So its now coming to our last week in Sydney and in Australia! We leave for Aukland next friday 28th and so its back to the backpacker life of living in crummy dorms and being woken up at the crack of dawn! Ah well, we can be just as loud when we want to be!

Last weekend I went snowboarding in the snowy Valley of Thredbo, which was so much fun. I made some new friends there, used muscles I never knew I had and covered myself in a few nice bruises! I was picked up Friday night after work at 6pm and we travelled 6 hours through Canbera and on to Thredbo which is on the border of Victoria. I met two nice girls and a boy on the coach who were all expert snowboarders and who convinced me to try it instead of skiing, which I did! By the time we arrived in Thredbo it was after midnight but we still had to sort out our clothes and boots and boards! It was freezing too so I was thankful when I got to my dorm to find big thick duvets and a radiator! I was not so happy however to find that I was sharing a room with too oldies that snored! Lucky for me I had brought my Ipod so stuck that in my ears ALL night! We were up at the crack of dawn though to have breakfast at 6:30 and then were off to the slopes at 8!

I met a couple on the drive up, Kim and Joel, who were also going to have a snowboard lesson and had never done it before so felt less nervous. At first I had no balance at all but after the two hour lesson I had kind of got the hang of it. Me and Kim stayed on the easy slopes for the day though as we couldn't stay on our feet for longer than 2 minutes at a time, while her boyfriend went to try some of the harder ones. We did go up to the top of the mountain though to eat at the restaurant that was 1900 meters up. It made me feel dizzy though but the views were amazing and all they way up there were little water falls in the hills!

To warm up on the way home we stopped off at a schnapps distillery to have a taste test and I ended up buying me and Hayley a bottle of the Apple one! Then later that night we went to the sites bar and done some shots out of a ski! (see pictures soon!) And then Jager bombs (Jagermister shots on Redbull) which the reps set up like dominos so that the jager was sat on top of the edge of each two Redbull glasses, so that on pushing one each one along the line toppled into the glasses below - like bombs! (see the video soon) Not long after that we retired to bed - I did not go back to the snore room though as the three expert snowboarders I'd met on the coach before (Elle, Eliza and Mat) insisted I stay in there room as they had 4 extra beds! Thank God I actually slept ok that night! But I awoke the next morning though feeling like I had done 1000 sit ups as the amount of falling down I had done the day before meant a lot of getting up had taken its tole on my belly! ah! But then it was off for our second day of boarding and learning to turn! I actually made it higher up the mountain this time and on the steeper intermediate slopes! Cant wait to go again! I had a lot of bruises though and ached for two days after!

At 3pm though it was time to leave and give back all our gear and then it was back to the coach for the long drive home. I got back at Midnight and walked back to find Hayley still awake so we swapped stories of the weekend and I found out that a new girl had moved into the other half of the lounge with the Korean guy who moved in last week! So there are now 6 of us living in the flat and the two new people use our bathroom. The girls ok, although she does take up my shower time, but the guy ALWAYS leaves the toilet seat up! Its so annoying!

Wednesday night we decided to go out on weekday bar crawl in the city... which ended at 6am... two hours before I had to be up for work! I was late of course and have not been right since, I keep losing things, missing my bus stops and today I flooded the bathroom right into the lounge! Whoops!

This weekend, Saturday, tomorrow, Im going to visit Palm beach aka summer bay from Home and Away, with my relatives John and Brenda, which should be good if the "60 per cent chance of rain" defies the odds! And then we have a fancy dress party to go to in the evening. I think Togas is the theme, so looks like we'll all be donning our bed sheets for that one - thank god ours are white ones, Mark and Phils are green and blue! haha! And Sunday we think we may as well go to the Sounds on Sunday which is a daytime garden time party thing in the city just to make sure our last weekend is a big one! And finally we decided we could leave Australia without having one attempt at surfing so we have booked in to do that on our last day on Thursday. Lets hope I don't drown or get eaten by a shark! Apparently everyone manages to stand up, but for how long is another matter!
Tarra for now, I'll be writing again from a new land... New Zealand!