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"Visiting a friend"
Wollongong is about two hours by train south of Sydney, and I barely caught the connecting train as I came in to Sydney Central Station. The train ride south was very nice, with large tropical forest on both sides. When I arrived at the Wollongong Station I went outside to wait for Paul. As I was waiting a man in his early twenties, already ruined by his drug abuse tried to get on a train without a ticket, and the police were trying to hold him back. They took him outside, and made him sit down on a bench so they could talk. After a minute or so with this guy screaming at the officers, he started talking to them, and they let him be as long as he paid for his ticket and waited outside the station till the train was there. He got some money from another junky who was walking passed them. The whole thing seemed a little sketch, but that turned out to be the only thing about Wollongong that was like this at all. Paul picked me up and we drove out to a lighthouse between the north beach, and the south beach. The sand was very clean, but it was all very different than it I was used to. There were no resorts, and down at the end of South Beach there was an industrial area, with steel plants all over. This is where people in Wollongong are working, the factories are in that way both a blessing and a curse for the people of this beachside town. I did not even think that the industrial surroundings were all that much of a beast, in this beautiful town. It felt like they belonged there.
It was only a little more than a week since I left Paul in our hotel in Phuket. It felt like a lot longer, just like it felt like I had known him a lot longer than the one month we traveled together. We met in Hanoi on February 1st, and I we said; so long, in Phuket on the 28th of that same month. Now that I was down there to visit I knew that I would see him again. The same went for Jiby, and he maybe studying in France soon, so that would be an opportunity to see him already in the fall.
Paul and I walked several beautiful beaches, and I got to see a lot of pelicans. It was the first time I ever saw one out of the zoo, so that was pretty cool. We had so much to catch up on, and I could only spend the day. While walking I saw some beautiful multicolored birds, and learned that they were rainbow lorikeets. (Later that day when we were driving on the highway I could see a couple Cockatoos flying over the road.) When we got back to the car, Paul took me to his house so that we could get copies of each other's photos. On the way we stopped by a local bakery run by some Serbians. We had some Macedonian food, since Paul is Macedonian, though born and raised in Australia. Their house was really nice, and I got to meet his mother's boyfriend before we headed out again. This time we went down to Kiama. There we saw a massive blowhole, and some really crispy water. When we got in to the cozy little town we looked around for a few things Paul said that I had to eat before I left Australia; sausage roll and meat pie. I had them both, and can with that say that I had the real experience of Australia, even if I only spent a few days. From there we went to Paul's Uni to meet his friend Asad and for me to see an Australian university. Paul let me drive his car up there, and it was really interesting to drive on the wrong side of the road. You would think, that after traveling through Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore, I would be use to the whole "driving on the wrong side of the road"-issue, but that was not the case. I always had to look an extra time to look where the traffic came from, but the worst was that every time I was going to use the turning signal, I went for the windshield wiper.
Australian universities are very different from the Norwegian ones. The focus on the outdoor facilities is greater, and the school cantina is called the UniBar, and they serve alcohol there. Maybe we can blame it all on the weather? They even have "Happy Hour" in the afternoon. Hanging out at the Uni and talking to a couple of Paul's friends was a good, and I got to experience some of Paul's life in Wollongong. After talking for a while, and of course I had some beer from the UniBar, just for the sake of it, Paul drove us home to have dinner with his family. I got to meet his mom and his sisters, all of them lovely and attendant. We had some lamb and some chicken, with a great tomato salad and the first potato salad I have had in ages. After a splendid meal, I had to leave for Roseville again. Paul wanted to drive me all the way up, and he did. It was raining so hard that we hardly could see anything, and in Sydney we got lost a couple times before we got across the bridge and up towards Roseville. Paul actually lived in Roseville before he moved to Wollongong, so we drove by his old house, for him to see what it looked like today.
Paul and I have a lot of great memories together, and I know that I will never forget our adventures through South East Asia.
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