Fun Fact: KFarm and I aren't as socially awkward as previously assumed!
We switched hostels yesterday to one across town called Backpackers HQ. It's rather nice to be on the other side of Sydney with a totally different feel and more fun things to explore :)
Our previous hostel had a kind of clubish feel to it, every time I got on the elevator I felt like I was waiting for strobe lights to come on. This one, however, is quite lovely. Its tucked away on a street lined by cute little boutique shops and cafes, gracefully shaded by trees that remind me of a hybrid mix between and maple and sycamore tree.
Our room is a tiny thing with 10 beds on the third floor (ha!). We met three swedish fellows (Linus, Gustav and Marcus) and the coolest Irish girl (Rachel) straight off the bat. We ended up eating pizza and drinking "goon" (Australia's version of Franzia) with Rachel trading phrases and awesome music. Swear to god it felt like I was REALLY back at Murray State. I keep waiting for my suite mate to come over.
I am so incredibly pleased with our ability to befriend strangers right now! Apparently we're hilarious Americans.
We had breakfast in the courtyard this morning Linus and have successfully achieved "Lets Do Nothing Today" status. Mumford Jam session with New Zealand planning (YAY free WiFI!!!) here I come :)
-L
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
Roll away your stone, I'll roll away mine
Day Three
I LOVE hiking. I firmly believe that it is the best way to center yourself body, mind and soul. Especially when you have beautiful vistas and a good solid line of hills or stairs to climb. There is something about getting your heart pumping and feeling that rush of blood through your veins that is simply medicinal on its own.
My last year has been full of roller coaster ups and downs, and my schedule just hasn't permitted a good long hike. KFarm and I walked a beautiful coastal trek from Bondi Beach to Coogee Beach Monday. Every corner rounded led to another gorgeous view.
I'm not an ocean person by any means, but that doesn't mean that I cant appreciate the beauty a coastal cliff has to offer. I'm also not a terribly religious person either (I believe in kindness and honesty above belonging to a particular religion), but there was something truly spiritual about that walk. My entire soul clicked back into place after being disjointed for quite some time.
What a feeling that was. It was as though all of the shitty nonsense that had been bogging me down melted away. That was a feeling that previously I could only attain for short periods of time after a great weekend, or by eating 8 pounds of chocolate haha. There was something about that 2 hour up and down, sweat your ass off, constant applications of sunscreen hike that did it.
My legs are sore as hell, but my heart feels like a bird.
I LOVE hiking. I firmly believe that it is the best way to center yourself body, mind and soul. Especially when you have beautiful vistas and a good solid line of hills or stairs to climb. There is something about getting your heart pumping and feeling that rush of blood through your veins that is simply medicinal on its own.
My last year has been full of roller coaster ups and downs, and my schedule just hasn't permitted a good long hike. KFarm and I walked a beautiful coastal trek from Bondi Beach to Coogee Beach Monday. Every corner rounded led to another gorgeous view.
I'm not an ocean person by any means, but that doesn't mean that I cant appreciate the beauty a coastal cliff has to offer. I'm also not a terribly religious person either (I believe in kindness and honesty above belonging to a particular religion), but there was something truly spiritual about that walk. My entire soul clicked back into place after being disjointed for quite some time.
What a feeling that was. It was as though all of the shitty nonsense that had been bogging me down melted away. That was a feeling that previously I could only attain for short periods of time after a great weekend, or by eating 8 pounds of chocolate haha. There was something about that 2 hour up and down, sweat your ass off, constant applications of sunscreen hike that did it.
My legs are sore as hell, but my heart feels like a bird.
Sunday, February 17, 2013
Chinatown, Pink Hair and Rallying.
Day One and Two
Can I just say how much sleep really improves your point of view?
Fun fact about me: Hungry/Sleepy Lauren = Grumpy/Negative Lauren.
We got into Australia around 8:30 local time and check in wasn't until noon, so KFarm and I hauled our worn out asses to some crazy asian shopping mall and proceeded to wolf down chinese food like it was manna from heaven.
Now full, but exhausted, my mood only deteriorated more after that haha. We ended up walking through Sydney's Chinatown about 4 times total, and I was so irritated at seeing anything Asian that I about lost my mind. We swung through Darling Harbor near the end of our walking excursion, KFarm and I decided that it was basically the touristy parts of Florida condensed and collected into that part of Sydney.
We crawled back to our room around 5 or 6 with plans to research what to do the following day. Instead, we promptly passed out at 8ish feeling none-to-impressed with the city of Sydney and ever more excited for a return flight to New Zealand.
