OK well here is part 1 of my Tasmania blog, it's a shame that I can't write this for you all on a scroll as that is exactly the kind of fitting tribute Tasmania deserves. In the morning me, Brid and Tom met at Liams apartment which is right next to work as Shauna was working that day until 12.30 bless her. So we met there Brid had got us all Kinder Surprises for holiday party gifts how lovely are the Irish. We picked up Shauna from work and off we headed to get the Sky Bus to the airport, we obviously missed the first one as Liam refused to pay 7/11 price for water so he ran to Coles down the road to save himself 40cents perhaps? Backpackers eh? So when we finally got there via a trip with the bus driver who clearly LOVED his job the best monotone voice I have ever heard. He sounded so sad doing the terminal announcements bless him. So we got off the bus and followed the tiger paws on the floor to our Tiger Shack which was where our lovely Tiger Airline did all their (Very Budget) flights from. It was literally a shed stuck on the real airport, it had a tiger print tower and the shack was also tiger print, so it was easily identifiable which I thought was a lovely touch. So we checked in on the way we made friends with a lovely Tasmania lady who told us what pub we should go to for our tea which was right next to our hostel ($10 homecooked meals) so we were happy to have met her! After check in obviously me getting scanned and my legs swapped for god knows what we were finally in and waiting for our flight, we ate tons of sweets and sushi, then we started the queue for the flight off as we were getting excited to be on our holidays. When we boarded the flight we discovered the sold Tiger beer funnily enough on a airline called Tiger so we all got a can immediately and Team Tiger was born. Then half of Team Tiger promptly fell asleep. Rock and Roll indeed. It obviously was not me or Tom as we were too busy drinking our beer and drinking our water.

We landed as we didn't have any luggage we just hopped straight on the airport shuttle to the hostel, I had very cleverly booked us the cheapest room inthe whole of Tasmania I think which was $19 a night in 20 bed dorm. We were hoping to make some new friends in our new dorm but this was obviously not meant to be. We all rushed in hoping to get bottom bunks as the top bunks are always a nightmare and also scary to climb in the dark when you may or may have had a wee tipple. So when we got to the dorm and realised there were 5 random top bunks for us we were gutted, although I was happy to discover I had a duvet having not had one since I was back in the UK. It appeared from our room investigations that people appeared to LIVE in this hostel... oh dear. It was very strange. The words strange/weird/mad/bizarre/timewarp may be overused massively in this blog too I might add as they are basically the words to sum up our family holiday to Hobart.

We dumped our bags, made our beds and headed straight out to the pub for $10 tea in the irish pub. It was freezing in Tasmania too so we were so overjoyed to see a roaring fireplace inside it was like being back at home in a real pub, it felt like it was almost Christmas too as its so weird the weather now as it is getting into winter in Australia so it is dark nights and cold just exactly how it feels in November in the UK. We mainly had $10 steak and chips, mine came out well done so Liam took it back for me which was nice as I wanted medium - rare as I like blood in my steak, I told the man when I ordered twice what I wanted too and I knew he didn't understand but he nodded and said he knew what it was when i told him again...obviously he hadn't heard the rule of the customer is always right. To be fair to him though it probably doesn't exist there yet as its so far behind.

So after our lovely tea and cider we went to Woolworths to stock up on pop, water and some alcohol. I got myself some bottles of fake passion pop called Trevi Passion, it was mixed berries flavour and it was lovelyish if you like paint stripper. Liam, Tom and Shauna got themselves a 5 litre box of goon that it turned out halfway in that was Goon Light so was only 5% so no way that was getting them drunk anytime soon haha. It was so sweet like apple juice too, very weird. As Brid or Bird as some call her is Irish she got herself a nice bottle of Vodka and some lemon pop. So we took these back to the room, and got showered and ready and started to drink and play cards. When Tom came back from his shower it turned out he was bleeding from the middle of his eyebrow, we thought he had been beaten up but actually he had decided to sort his mono brow out and had actually cut himself pretty deep so he sat bleeding everywhere with tissue stuck to his head for the whole night until we went out haha. We played some excellent cards - all of which I will never remember but we played f*** the dealer where basically whoever is dealing ends up having to take a drink continuously and getting very tipsy in the process, and we also played some crazy game that Brid had where you had to bet how many drinks you would drink or pass out depending on whether or not your card was within some other card numbers. Sounds complicated on here but it was not it was brilliant! So whilst me and Brid were getting a wee bit tipsy we realised the others weren't so we checked their goon box and thats when we discovered it was goon light which my mam would probably manage to get drunk on but unfortunately them 3 were not having the same luck.

