29th June 2009

Today I’m celebrating the fourth anniversary of my 21st birthday!!!! The weekend was really good, even though the plans for it ended up being really last minute. Friday evening was work’s End of Financial Year Cocktail Function, sounds really fancy but jeans sufficed, and since there was free drink and food there was no way I was going to miss it! We were handed a raffle ticket as we went it for a draw later on, and if we won we could choose between a $50 voucher (they had about a dozen for various retail shops) and a $12 lottery ticket that could be the winning ticket for the $90million draw tomorrow night (there was the same no of lottery tickets as there was vouchers)! Which would you have picked??? My ticket was drawn : ) and there were just two vouchers left to choose from but I think I would have gone for that anyway. The food was really nice, lots of finger food to begin with then came out the noodle boxes with beef stir-fry, veg stir-fry, chicken and chips and fish and chips and all with chopsticks! I most enjoyed the novelty and almost even mastered how to use chopsticks. The important word being almost!

Saturday night I spent in Surfers Paradise with Minna and Michelle from work. I was supposed to be going out with my flat and room mates but they all let me down, most annoyingly my roommate Catherine and Tara just because they wanted to go to a barbecue cos they were broke and some boys they fancied were going to be there, I was more than welcome to join them apparently….thanks….but then the girls from work said that they were going down to the coast to meet a couple of friends for the weekend and they had a spare bed so I went there instead, and it was a great craic! Lots of drinking and dancing followed as usual until we got kicked out at closing time at 3am! Got to speak to lots of random Australians at last rather than other backpackers and we headed back on Sunday feeling a bit worse for wear but the weather was glorious. I felt even better when Catherine and Tara said they didn’t really enjoy the barbecue they blew me out for hehe! Minna’s friend took lots of photos so hopefully they will be appearing on here and fb very soon.

This morning I got a parcel from home (yay, thanks!) got a (very) early morning phone call from home, even though my mum pointed out that technically it wasn’t my birthday yet cos it was only 10pm on the 28th in England (I don’t care, if I was up to go to work it was my birthday already!). It was really nice to speak to mum, dad and Martin and feels very strange that I’m in Australia for it but nice at the same time. My manager is buying birthday cake, when it’s your birthday here you get bought the cake rather than having to buy them yourself which is def how it should be!!!! I even got to choose it : ) I was slightly disappointed that they don’t have lemon cake…..apple cake, orange cake, carrot cake and even banana cake but no lemon!!! So caramel mud cake is on its way! Yum yum yum : ) And everyone at work has been super nice to me today, to be fair probably because they know they’re going to get cake.

I’ve started making some more plans for where I’m going and what I’m doing in Oz. I will be going to see Michelle (a friend from mini club) in August for a long weekend. She has been working in Adelaide for the last couple of years. There is a food and wine festival at the Barossa Valley (where Jacob’s Creek, Wolf Blass and many other wines are made) so it should be lots of fun but I’m expecting it to be pretty cold in South Australia. I’m also going to see Britney Spears in Perth in November (I know I’m sad!) and Green Day in Melbourne in December. Planning where I want to go and how I’m going to get there makes me realise how humungous this country is. Like I wouldn’t have believed from looking at a map to get a bus up the coast from Brisbane to Cairns that it would take 30 hours!!!! It’s unreal. Have a look on a google map to see. And to fly from Brisbane to Perth it would take 4 hours, you could get to Greece is less time from England! And have flown over umpteen countries to get there, but still won’t have passed over the border of Australia in that time. I wouldn’t like to think how long the drive would be for that. Luckily I shouldn’t have to go to Perth straight from Brisbane since I won’t be working here any more by then. So by the end of the year I will have definitely made it to five states and the capitals of those states: Sydney, New South Wales; Brisbane, Queensland; Adelaide, South Australia; Perth, Western Australia; and Melbourne, Victoria. Only three more states/territories and their capitals to go!! They’ll be Darwin in Northern Territory, Canberra in Australian Capital Territory and Hobart in Tasmania and I’m hoping I’ll get to go to them all but if I had to miss one I have to admit I’m not that fussed about Canberra. But since it’s the country’s capital I know I should make the effort.

Interesting fact: England would fit into Australia 58 times! 58!!!!!

Have now had mud cake and feel sick…….