Fie goes downunder

What a brilliant week I have had. So much fun. Sometimes I just can't belive how lucky I am to be here in Australia, I really can't.

I have met so many nice people and.. wow yeah it's been good.

Saturday night was my last night at the lodge, we went out and had loads of fun. We went to a gaybar actually, so the boys I was with got a bit nervous haha but we had an awesome time. The backpackers and students over here party pretty hard, but I really needed to be in that space for a while.

Sooo.. where am I going tonight then? Well unfortunatley I still can't tell you. I just hope the person that I am organising this big surprise for on the blog still actually reads the blog, allthough I am pretty sure she does :)

I fly out at 11.30 PM tonight so today I am just sorting out all my washing from last week and at the same time I am organising my bedroom for Carl. I am moving upstairs today to make room for everyone who is coming over for christmas. I got back from the lodge yesterday morning at wich point I hadn't slept for about 28 hours so I just completley crashed and slept until about five in the afternoon.

I was pretty crap at taking pictures last week. Plus that I don't like to take pictures of people I dont really know and putting them up on the blog, but I have some pictures of Perth to show you :)



View of Perth from Kings Park



Sky- scrapers



The "Perth wheel"



Beautiful view from a tower in Perth that we went up in. Unfortunatley the pictures turned out pretty crap because of the windows, but it was very beautiful.



Me playing tennis with Andrew :)

So now I am travelling again for a week, wich means that the blog will suffer again. But I will try to write as much as I can :)

I have had an awesome start to my week :)

Two friends from the bus that took me up to Exmouth were in Perth and the three of us have had a great time. I have actually, for the first time in my life, managed to play tennis. It was really fun. So yeah the three of us have been hanging out a lot and now they have left to go back to sydney but I will of course see them over there. I have got quite a few contacts over there now so it's going to be good fun to go over there in january.

I have allso booked my trip for next week. It's going to be so fun, but I can't tell you about it yet. I have a surprise planned for someone who regularly reads my blog, that's all I can say right now :)

But this week I am in Perth. I am only just learning my way round the city, trying not to get lost. But I successfully got from my lodge to kings park and back today and I allmost allways knew where I was going so I am definetly making a lot of progress.


Tonight, I am going to stuff my face with sushi, it's so cheap over here. I have bought I think about twenty pices of sushi and that came to seven dollars wich is about 35 kr!

I am taking a lot of pic's of perth but I will not be able to upload them until I get back to Fremantle on sunday.

Take care all my lovely readers :)

You must all have been so anxious wondering where I was all this time. I understand that most of the swedish population are now dependent on my blogg. Haha. I am now at the lodge in Perth, where I am going to stay for a week. I am going to explore Perth and try to get to know some people over here. Might be going somewhere else after this, but to keep you all on your toes I am not going to reveal where I am going just yet. I am not working at the moment. I decided that the restaurant I was working at was not for me and I am glad about that. Otherwise what have I been up to? I have been on a hike in a national park with my swiss friend. That was awesome so I am going to get some pic's up from that hike in the next couple of days. Me and Fran have been working hard getting everything ready for all the relatives coming over in december aswell. So that's a little update on me and my life at present.

Well im not moving, not to New York anyway, and I haven't got problems with my sleep. Im moving to Perth! Yes sir, I am. Only for two weeks, but still! Big city life here I come.

One week from now I will be in the Townsend Lodge in Perth. So great! I am going to explore the city, and hopefully talk to all those cute guys that will be my neighbours in the lodge :)

Well, let me explain. I have actually allready been to the lodge, I have a friend from Switzerland who is living there and she showed me round the other night. That's when I feasted my eyes on all the handome lads haha.

Unfortunatley my swiss friend will be moving out when I am moving in.. But you can't have everything.

So that's good news. I allso noticed that a few people are asking me about Desi and if she was infact with me in the water when I got stung by jellyfish. I really don't understand the relevance of that question since jellyfish have no effect on dogs whatsoever, but yes, Desi was with me. Second of all, about the urine; I did ask Fran as we were leaving the beach: "So when are you going to wee on me then?" but it really did not go down well my friends.