We Eventually went out into civilisation (or Hobart at least) and it was sooo cold. We ended up going past a bar finally called the Victoria Tavern that looked amazing from the outside by amazing I mean warm. We went in there and there was some lovely boys playing guitar n keyboard and doing a nice set of music so it was quite nice although the clientele was very strange a bit like a night out in the big market in the 70s I believe. Hilarious! I did get $5 wine though which I was happy with. In there a man walked in thinking he was mister cool he looked like a reject from the 80s and his shirt was sticking out of his fly which made us giggle like naughty school girls for quite some time. We then moved on to a new bar, Tom had pulled some weird Tasmanian girl so she took us to some club on the way we met some other Tazzie Girls who photobombed our photo which was funny as they were like 'are tous Geordie shore like' haha mint Geordie Shore is famous in Taz! We then headed into this random bar, we got ID'd on the way in woohoo!! Liam didn't have any ID on him silly boy so the man was almost not going to let him in so Brid was like 'well you've checked all of ours and we are all over 22 so clearly we wouldn't be hanging round with any underage kids' so he let him in. So we got in and it was a pretty cool place all underground and a little dance floor room. We had already decided to see what random things we could steal/borrow so after buying my local taz beer cascade I found myself with a nice baseball cap haha. So I posed for a few photos with that, then we found a lad asleep/dead on a sofa so we posed next to him for a little bit then I passed on the hat to a proper aussie surfer type and then he gave it back! People are so different here. And then some loser came over and demanded I hand the hat over as it was his friends and I had stolen it... I told him to 'fack off you big galah' which is Australia for piss off dickhead. Anyways somewhere along the road I lost the hat anyways. We all eventually ended up round this table and we decided to head somewhere new as it was a bit weird in there, on route I told the 'barman' that I liked a sign behind the bar as I photographed it, he then started chatting with me and I said we were leaving as it was strange in here so he was like you guys need a shot so I said are you offering to buy me and all my friends a shot so he checked how many of us there was and he agreed so he got us all a shot of something black that wasn't sambucca and then he got his credit card out and paid for it. It turned out he wasn't a bar man at all just a man standing right next to the bar haha. So we did our shots and ran for our lives while he paid for them - sucker alert. We then headed on down to some bars at Salamanca where we ended up in what appeared to be an Italian restaurant that had turned magically into a bar. We made friends with some people wearing Christmas jumpers which I found a bit weird. 2nd Christmas time feeling I'd had since arrival. It's going to be so disappointing for me in 4 weeks when it isn't actually Christmas! At some point in the night we put Shauna in a taxi home as she wanted to leave and we ended up in a club called O which was pretty cool there was some good music happening in there. When we left to head home It was freezing so I demanded to get a taxi home so started trying to flag down any car I could see, I accidently tried to flag a Police Car down too oops obviously we don't want them to take us home! I got us a taxi pretty quick and I then demanded I needed food on the way home so our lovely (jokes) taxi driver took us to a chip shop where I got some nice chips I had about 2 and then Tom spilled them all over the floor of the taxi. Our Taxi driver was an absolute nutter, she was all dressed in glow sticks even in her earrings and had a bit of a rave taxi going on, she was banging on about how she was doing this to pay to put her kid through private education and blah blah blah I wasn't listening to her at all as she was boring the hell out of me. Think she was being rude to us though shame on her what a lovely Australian lady - not. I think we got in after 4.30 and somehow managed to get ready for bed and get in my top bunk without any issues I don't think anyways.

ok part 2 almost up...