on the gold coast, all that glitters might be glass...

Sooo my third weekend in Australia was almost accidentally spent in Sydney instead of the Gold Coast (think - Australia's answer to a spring break hot spot).

So..my third weekend began with the SGM Awards (see previous post). After probably downing about 2 bottles of champagne and dancing our butts off until 2am, my roommate Jamie and I took our cute little black dresses and very tired heels home for a little bit of rest before meeting the rest of the girls for a 7am flight to the Gold Coast. Well....instead of waking up at 5am (go figure..haha..hmm - in retro, not the best planning i have done), Jamie and I instead woke up at 6am to Ally calling from the lobby where we were supposed to be meeting everyone to head to the airport. Eek! We jumped out of bed, threw random clothes into our bags and literally jumped into a cab (and in front of! haha) all in the span of about 5 minutes. Yup, we barely had anything we needed but we still made those flights!!

Once we got to the Gold Coast, being the six classy ladies that we are, we hopped into our Avis white Tourago (aka...minivan haha) and Ally skillfully drove on the wrong side of the road for an hour...all the way to Byron Bay. Byron Bay is this super super cute/laid back surfer town an hour north of Surfer's Paradise. Its also now the top of my list for places to retire to....and is at the top of yours too...trust me! The beach is pristine and stretches for miles as the clear blue waves broke gently all along the shore.

We pulled in around 10am and spent a couple of hours exploring all the cute souvenir and surf shops that lined the town. Once it hit noon, we hit the only cafe on the beach and had a seafood extravaganza outside on the open air porch. Well actually, more like everyone else had seafood - being still a little roughed up from the night before, i opted for a HUGE delicios bowl of mashed potatoes with olive oil and rock sea salt and (of course!) a salad. Delicious!

Once we finished stuffing our faces, we hit the beach and took a nice loooong stroll out to the absolute eastern-most point of Australia. Thats right - you can't get any more East than that..haha...We found a really cool lookout point and watched the kayakers below as they got closer and closer to the surfers near the shore. Definitely need to try surfing at one point.

Once we finished walking as East as we could, we then headed back into town...picking our way over the beach that was now littered with people on a gorgeous 80 degree day. (Incidentally, we were the only ones in jeans...can you spot the tourists? yup, its us..haha) We did a little more shopping then headed to Surfer's Paradise to find our hotel - the nicest Holiday Inn I have ever seen! (Jin, it would have brought a tear to your eye..finally a Holiday Inn as good as a Hilton! haha) We walked into the super posh lobby, got our rooms keys and then played room key roulette to see who would be bunking with whom. Turned out to be the tall girls and the short girls hahaha...

We relaxed a little (and of course, had a couple of bottles of wine while getting ready) then decided to hit up the dirty spring break town first hand! We had dinner at Melbas - less than a five minute walk from our hotel. Melba's is a totally lively and fun restaurant that slowly becomes a club... Since we had to wait a little while for a table, we hit up the bar and got a fishbowl to share! A leisurely dinner (with lots more drinking) and then we were ready to hit up the dance floor! While fun, it was definitely a crazy mix! There was glass all over the floor from all the drunks dropping their drinks (ps - first time i have seen anything other than a pristine floor since I have been in Australia) and the clothing and hair - WHOA. People must just get drunk and chop each others hair into the awesome rock star mullets they have - otherwise, there are some very twisted hairdressers out there! To top it all off, people slam into you instead of passing you like normal. Def brought out the fighter in me and my girl from Philly - Erica...we started dropping some bows! haha...However, in spite of those few negatives, anytime you get 6 lovely ladies together with some good music, you are still going to have an awesome time! We danced the night away until about 2:30 then headed home for bed (with a pizza pit stop on the way!)

On Sunday, I woke up suuuuuuper bright and early at 8am. Ugh..gross - the only thing my poor body wanted was sleep! Since I was already wide awake tho, I decided to get up and get ready. My fellow short stuffs (Erica and Holly) got up pretty soon after I did so we wandered around and had some breakfast. By the time we got back, it was already noon - time to meet the other girls, check out, pack up the minivan (aka White Lightning!) and do some exploring. We spent an hour wandering from Surfers Paradise to Broad Beach where we had a delicious pizza and salad brunch. Incidentally, I think we were also the only people in the restaurant not drinking..haha...Australia - I like your style. We then walked the beach back and realized we still had a few hours to kill before our flight so we got some gelato and then went bowling! Yay! Sylvia ended up being the hustler of the group - she bowled a strike or a spare almost every frame!!!! Once we handed back our rental shoes and socks (I know - totally gross) we then leisurely walked back to the car, went to the airport and then hopped on our flights home!! Too bad the weekends go so fast!!

