Sydney - Christmas, New Year's and Friends

The first day we arrived Evelyn had organised a Christmas picnic in the park. Niamh was very excited about the picnic, but also slightly annoyed that yet another bunting opportunity arose and she had no bunting. The point has been proved once again that bunting is an essential traveling staple.

We made an orange and apricot couscous salad and Ev and Nick made delicious Christmas brie and cranberry sandwiches, among other goodies. We did have an enviable food table by the end of it. The dog walkers all had a bit of a gawk on the way past. We ate a ridiculous amount of food and lounged on picnic blankets, occasionally taking shelter from rain showers. Emmet disgraced himself in a rugby kicking competition, his excuse was the shape of the ball, it is good to have an excuse. After the picnic, we met some of Emmet's school friends in a nearby bar for a catch up and wept silently into our very small glasses at the price of Australian drink.

We split our days in Sydney between sightseeing and just flaking. Niamh reached the low of watching the Kardashians and vows not to have TV when we get home to avoid such incidents in the future (Yeah right Kirwan, 60" flat screen, sky sports, history channel, done! Just don't watch crap and it is fine.)

One day we went to see the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House and got our obligatory tourist shots. Well, we got a few until Niamh's impatience at being on the photo side of the camera set in, it happens. Later we went to the Modern Art Museum which has the usual 'brick in a corner' rubbish, but also some really interesting and beautiful exhibits which Niamh photographed extensively. Just a note to all budding modern artists, an alternative to video installations already exists, its called film and it generally has a narrative, not just weird random stuff happening for no reason.  

We went down to Darling Harbour which is a really nice part of the city. It has lots of bars and big expensive boats in the harbour. It is against the law to enter and not say 'Yah, my new aga is simply divine darling, rah rah rah'. Actually, it is not really that posh, but there are fancy boats. Later, Brian and Sarah had us around for a lovely Thai Curry. It was so nice we decided not to leave and stayed with them for the night.

Evelyn took us for a beautiful walk from Bondi to Coogee, which included an ice cream stop! There may have been a slight spillage on Niamh's part, but it was only the melted part at the end, so all was forgiven.

We also hung about in Surray Hills, near Ev, and got acquainted with the cafes!

We spent Christmas week in Jervis Bay, which is south of Sydney, with Emmet's mates from home. Brian and Sarah and Kev and Aoife all live in Sydney. Two other friends Keith and Sue, who live in Wellington, flew over from New Zealand to join us for Christmas. Unfortunately, Aoife was away. The night before we left, we all met in Brain and Sarah's for a bbq, as a warm up to an Aussie Christmas. Keith and Sue had big news, announcing they are having a baby. This babies nickname will be "Liddle Diddle". We stayed with Kev for the evening, ready for the drive down in the morning.

The house was beautiful with a huge kitchen/dining room area to chill out in. There was also a big TV and sitting room upstairs which was perfect for Kev and his outrageous DVD collection, which he was good enough to bring a selection of along with him. Christmas movies sorted.

Jervis bay is beautiful. There isn't much to do, which is kind of what you want at Christmas! There was a beach, a golf club and a bowls club. So we played bowls one day, Emmet got in a couple of rounds of golf with Keith and Kev and we spent lots of time on the beach and chilling out together in the house.

Niamh's closest shot, pity it wasn't a reflection of her performance over the day!

We ate like kings for the week, mainly thanks to Keith and Brian. We had a bbq with 'up the butt' chicken (when you put an open can in the chicken). Very tasty. And had a mammoth Christmas dinner with, wait for it, three different types of stuffing. Oh yes, that's how,we roll up in Jervis Bay y'all.

In the evenings, we played poker and monopoly and drank from our fine selection of alcohol. Good times. Also pictured is the mulled wine that ended up on the monopoly board during a particularly hard negotiation process and a very expressive Niamh.

Evelyn organised a trapeze lesson for us after we returned from Jervis Bay. We went for a few drinks the night before. Actually Emmet went for a few drinks with the lads, but the girls weren't invited! We watched some films and had a couple of glasses of wine instead. Niamh was keen to get an early enough one in preparation for the trapeze and Emmet had appeared to agree. This was shown not to be the case when he strolled in at 4 to a peeved Niamh getting temporary respite on the couch. The lads were in the dog house but once the girls got over not spending a night with the lads, all was good. Who could blame them really, we are great to hang around with.

