Chk Chk Boom

Greetings all from the future! If you are reading this, I am glad that you have survived the...oh wait, I've said too much.

I believe that many of you who have been reading this blog are familiar with Briana's...lets just call them "recounts" of our journeys. I don't want to out right call them lies...maybe just twists on reality. For instance, I have not read her entries, but I know of a few examples. First, if I wanted to keep the grilled chicken sandwiches on wheat bread after we got on the plane. Why weren't they in my bag? Why did Briana have them, and as a result get us stopped for Quarantine. Most likely what happened was Briana saw a cute puppy and after a 14 hour plane ride wanted to play with it, which resulted in what was short of an international crime. Example 2 - she could have stopped us from walking through the Royal Botanical Gardens at night, so it wasn't my fault we went through it ... it was actually a great experience.

So where to begin? I'm not sure if you really want me to go back and retell my experiences, so you can compare them with Briana's, so I'll just give you my basic commentary on Australia. The part you don't read in the books!

Overall, people in Australia may be the poster children for bipolar disorder. We've encountered many a nice person who wouldn't mind giving us advice on where to go or even take our picture. Nevertheless, there have been times where they just all of a sudden whip out some crazy. The first shining example is when Briana and I were near "The House" (that's what us who are in the know call the Opera House), and some nice woman came over and saw us struggle to do a party pic. She asked if we wanted help. We said sure and she was nice enough to take a picture. Well, then...the inner psycho came out. She said that now we could take her picture, and not just of her but of her baby that was in a stroller a couple of meters away (yeah, I said it meters, not feet...I think the metric system is cool also it makes things seem a lot longer away, esp when comparing km to miles). And then she was asking questions about us and why we were here. But when we asked her....we got the sense that she was here because the baby she left in the distance is probably stolen and she came to Australia to start a new life because no one really remembers to look at Australia for basically anything (it's true...you should see the news they have).

The only other major example of crazy in the land down under is that when ordering coffee here, you would think that one would be greeted with clarifying questions with an air of good customer service. However, in Australia ordering coffee is equivalent to starting a gang fight where in the morning I thought the waitress from Famous Roys was going to punch me...I felt threatened.

All in all, Australia has been really great. As Carmen informed us they have amazing street signs here! And at all the cross walks they say "Look Right" just as a friendly reminder to travelers where as in the US they would rather put "You Had It Coming" on the fender of every car. As Briana has mentioned we have seen a lot of great sites and as Briana will mention yesterday we went on the Coast Trail that goes from Bondi Beach to Coogee Beach which is written in all the books (which should be written as a dead man march filled with an obscene amount of stairs...which is probably also why it cuts through a cemetary just in case you really do think it's the end of you).

Well Briana is sitting next to me and talking about what our plan for the day should be...and then she'll blog. Peace!