sorry!

clearly these posts are not in order - whoops! will be better about that from now on! tune in tomorrow for details of weekends three and four! whoa! i've been here a month already!!! :-P

1 week down...lots more to go

Soooo my second weekend in Sydney was great! Definitely better than the first. My jet lag finally was subsiding and I got a roommate!! Jamie arrived Friday night and I am soo glad I have such a great roommate! She was also gung ho ready to go right away..

On Saturday we went to the Fish Market for lunch (we being, Jamie, Ally, Holly, Erica, Martin and I) and was it an adventure. Its supposed to be a bit past Darling Harbor so we walked over the bridge...and then immediately veered off course. An hour later, we got there and since we were starving, I'm sure the food was even better!! Pretty much everyone in the group got some type of grilled fish. Being as ravenous as I was, I decided to go for the seafood platter aka the mountain of fried golden goodness haha. It had a scallop (only thing not fried) as well as fish and chips, three kinds of oysters, calamari, squid and a big jumbo prawn. YUM. I only got through about half..haha (see picture) After that we walked all around Sydney (the Opera House, etc) and then headed home to relax for a few hours before hitting up another JIT's place for a party - Igor's birthday. House parties are such a blast. We partied up then went to King's Cross -specifically to Hugos. Hugo's is totally your NYC club type place. Guys def needed girls to get in but unfortunately we didn't split into cabs in the most diverse way so all the girls were already in by the time our last group of guys got to the door. After being rejected once, they finally made it in. There we partied the night away to tons of great music - lots of hip hop and 80s and my fave - lots of Will Smith haha. Soooo much better than the unst unst unst of techno which haunts us everywhere else we go!! Too much techno!

Hugos: Chilling with the Shin-ster (aka Sylvia) .....loving the disco balls with Jamie and Ally

After doing shots with John - our fellow JIT from Adelaide (and also EY NJ - see pic), around 2:30, Jamie, Ally and I decided to call it a night but not without stopping for some pizza from the kebab place near our apartments! While no NYC slice, at 3am it def did the trick!!!

On Sunday, Jamie Ally and I headed up to the Rocks (the area right beneath the Harbor Bridge) for the Aroma Festival. Basically the festival was to showcase a lot of little booths focusing on coffee, tea, chocolate and spices - 4 of my favorite things. I had some really delicious tea (surprise surprise) while Jamie and Ally spent 20 minutes hunting down a cup of coffee! I also made out with a sampler of some authentic Aussie spices..can't wait to try to use those! After that, the 6 girls (Sylvia, Holly, Erica, Jamie, Ally and I) headed off to Bondi Beach. Bondi is about 20 minutes from the city and is absolutely adorable. Its one of the must visit spots in Sydney...even celebrities hit up the beach when they are in town (according to the travel program on channel 9 here anyway). Even though the day was gray and threatening rain, we still enjoyed a cute little brunch on an outdoor patio (thanks to the heat lamps), with a great view of the beach. I had the best bacon sandwich of my life..haha (again..see pic) and then went on a coastal walk from Bondi Beach weaving all around the coastline to another little beach - Coogee. Although it was threatening to rain the entire time (see the pic of Erica and I at Bondi Beach below), we walked fast and made it home safe and dry! Aside from the gray skies, the views were absolutely gorgeous off the coastline. Its so weird how much of Sydney is surrounded by water, and ocean water at that! After our walk, we headed home and just chilled out (actually warmed up! hahaha...i am too much of a dork for my own good) for the rest of the night...and just like that weekend #2 was already over!

(yes this post is out of order)

every other workday (so far)...