"So im moving to New York 'cause I've got problems with my sleep; looks like christmas came early, christmas came early; for me"   // The Wombats

Just throwing in the last pic's from the Exmouth trip now. My favourite ones from the last days of travelling.

Hope you have enjoyed looking at the pic's, I wish more people would comment on my blog, it's so nice to get a response from people about what you are writing/showing. I know that quite a lot of people are reading my blog now so it would be cool if you would like to just drop a few lines when you have visited the blog :)



 Amazing sunset that we looked at on our way to coral bay (I think). So nice to just relax, watch the sun go down and listen to Paolo Nutini on the Ipod..



Torquise bay where we did some awesome snorkeling, it was a bit cloudy but actually that was quite good cause otherwise you could get pretty sunburnt just floating around with your back exposed for several hours in the water.



Me in torquise bay, so incredibly happy after snorkeling :) great feeling that day.

This is an absolute favorite, I love this picture. It is taken in Northbrook at a farm where we stayed on our last night together. The sky was so beautiful and I love the old train carrage standing in the middle of the field.



Exmouth



Taken at the border of the Hutt river province wich I will tell you more about tomorrow :)

Start with scrolling down to part one if you haven't allready done that. That way you can see the entire trip.



After Monkey Mia we continued towards Shark Bay. We stopped on the way at Hamelin pool to look at the Stromatolites, the oldest form of life as we know it. That was quite interesting. Stromatolites can only be found in about three places in the world now, Australia beeing one of those places.

In the evening, we arrived at Coral Bay and I was quite tired of sitting in the bus. All I could think of was the next day, when we were going to snorkel with manta rays. I played some pool in the evening with my taiwanese friend Wendy, but she completley thrased me, she was really good and it's not very hard to be better then me haha.



This is the day that I had been waiting for, the manta ray snorkel.

First we got to swim with some fish so I will show you some pictures of that first. The crew on the boat had underwater cameras so they took some pictures of us swimming around with the fish.

The coral was spectacular as you can see.







This is a manta ray. They are completley harmless and live of plankton and other particles from the sea. They have an average of a four meter wing-span so they can get quite big. In the picture, the manta ray is doing a rolling motion, that is what they do when they are feeding. The fish that are stuck to the manta ray are there to clean it.

Watching these fascinating creatures was such an adrenalin rush, when they came up towards you with their mouths open (allthough they have no teeth), all you could hear in the water was your heart beating faster and faster.



We allso got to see some dolphins, this is a baby dolphin with it's mother :)

That is infact about all the photos this computer can handle in one go, so more pic's tomorrow I belive.

Home again, strange sensation to be back in Fremantle. I can't even begin to explain how much fun I have had this past week, the trip was amazing.
Today, my back hurts like hell (from sitting on the bus for two days straight) and I am so tired, despite the fact that I actually went to bed at 9.00 pm last night. Still, everytime I think about past week, I light up inside. I really needed that trip.

I don't really know how to tell you about all the things that we have been doing during this week and all the fun people that I have met on the way. I will just throw in some pictures today, and then I will write a little about them. Then tomorrow, I will throw in some new pictures and tell you about them. I think that is the best way to go about it :)



First stop on our trip up to Exmouth from Perth was the Pinnacle desert. It was absolutley swamped with flies. You couldn't even open your mouth without swallowing about ten of them. So the "Pinnacle information center" made a fortune selling flynets to all of us from the bus (we were twenty five people in the bus). But it was very interesting to see the Pinnacles, they are stones in funny shapes, for anyone of you who doesn't know.
  

Nobody knows why these stones are shaped/formed the way they are, there are a lot of different theories about it.
We walked around the Pinnacle desert for about half an hour but it was really hot and the flies were freaking everybody out so we went back to the bus quite quickly.  




That evening we stayed in a place called Horrocks by Kalbarri. The evening there was quite spectacular with a thunderstorm going on all around us. We had a nice dinner and I enjoyed watching the lightning. On the picture you can allso see our bus.