5:00am rolled around and my ass was AWAKE. I wiggled as quietly as possible from the squeaky top bunk and came down to the lobby to read some more Jack Kerouac (interesting read all in all, he writes the same way my brain processes things: lots of run on sentences and back stories haha. So its easy enough for me to follow :)
Favorite quote this far from On The Road:
"...because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace things, but burn burn burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars..."
I loved it because it true! I adore people who have passion. Spontaneity and confidence together is such a dangerous and perfect mixture. So far, the people KFarm and I have befriended have been very much so of this caliber.
I spoke at length to a girl named Steph with bright pink hair at 5:00 am that day. She said "I love having pink hair, orange was better, but pink is great! People want to talk to you when you have pink hair, I cant even tell you how many friends I've made just because of it." It true, you do want to talk to her because her hair is pink, but more-so because she is so confidently friendly.
Now in all fairness, parts of this crowd of spontaneity isn't quite my style. A majority of the people at this hostel are wee little babies of 20-22 who drink for months straight. They have have the funds to travel to Cambodia for 3 months and get sick on malaria pills, only to stop taking them because they preferred to be vomiting from alcohol instead of malaria pills (True DudeBro story 1). Like I said, not my style but the most interesting and fascinating people to speak with for their stories and to compare opinions (and your home country's favorite curse words/sayings) with.
BUT there are also some AMAZING people here. We are bunked with 6 other people in our room, two very nice girls from different parts of England here on work visas and two Australians (Melbourneians?) in particular are hilarious. There are several people here traveling alone, which makes you a very friendly chatty person because you HAVE to be. I'll have to try that next, it's be good for me to learn how to be less reserved straight off the bat.
Anywho, a rough summation of yesterday:
- Expensive breakfast
- Expensive everything
- Hyde Park is BEAUTIFUL.
- The Royal Botanical Gardens are AMAZING.
- Sydney is full of gorgeous, perfect, blonde, skinny people that make me feel like a frumpy American
- The Opera House is TILED on the outside. ::surprise face::
- Free WiFi is my new best friend (Thank you Sydney Opera House and Art Museum for offering such services to the public.)
- KFarm's team is sooooo much better than mine! She is a much better people watcher than I am haha!
Needless to say, my initial take on Sydney was a negative and depressing one, but the city rallied today! I wouldn't get anything done if I lived here, there are too many beautiful things to look at.
More to follow soon!
Can I just say how much sleep really improves your point of view?
Fun fact about me: Hungry/Sleepy Lauren = Grumpy/Negative Lauren.
We got into Australia around 8:30 local time and check in wasn't until noon, so KFarm and I hauled our worn out asses to some crazy asian shopping mall and proceeded to wolf down chinese food like it was manna from heaven.
Now full, but exhausted, my mood only deteriorated more after that haha. We ended up walking through Sydney's Chinatown about 4 times total, and I was so irritated at seeing anything Asian that I about lost my mind. We swung through Darling Harbor near the end of our walking excursion, KFarm and I decided that it was basically the touristy parts of Florida condensed and collected into that part of Sydney.
We crawled back to our room around 5 or 6 with plans to research what to do the following day. Instead, we promptly passed out at 8ish feeling none-to-impressed with the city of Sydney and ever more excited for a return flight to New Zealand.
5:00am rolled around and my ass was AWAKE. I wiggled as quietly as possible from the squeaky top bunk and came down to the lobby to read some more Jack Kerouac (interesting read all in all, he writes the same way my brain processes things: lots of run on sentences and back stories haha. So its easy enough for me to follow :)
Favorite quote this far from On The Road:
"...because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace things, but burn burn burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars..."
I loved it because it true! I adore people who have passion. Spontaneity and confidence together is such a dangerous and perfect mixture. So far, the people KFarm and I have befriended have been very much so of this caliber.
I spoke at length to a girl named Steph with bright pink hair at 5:00 am that day. She said "I love having pink hair, orange was better, but pink is great! People want to talk to you when you have pink hair, I cant even tell you how many friends I've made just because of it." It true, you do want to talk to her because her hair is pink, but more-so because she is so confidently friendly.
Now in all fairness, parts of this crowd of spontaneity isn't quite my style. A majority of the people at this hostel are wee little babies of 20-22 who drink for months straight. They have have the funds to travel to Cambodia for 3 months and get sick on malaria pills, only to stop taking them because they preferred to be vomiting from alcohol instead of malaria pills (True DudeBro story 1). Like I said, not my style but the most interesting and fascinating people to speak with for their stories and to compare opinions (and your home country's favorite curse words/sayings) with.