Ok so basically every day since my first day has reinforced the following. Forget what you heard. Here, its really busy season. blechhh...Especially on the FS clients, one of which I just worked on for the past three weeks. Sooooo to all you people enjoying your summer – live it up! We work…sometimes a lot…and the workpapers are scary. Maybe I shouldn’t be writing this down haha…they are just too scary to not mention. Just take the worst workpapers you have ever seen and multiply that times an engagement. Then times a whole office. Then times a whole country. Yeahhhh… On the bright side, all of my SGM coworkers thus far have been really great and super helpful! There are a surprising number of other people who are here from all over…be it the UK, South Africa or…um the UK or um…South Africa…haha. I’ll work on broadening my horizons sometime later. Supposedly there are tons of Germans too but I have yet to meet any of them. Oh well. Plus side so far is that I realllllllly like my group – SGM. Its like a somewhat extended family since everyone is super nice and friendly. Its so great to have people introduce themselves to you! My buddy here is super cool too. His name is Max and he is from Edinborough. Yay Scots..haha… Its great to have him as a buddy though, especially since he just moved here 6 months ago. And the other great person I have met in SGM is my roommate – Jamie! She is awesome! I can’t wait to actually start working on SGM jobs instead of this FS nonsense!

The best part of SGM so far has been the "SGM Awards Night". The group is still pretty small (about 150 ppl) so every year they host an awards night to recognize the hard workers as well as some of the funny things people have done/said over the past year. I would totally love it if we had something like this in the US. I guess its kinda hard to explain via blog but I'll try to "capture the magic" as best as I can. The theme was Willy Wonka so you had two options for dress code - black tie or movie character haha. Since I didnt have a dress, I bought one (black tie style..not Oompa Loompa). They held the event at a function room overlooking Darling Harbor (which is every bit as "darling" and cute as the name implies). When we first arrived, we had cocktail hour outside on the balcony overlooking the harbor and then went in to have dinner. They started dinner with a cute little skit then we had our appetizers (which they actually call entrees here...weird). Then after that they did the awards. First were awards for People, Quality and Growth, as well as an "Overall" winner. Those people each got $200 gift certificates to dinner! What a great prize! After the serious awards were over, then they presented the non serious awards in the form of a top ten countdown of quotes and moments from over the past year. It was hysterical! All throughout, the waiters and waitresses kept refilling our glasses. The we had our entrees (aka "Mains" to those in Aussie) and after that danced the night away to tons of great 80s songs while still more drinks kept flowing! We danced like crazy until like 2am and then Jamie and I realized we had to get to bed so we could catch a flight the next morning..more about that in my Gold Coast post =)

the first day of the rest of my....secondment...

ok well i think i am long overdue for some additional posts...this one is (as you can read) about my first day of work!

I’m sure many of you want to know how things are at work…well my first day of work was like the first day of anything. The usual mix of butterflies and not being able to sleep the night before because you’re also really excited. Except its a lot worse when you are halfway around the world trying to adjust to the time difference on top of it. After waking up bright and early (2:30am to be precise but I hit the snooze until 6am tho- haha), I got ready and headed off for the 2.5 minute trek to the office. On the way, I ran into not one but TWO people I know! What a good start to the day – yay! I only know like 8 people in total so thats like 1/4 of my peeps! After being approved by the security guards I headed up to get familiarized with my new office. Lucky for me they were doing the kickoff to their new induction program. After learning who Jim Turley is and all about “people/quality/growth” for the like 30th time, we were finally granted the real essential – laptops (um old school back breaking dell 610s! eek!), securIDs and…dum dum dum dum…our building passes. Here they put all the ID pictures into the directory - no opting out. At least hopefully when people see mine and then meet me, they can think I look better in person..haha. After we got all settled we still had a couple of hours until the end of the day so my buddy, Max took myself and one of the other JITs (just in timers…that’s what they call us out here) Martin around the SGM (Strategic Growth Markets) floor and a half and introduced us around as well as helped us get oriented and showed us how to print, etc. Its crazy – here to print you actually have to swipe your ID card at the printer where you sent your document in order to get it to print out! They are also super strict with their network too – myspace, aim, etc are all blocked! Oh well…I guess it doesn’t really matter since at most client sites we can’t even get an internet connection. Seriously. Haha..as all us “JITs” have been saying, welcome to technology…10 years ago. Well after getting settled in, it was actually already time to leave. The mandatory workday is only 7.5 hours! Wooo! No point in staying past that my first day, especially since I was starting my first client the very next day. After packing up, I headed home, had some dinner and “retired” quite exhausted by 9pm. Hmm..I could get used to this…

first post! first post! first post!

Hi!

Welcome to my blog! Yay Australia! I warn you this is going to be a massively long first post (esp since I had a massively busy first day) but after that they'll be short & sweet. In a nutshell - so far so good - I love this city!