This is a picture that I took in Horrocks in the morning before we set out to shark bay and monkey mia. I love this picture.



This is a picture of the murchison gorge, we descended down into this gorge on our second day travelling. It was very beautiful, but hard work. We then climbed up the gorge and rested at a place called Natures window.



We were quite high up, as I hope you can see in the picture, the view was breath taking.



This is me, sitting in natures window as it is called. The picture is not very clear, i dont know why, but it gives you an idea.

After this we carried on driving, we went to a beach called shell beach, but the weather was quite bad by then and I didn't really get any good pictures.

We arrived at monkey mia late that evening and had a nice barbeque. I went down to the beach and looked at the full moon with two nice german girls. We discovered that the beach was covered in crabs and that was not to pleasant but we stayed for a while and it was so nice, the water was really warm.



This is a picture taken in the morning at monkey mia. Monkey mia is a famous dolphin resort and in the mornings they have a dolphin feed so that you can come up close to them. Quite cool but not as cool as seeing dolphins in the wild, wich I got to do later on in the week. 

Tomorrow i will have much more interesting photos for you guys to look at, the week was a lot more interesting at the end, haha, but I wanted to show you everything from beginning to end so there you go :) 

So I was walking home from work a couple of weeks ago, and the weather was really bad. It was raining down on us so hard and the wind was effing arctic.

As I am walking, I approach two men who are carrying a piano or something towards a door. One of them (30;isch years old) says to the other, while looking straight at me:
- "We don't care if it rains, we are such hard workers we just carry on!"
- "Good on ya I mate" I call out as I pass them, because he clearly wants a response from me, and round here everyone just talks to each other.
- "Yeah, I'd make a great husband", He replies and gives me the biggest smile ever.

I just laugh at him and carry on home, but it spurred my thoughts on, thoughts that were allready brewing about the way young people view relationships over here. It really is a big thing, very few people my age are single over here.
I have been driving Fran crazy on the subject during the last month. Analyzing why this is; why everyone needs to be involved with someone over here. And I still don't have a descent answer for myself or anyone else for that matter.
I will get back to you on that after further investigation.

Not only are 95% of the people I meet over here, my age, occupied emotionally, they allso love to talk about their partners in extraordinary ways. I have three "bosses" at work, one of them, A. is about five years older then me. A. is a lovely girl. But a few weeks ago, we really didn't know each other because she had been on holiday when I started at the restaurant and so on, and she says to a client of ours (a regular) when I am standing beside her;
- "This morning, I woke up with my boyfriend and I was so bored, guys never want to do stuff in the morning".
- "I know, the client replies, men are so terrible, my Steve won't do anything before eleven a clock in the morning"

As I am evesdroping this conversation, I begin to blush. Really blush. In Sweden, in a employee-customer relationship, no one would talk about when they "woke up with their partner this morning". I was in a serious relationship for nearly three years and I didn't even mention my partner until I really knew the person I was talking to, and I certainly wouldn't talk about him with a customer in a work- situation. They looove to talk about their partners over here. Another, guy this time, from work, insisted to tell me and everyone else at the bar about all the nicknames his girlfriend used to call him in their home. I thought I was going to pass out when he did that, "how embarassing" I thought, but everyone else seemed to take it with ease.

I am generalising a lot in what I am saying here, I do realise that, but it's still an interesting phenomenon. And it keeps reacurring.

                                                           Bye everyone, see you in a week!

Yay! Only one and a half days left until my trip to Exmouth! I have really been warming up for this one I tell ya! I think it's gonna be swell :)

Also my skype is now working: sophieinaustralia is ny name, so feel free to add me if you know me :)

Lovely day today; sun shining, birds twittering away in the trees and here I am, in front of the computer. But I have my reasons, had some stuff to fix for the trip on the internet. But now that's all done and dusted, I am going to the beach. Suck on that lousy swedes.

p.s locked myself in a bathroom last night