BUT there are also some AMAZING people here. We are bunked with 6 other people in our room, two very nice girls from different parts of England here on work visas and two Australians (Melbourneians?) in particular are hilarious. There are several people here traveling alone, which makes you a very friendly chatty person because you HAVE to be. I'll have to try that next, it's be good for me to learn how to be less reserved straight off the bat.
Anywho, a rough summation of yesterday:
- Expensive breakfast
- Expensive everything
- Hyde Park is BEAUTIFUL.
- The Royal Botanical Gardens are AMAZING.
- Sydney is full of gorgeous, perfect, blonde, skinny people that make me feel like a frumpy American
- The Opera House is TILED on the outside. ::surprise face::
- Free WiFi is my new best friend (Thank you Sydney Opera House and Art Museum for offering such services to the public.)
- KFarm's team is sooooo much better than mine! She is a much better people watcher than I am haha!
Needless to say, my initial take on Sydney was a negative and depressing one, but the city rallied today! I wouldn't get anything done if I lived here, there are too many beautiful things to look at.
More to follow soon!
Saturday, February 16, 2013
College....again.
For the first two nights in Sydney, KFarm and I are staying at a large hostel near downtown called Wake Up! Sydney.
It's a great place, sweet location (walking distance to just about anything downtown), neat activities and free advice on a variety of subjects.
The entertaining part is that fact that the target audience seems to be baby collegiates. It makes me miss my old dorm room, people stomping up and down the hall, doors slamming, showers with kick ass water pressure. I half expect my floor of brothers to come knocking on my door at any second :)
It's a great place, sweet location (walking distance to just about anything downtown), neat activities and free advice on a variety of subjects.
The entertaining part is that fact that the target audience seems to be baby collegiates. It makes me miss my old dorm room, people stomping up and down the hall, doors slamming, showers with kick ass water pressure. I half expect my floor of brothers to come knocking on my door at any second :)
Friday, February 15, 2013
Let me show you a few things
A wise woman told me once to never lose my child-like wonder and fascination with life. Seven year old me took that advice quite seriously and I try to follow it with what ever is left of the child in my heart.
I have seen mountains. REAL mountains. I fully realize that this is something that I will at some point in the very near future not be so enamored with, which, in turn, leads me to feel that it is important for me to translate my immediate reaction to you ASAP before they become just another beautiful thing in this broken world.
I can honestly say that I have never felt a greater urge to put pen to paper and write what I was thinking and feeling. The tsunami of creativity that was whirling behind my eyes really took my breath away for a short moment. Metaphors flew through my head like comets, shining with clever description and burning across my train of thought. Shame they flew as fast as comets, leaving me the few that I can recall.
They are tremendously beautiful things, these mountains. And that's just viewing them from an airplane. I can only imagine what they look like from the ground. Coming from a land of rolling green hills and picturesque pastoral settings that make you want to buy an easel and paint for the rest of your life, I was taken aback by the pull they had on my heart. Mountains are a completely different breed of scenery. They make you want to breathe, to climb, to stretch. Screw painting, you cannot capture their soul on canvas. They make you their canvas, gracefully tearing their way across your line of sight.
It was also quite amazing to see bits and pieces of this giant country from my tiny window. Before today, the furthest west I had ever been was probably St. Louis. I had seen the eastern area of the country from a plane many times before. It was always beautiful, but very bland at the same time, as though our country was made up of right angles and squares like some giant quilt strewn across the land.
Wrong.
I just hadn't flown far enough!
This country still has some wild in it. You lose the structured city lines and gain the wide open curves of the plains. Even where there was clearly civilization the seamless welding of cookie cutter fields and chaotic wilderness was beautiful.
Color was everywhere, my graphic design brain went haywire labeling hues and sifting through fonts to use. ("A Love of Thunder" would have made a glorious title font. Just the tops of the letters peaking through the clouds.)
The Rockies took my breath away. The 20 minute glimpse of California? Im sold already. We didn't even leave the damn airport and I love San Francisco. That city jumped to my top 3 list of places to move with ridiculous speed. KFarm and I were particularly tickled with the wind farm we saw just before landing.
One person whom I thought of on our cross country flight was my grandfather. I am definitely his granddaughter as i have clearly inherited his love for travel. I miss him greatly, but I'm 99% positive that he's pretty proud of me right now.