Emmet was a little concerned about the trapeze due to his fear of heights, but in the end, he was flying (ha pun). The first thing we had to do was warm up and then practice on a little swing on the ground. Niamh wasn't able to pull herself up on the bar and was a little worried. However, we were assured the momentum would make it easier when on the real thing, and this proved to be true. Our first trick was to jump off the platform (the hardest step and there were a few false starts), swing a length, then pull our legs up over the bar, let go and reach backwards. We learned a few more moves and lead up to doing a catch. When it came to it, Emmet caught nothing but air. Niamh got it no problem, as did Ev (you can see her doing a very graceful swing in the pictures below). Now whether this was due to the topless dude waiting to catch them or not is unclear but you can make your assumptions on that one. Anyway, after Emmet's missed catch, he proceeded to fall over on the net to a rather ungraceful end to his trapezing career. Some people are clowns and made for the circus, others aren't. Well done Niamh!

New Years we spent with Evelyn and Nick. We stayed in their place with their flat mate Paul for a while, about two weeks altogether. One of Ev's mates works at the naval base at Sydney harbour and got us tickets for the firework show, so we were very lucky. We had plenty of space, we brought a picnic, blankets, cooler bags packed with beers, chairs to chill out on. It was great.

Niamh's sister Annie was in Australia, but we nearly missed each other. They scooted up to Sydney early and we got to spend a day with her and her travel buddy Sherry. We got a ferry out to Manly, an island with a beautiful beach and nice village. It was a roasting day so we sat out for a little bit and then took shelter in a cafe. In the evening, we headed back into the city centre, had a couple of drinks and then all met with some of our friends for the final goodbye for now. It is a pity we couldn't keep the Kirwan party going for a few days longer, but we'll just have to save it for Dublin in June!

We are in Santiago now, trying to get through our jetlag. We love South America so far and are looking forward to 5 months of travel adventures here starting with a Jerry and Aisling reunion.

Australia - Help Exchange, Birthdays and the Sea Side

We started on our help exchange out in Fitzroy, in Melbourne. Help Exchange is where you do a few hours work in exchange for accommodation and food. When we arrived, Megan answered the door and let us in. So that was a good start. She was really nice and shortly after that her husband, Tao and their daughters Xavie and Illy arrived. Once we were all introduced, we had a bite to eat and got to know each other. We sat there for the evening and chatted and watched The Newsroom (one of the best series out there, the box set will be purchased when we get back to Dublin!)

Our help exchange consisted predominately of gardening work and laying an irrigation system. We had our own room with a TV, so we could chill out there and not be under their feet. The house was beautiful, Megan studied and worked in interior design, and the food they cooked was amazing, Tao has skills in the kitchen.

Unlike our cooking for example. We decided to do a really complicated dish one night for them, something to really impress. Pasta and mince. Oh yes. Get your cook books out lads, this is gonna be complex! Obviously this is not a difficult dinner, except when you don't take the mince out of the freezer early enough. Turns out you see, they don't have a microwave. So this left us breaking up the mince bit by bit and in turn trying to cook these bits as we bashed them into as close to a defrosted state as was possible. Mince that has not been defrosted properly does not taste good, it has a nasty gritty texture. This is not helped if you then burn the mince. We added as much flavour as we could, but it still was awful. One of the kids didn't eat it, which was not a good sign. Needless to say that was the last time we cooked for them. Save ourselves the humiliation I think. We have been cooking a lot recently and had been quite proud of our culinary creations, but managed to comprehensively feck up that meal.

The first few days we did weeding in the the front and back gardens. It was hard going, as we hadn't done any exercise in ages. So our legs and backsides were really sore. I was moving around like the old man that I am becoming. Sitting down, something I'm quite accomplished at, and standing up were an ordeal in themselves. But once we broke through the incredible pain barrier of a household gardener, we weeded like weeding machines.

We were given the weekend off as we had to install an irrigation system into their garden the following week. So we took full advantage. We went to see the new Bond film (disappointing flick) in the local cinema which you can buy beer or wine at, and bring it into the theatre with you to watch the movie. Now, as previously explained in earlier blog posts, Niamh enjoys saving the pennys. And as the price of wine there did not fall into the $2.50 to $10 bracket (yes, you can buy a bottle in Aldi for $2.50, it's called Precious and we have indulged) we obviously bought our wine somewhere else. We got a nice cheap bottle of wine in a drive-through, bought one beer in the cinema so as to have a glass to sip on our smuggled contraband and got comfy for the flick. Sipped away and got nice and tipsy. Good times!

After the cinema, it was too early to go back and went on the hunt for a nice little bar somewhere. We found one called Deco Bar. It offered cheap beer on a blackboard outside, cheap beer being our second favourite beverage, just behind free beer, we decided this was to be the place we would complete our goal of fun for the night. There were only a few people at the bar itself, so as we ordered our drinks, we got a talking to our fellow patrons and met some great characters. It was such a fun night, we crawled into bed in the wee hours of the morning.

