaloutlely crazy metalhead swedish guys... but we ended back at camp by like half 10 haha. Every other day we ended up kipping between surfs, otherwise i dont think id have managed at all!

Tippy Cups, 1 - 2 - 3:

The first two days we had to surf IN THE RAIN.... can u believe it! It was still good though, i mean ur pretty much wet anyway so it doesnt matter and apparantly surfers love weather like that cuz the waves obviously get much bigger. By wednesday tho the weather was gorgeous and we all now have lovely tan lines on our arms and legs from the wetsuits. We were out in the water for 4 hours a day so we were pretty paranoid bout burning, and i had bought this suncream the other week that i thought was awful cuz it was proper white and just never rubbed in but the instructor told us it was actually like the best stuff u can buy - white zinc stuff, u just spread it on and dont rub in, so u look a bit of a knob with a mega white face, but theres no chance of burning. So by the third day we were all out there ripping up the waves with our big snowmen faces... i have some amusing photos ill get up soon!!

Surfing is actually surprisingly easy - i stood up in the first session! its hard to improve though... like, once uv got the knack its ok, but i dont think i got any better than that during the other three days. And its so rough on ur body, u have to use every single muscle, and worse than that the surf boards absaloutly rip up ur skin, i have rashes and bruises all over my body from being battered by the waves and scratching myself on the surf board. got whacked in the face a couple of times too and collided with steph once and ended up basically squashed underwater between her bum and the sand. not very nice. ooh also! from being battered around so much by the waves i think i must have inhaled tones of water thru my nose without realising, cuz at one point a couple of hours after a surf i was back in our hut thing and i bent down to pick something up, and a massive stream of water flew out my nose!! tell u something, saltwater makes ur nose run, we were all snotty as hell and monging out, but i knew my nose wasnt THAT runny. then it kept happening whenever i went in a funny position and it was pretty embarassing, it must have been draining out of my brain or something so im glad i got it out. that afternoon i had a little nap though, and i woke up and water was trickling out onto my pillow! blergh!!

Anyway, yesterday we got back to sydney and went to this 'porno themed' party which we were all pretty dubious about but the guys at surf camp said if we wore our surf camp tshirts wed get free alcohol and pizza so we thought what the hell, and it was ok we managed to get like 2 free jugs of beer and then more all night for like $7 dollars which is well cheap! the whole porno thing was a bit of a flop though, the only people dressed up vaguely sexual were the people that worked there and they just looked totally embarassingly cringey.

Today 7 of us moved into a house in Ultimo - which is an area just near darling harbour, and 5 mins walk from central station, its a really great place. The house is pretty massive, living with something like 16 other people i think... got a pool and stuff tho, its really cool. Have yet to meet all the people but they all seem cool.

sydney photos!

chinese new year party thing