I better start getting some of that good karma!

For some reason I have been waking up fairly early by myself so I figured I’d make use of this additional time and get some school work done. Whenever I turned on my computer skype automatically signed me on and almost instantly Alex started to message me. That reminded me to let my parents that I wouldn’t be able to skype with them since we had made plans to go explore a new beach for the day. However, a call came through from them earlier than expected meaning I could skype with them! It was nice to see and talk to them once again, especially since I got to hear about my parent’s 25^th anniversary weekend trip to the Outer Banks. I’m so thankful that my parents have stuck through the thick and thin together for 25 years and are still looking forward for many more to come! With my stomach growling I knew it was time to start my day and make final plans for the beach. We were planning on going to this beach called Cronulla which is close to the first landing on the Australian land but figured it might be too far away for the limited amount of time that we had left with our day. We then decided to go to a closer beach called Coogee which we haven’t been to yet. So we packed our lunch and headed out the door to catch a bus which would take us right to the beach front we had heard. Seems that we have bad luck with the bus system since we either just miss the bus and/or end up having to wait a long amount of time for the bus to come. Today was both and we waited for over 20 minutes it seemed. Nonetheless we were able to catch the bus and arrive at Coogee in about 45 minutes. 

The weather had not really listened to us and had persisted on being cloudy and windy once again. We found a nice sunny spot and ate lunch while Riley offered some of his sandwich pieces to the seagulls. I informed Riley that he should be a bird scientist but he’s convinced it’s too narrow of a field with not a lot of job openings. However, he did admit to doing some research on the pigeons of Sydney along with another one called the magpie. Apparently they are known to be pests in Sydney, but Riley completely disagrees. I think I now have more information about birds than I ever thought possible.  Nothing competes with his passion and love for squirrels though. Turns out he really misses his squirrels since they are nowhere to be found in the city when I pulled up the internet on my computer the other day to find a picture of a squirrel staring back at me! I find this to be rather cute and adorable. With major rain clouds off in the distance we knew that we had to make our time count and ventured off to the hill top to see the lookout spot. There was a small little forest with oddly shaped trees that we couldn’t resist getting pictures of.

          This bench was so high our legs couldn't touch the ground!

Yes, this tree was actually a circle.

 With not much more to do in Coogee since it was obviously too cold to swim we headed back through the streets to do a little window shopping. We ended up in the town of Randwick which had even more shops and good ones at that. We found a shop called Cotton On which had $2 tank tops for guys! Riley was in heaven and was finally able to get out of his clothing depression, plus he has a whole summer stock of tank tops now! We decided to head back into the city since we had plans to make it back to the University for an International Student Internship fair. Once we arrived we realized that it wasn’t exactly what we had in mind since it was more for postgraduate programs. I don’t think we’ll be sticking around in Australia for that long so we didn’t seek much benefit from the event. Then it was time for a quick dinner of sweet and sour chicken before we headed off to another trivia night in Newtown. This was actually an Irish pub which Neill liked because of the video trivia. We agree on this aspect since there were a lot of music video clips where you had to identify the song title, TV show theme songs where you had to name the TV show, and then random clips that you had to watch and then answer a random question about afterwards. Each trivia question was also displayed on the TV screen so it was nice to just look at the screen instead of straining yourself to hear the host talk. There weren’t as many teams at this pub and we ended up doing fairly well in the first round. However, the questions got a lot harder and we unfortunately slipped into last place by the end of the night. We tried to redeem ourselves with the paper airplane contest when Riley tried to throw the airplane underhandedly, but we weren’t successful. We did come close though! Overall I think it might have been one of our best trivia nights so far, but we’re looking forward to next week when we can hopefully have a powerhouse team. This means having a lot of people present from a lot of different nationalities and interests so that a wider range of questions can be answered! Hoping for the best!