 

Another day we headed over to an Eco park, Niamh was in her element. We happened to arrive on barbeque day, so the place was buzzing with people and music. We wandered about the market garden, hen house, eco house and other displays. They also has a really cute cafe with bunting. The band was great and kept to the barbeque theme, they changed the words of famous songs to BBQ food, for example, The Smiths song This Charming Man became This Chargrilled Ham. We abandoned our plans for walking, grabbed a beer and chilled out for a few hours.

 

 

The area we were staying in was really great. We spent a lot of time wandering around the shops and cafes and visited a lovely flea market, which made Niamh want to set up her stall again.

We were finishing up our time with Megan, Tao and the kids, so we decided to ring the guy from the next Help X we were due to start with. We were to arrive at his place in a few days and wanted to get directions, he had told us to ring him to sort it out. Unfortunately when we called, he was as unorganised as we feared he might be from his emails. When we gave him our names, he said "Oh aren't you due here in a few weeks"? Not a good start! We said "No, Friday". It was Wednesday. As it transpired, he had someone working for him that decided he wanted to hang on for a bit longer and didn't have space for us. We were quite vexed by this as we had arranged our route down the east coast of Australia time wise based on working there for two weeks. We had arranged these dates with him weeks in advance, before our replacement as well! Also we had turned other help exchanges down as we had already committed to him. We rang around the people who had wanted us to turn up. We were worried they would have people at this point and this was to be the case. So it was onto plan B, just go travelling again. We are having it so tough right now, ha.

After we finished our time with our Help X family we headed to a different place in Melbourne called St. Kilda. It was one place we had driven through but hadn't got to check it out. It is a cool part of the city with nice bars,cafes, cake shops, which we stopped into for a sample. You could easily spend a lot of money in these places. Luckily weasel wallet Kirwan was controlled enough to make sure we only stuck to one each. One of the most innovative places was called Lentil as Anything. They serve vegetarian Indian style food. It is delicious and reminds me of Govinda's. They don't put prices on any of the dishes, but ask you to donate how much you think the meal is worth.

One of the days we were chilling out in the hostel, Niamh came over to me to say there was a note on the door of our room asking me to come to reception. Knowing what this may be about, as it was my birthday that day, I feared a birthday song. My fears were realised and the embarrassment commenced. This was bear in mind, in the common area, where there wasn't a huge amount of people due it being early but there were a few all the same. As I stood at the counter looking worried, Niamh beside me smiling ear to ear, the staff arrived out with a birthday cake, whistles and party poppers singing Happy Birthday to be. To make matters worse I for some reason felt compelled to start dancing out of a sheer lack of knowing what to do in this situation. The staff sang as though they had done this a thousand times before and the novelty was truly gone, understandably I would say. As I waved my hands in the air with my silky moves, Niamh laughing at my awkwardness, I looked around the room to everyone just blankly starring at me, not singing along surprisingly. After the final party popper popped, the silence deafening, the anti climax of a 32nd birthday was clearly felt throughout the room, except from Niamh who was still thoroughly enjoying my awkwardness. We went back to our seats, cake in hand and slightly embarrassed, we tucked in, offering slices to the people who had witnessed the whole scene. It was a nice gesture though, so thanks Habitat HQ. That night we went and got a few drinks and headed back to the hostel. After, we went out on the town and had great night.

After a few days we started to make our way to Sorrento. We arrived at the local train station but to our surprise, you cannot buy train tickets at the train station. We asked around and found that we had to buy a myki card, kind of like the oyster card you get in London, except you don't get it refunded to you when you leave Melbourne. Not exactly designed for tourists. So after having to spend about twenty dollars on train tickets between the myki and putting credit on them, we were on our way. After the train we jumped on the local bus. An hour or so later, we arrived in Sorrento and went to a nice little hostel there. It was a really picturesque town, with a beach and a national park nearby, which occupied most of our time there. Although the little cafe got a few visits as well. We got to meet sound people in the hostel. As it was a small one, we got talking to everyone and had some great nights sitting around the table having a few cold ones.

 

We decided it was time to leave Sorrento and make our way to Sydney. We were going to book into a hostel for a night when we got back to Melbourne but we inquired when the next night train to Sydney with available seats was, which was conveniently that evening. We could check our ruck sacks in, which was great, so we could walk around for the day without hauling them around with us. We didn't get a great nights sleep mind you, as the night train is the same as a day train, the seat reclines slightly but that's as close to a bed, as it got. Niamh ended up sleeping on the floor.

The first night we checked into a hostel and had a nice chilling day in Sydney. That night, we got talking to the two London lads in our dorm. They were meant to go out, but ended up staying in talking crap with us till the wee hours of the morning.

We ended up in Sydney a week early because the help X fell through. Emmet's cousin Evelyn and her boyfriend Nick put us for the week. They were so good to us, thanks guys. We met their flat mate, Paul, a fellow Londoner for Ev, who was lovely. Well tell you about our adventures next time...