Never say no to a mint.

Wages in Sydney are exceptionally high. The average hourly pay for someone my age doing mundane work is about $20 an hour. This is great if you're working, but to match high wages is an equally high cost of living. As my wallet has been losing weight, I decided to work for a weekend at the Masset Mega Market (nauseating and unnecessary alliteration) passing out balloons and flyers for the Oncology Children's Foundation, and Academic Solutions. Sounds dry, but it wasn't so bad- I met some pretty old school Slovenian riggers that were making jewelry by splicing steel cable and attaching the ends so that you couldn't actually see the joint. Very cool. Not as cool as a surfing trip up the east coast though! Nice segue right?

I went surfing. I LOVE surfing. More than surfing, I love the surfer dude lifestyle. I got on a Mojo Surf bus with 34 fellow travellers, and set off up the east coast for a hilarious week of surfing and partying by the beach. The only people to rival Australian surfer dudes at a party are Swedish boys. At least you expect it with the surfers- when we were picked up, our bus driver/surf instructor/legend was an obvious life-of-the-party type. The Swedes (all 9 of them) however, were polite, reserved, and generally blended in...until their first beer and the first 3 chords of any song by Kings of Leon. We'd get up early (6 ish) to surf, sleep/read/play guitars through the hottest part of the day, then surf again for a few hours before dinner. After dinner good friends became great friends, and we'd wake up and do it all again. I survived surfing reasonably well, but I managed to sprain my ankle running on the beach on the last day. By the end of the week we had arrived in Byron Bay with sun burns, board rashes, and a pile of dirty laundry. I stayed there for a few days with the crew from the bus, and now I'm back in Sydney. Laura from Scottland is here as well, and we're just waiting on Charlotte from New Zealand to get here before Big Day Out in Sydney (big festival with lots of bands), and our own little UN convention.

rippin'