We defied our fellow partygoers David and Megan's predictions and got up at 11am capping off our sleep at just four hours and headed for the station. We got there easily enough and we had a pleasant surprise in shape of Colley, a 66 years old long lost brother of Santa who we met last night and is known as the local legend. He decided to wave us off and soon enough our train takes off...

This gives me a lot of time for some reflective thinking and drawing comparisons between the deaf community in Bairnsdale and the deaf community in UK that I witnessed from my childhood through to my present now.

I felt as the words can't describe how close knit the community we met yesterday is and how much it remind me of my upbringing and my early sporadic involvement in the deaf community. The innocence of the deaf children strikes me particularly hard especially that they, like me have no concept how much adults strived and laboured to make their children's childhood complete. This involves ferrying children to events and organising them which meant sacrificing their own time for the children's enjoyment. For first time in my life I felt truly grateful for what my parents did for me when I was a child and I also had an enlightment moment when I felt what I saw in Bairnsdale truly captured the essence of a community.

Did I mentioned in between these realisations, I behaved like a typical twenty-something by sleeping off my hangover in my hoodie sprawling all over the train!

Eventually we arrived and dropped off our gear at hostel before being reunited with the girls to go to AFL match which is Aussie Rules Football. I was particularly interested to see which version is superior. The match took place in Etihad Stadium which is the venue of England's rugby world cup final win over Australia!

I enjoyed the match enormously. The rules is bit weird so I will attempt to explain it when I am back in England, however it is less physical than the British version of football which I dislike but the matches were high-scoring thrilling affairs which were good. We went back to the hostel with every intentions of an early night. The boys failed miserably as usual!