Alight kids! Still on the plane from San Francisco to Auckland. I think I'll curl back up into my yoga ball and sleep for a few more hours. Australia here we come!
I have seen mountains. REAL mountains. I fully realize that this is something that I will at some point in the very near future not be so enamored with, which, in turn, leads me to feel that it is important for me to translate my immediate reaction to you ASAP before they become just another beautiful thing in this broken world.
I can honestly say that I have never felt a greater urge to put pen to paper and write what I was thinking and feeling. The tsunami of creativity that was whirling behind my eyes really took my breath away for a short moment. Metaphors flew through my head like comets, shining with clever description and burning across my train of thought. Shame they flew as fast as comets, leaving me the few that I can recall.
They are tremendously beautiful things, these mountains. And that's just viewing them from an airplane. I can only imagine what they look like from the ground. Coming from a land of rolling green hills and picturesque pastoral settings that make you want to buy an easel and paint for the rest of your life, I was taken aback by the pull they had on my heart. Mountains are a completely different breed of scenery. They make you want to breathe, to climb, to stretch. Screw painting, you cannot capture their soul on canvas. They make you their canvas, gracefully tearing their way across your line of sight.
It was also quite amazing to see bits and pieces of this giant country from my tiny window. Before today, the furthest west I had ever been was probably St. Louis. I had seen the eastern area of the country from a plane many times before. It was always beautiful, but very bland at the same time, as though our country was made up of right angles and squares like some giant quilt strewn across the land.
Wrong.
I just hadn't flown far enough!
This country still has some wild in it. You lose the structured city lines and gain the wide open curves of the plains. Even where there was clearly civilization the seamless welding of cookie cutter fields and chaotic wilderness was beautiful.
Color was everywhere, my graphic design brain went haywire labeling hues and sifting through fonts to use. ("A Love of Thunder" would have made a glorious title font. Just the tops of the letters peaking through the clouds.)
The Rockies took my breath away. The 20 minute glimpse of California? Im sold already. We didn't even leave the damn airport and I love San Francisco. That city jumped to my top 3 list of places to move with ridiculous speed. KFarm and I were particularly tickled with the wind farm we saw just before landing.
One person whom I thought of on our cross country flight was my grandfather. I am definitely his granddaughter as i have clearly inherited his love for travel. I miss him greatly, but I'm 99% positive that he's pretty proud of me right now.
Alight kids! Still on the plane from San Francisco to Auckland. I think I'll curl back up into my yoga ball and sleep for a few more hours. Australia here we come!
Sunday, February 10, 2013
Saturday, February 9, 2013
Lindy Hop
Fact #1: I am a white girl.
Fact #2: I dance like a white girl.
Fact #3: Until now.
Now I (kind of) dance like a white girl who can actually move with some level of coordination on a dance floor. I introduce you to.... The Lindy Hop:
In an effort to try and learn something new as often as possible, I have been taking dance lessons from a lovely couple in Lexington for the past month.
I have dipped my toe into the basics of the lindy hop, and I LOVE IT! I have never had so much fun on a dance floor in my life! Especially the swivels and switches haha! Long legs + swivels = LP was made to shake her booty (or as Mary put it "polish the wall").
There is a performance group out of Lexington that I'm seriously considering trying to weasel my way into. I watched a few of them dance the other weekend and it was truly the most entertaining and captivating thing to see. Videos are one thing, but I highly suggest that you find a place to see it live. We'll see if I can be any good at lindy, but at the least I'll be a decent dancer!
Fact #2: I dance like a white girl.
Fact #3: Until now.
Now I (kind of) dance like a white girl who can actually move with some level of coordination on a dance floor. I introduce you to.... The Lindy Hop:
(Side Bar: If I EVER find someone as funny as this man on the dance floor...game on.)
In an effort to try and learn something new as often as possible, I have been taking dance lessons from a lovely couple in Lexington for the past month.
I have dipped my toe into the basics of the lindy hop, and I LOVE IT! I have never had so much fun on a dance floor in my life! Especially the swivels and switches haha! Long legs + swivels = LP was made to shake her booty (or as Mary put it "polish the wall").
There is a performance group out of Lexington that I'm seriously considering trying to weasel my way into. I watched a few of them dance the other weekend and it was truly the most entertaining and captivating thing to see. Videos are one thing, but I highly suggest that you find a place to see it live. We'll see if I can be any good at lindy, but at the least I'll be a decent dancer!
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