So where to begin? Ahh, the plane...the flight was surprisingly relaxing but as always not without incident -- i didn't get my seat assignment until they had already begun boarding coach! 14 hours on a plane can go by pretty fast when you haven't slept in the two days before you go. Highly recommend this as a way to approach long flights. Once we got onto the plane in LA, dinner was served then it was time to pass out and let the pilot take over. (ps Hong - you were totally right about Quantas..coach was surprisingly roomy!) All in all I slept about 10 hours of the flight..and managed to squeeze in not one buuuut TWO Drew Barrymore romantic comedies (music & lyrics and lucky you).

As the plane landed, the sky was just barely waking up so it was hard to see what the city looked like right away. After that arrival was nothing too spectacular - altho I'm sure it was amusing to see me put a 75 pound suitcase on the baggage cart. My driver met me as soon as I cam through customs and was very pleasant for someone awake at 6am on a Saturday morning. As we started to drive through the city, it looked very european...lots of small two story houses packed tightly together with the occasional convenience store thrown in. As we got more into the heart of Sydney I looked up and was greeted by a familiar Times Square sight - a ginormous E&Y building. The driver went a couple of blocks further and then pulled up outside of a fancy building right across from the park (Hyde Park). They definitely did a good job on housing here! Our accommodations are actually a converted hotel and are great except for one thing - they are freezing! For those of you who went to Albany, you can imagine the poor insulation of Empire Commons but with much prettier views and a less powerful thermostat to boot!

The lady from the housing place met me, showed me around the building and my apartment but before I knew it, it was 8am and I was alone in whats going to be my new "home" for the next 3.5 months. Having slept so much on the plane, I decided to being conquering my list of things to do. Since 7-11 is pretty much the only thing open so early on a Saturday, a phone card became my first order of business since I wanted to let my parents know I was in one piece on the other side of the world. After that I walked around and immediately realized how much I love my new neighborhood. Literally three minutes from my apartment is the E&Y building and it borders right on chinatown which means lots of prime asian food! There are tons of other places too - including a bunch of tapas restaurants. mmmm and lots of other cute shops and restaurants. there are also a TON of banks. not that thats exciting..but there just are haha. One thing they don't have is litter! I love this clean streets thing!

After walking around in Chinatown a bit, I decided to hit up vodaphone for a cell phone and then went in search of the supermarket for some essentials. One of the supermarket chains here is called Coles and its pretty decent for a supermarket in a city..just expensive. Its in this underground shopping plaza beneath the E&Y building. Walking around, it was basically like being home except for the produce selling at $ per kg. After my groceries were tucked away in my apartment, I set off again to explore some more. One thing I'll say for Sydney is they love their food courts-they are everywhere! There is one giant shopping area all set up in various arcades (not video game ones..architectural ones). As I walked around, I picked up random things...tim tams (now verifiably the best cookie on earth. EVER.) some flowers to make things more homey and some authentic Australian Riesling (haha..yes, I know how to take myself out on the town..wooo).

After that, I headed home and decided to stop at 7-11 for a bottle of water. It turns out that two of the guys from my program were there so we chatted a bit and they invited me to a birthday dinner being held for one of the girls that night. Even though I was exhausted by this point, I couldn't pass up the chance to meet everyone and get some "modern Australian" cuisine! We had dinner at this really cute place called Otto right on the finger wharfs in Wooloomooloo (yes thats the real name of the town!) After that, it was time for some chilling - literally and pun intended - we went to Minus 5, a bar made entirely of ice. Once they suit you up with some parkas, Uggs and gloves, you get to go into the minus 5 degree (centigrade) bar and have a drink (in a cup also made of ice). Nothing like some good cold fun!

After that, it was bedtime for me! I think I crawled into bed around 12 so I was shocked to be wide awake at 6am. Thats definitely a somewhat annoying and pleasant aspect to the jet lag. Its nice to start your day early but weekends should be for sleeping in! Since I was already up, I decided to get ready and meet some of the girls for a tour of the Sydney Opera House. It was sooo beautiful inside..and with great views of the harbor so I was really glad I went. (see pictures) After that we walked across the Harbor Bridge (the famous one) and went to have lunch in a cute little town on the other side. Then we walked down to the harbor on the other side, took some pictures and were off to Luna Park to check out Australia's first "Coney Island" amusement park. After a quick ride around on the ferris wheel, we then we walked back across and walked all the way home...and like that my first weekend was over!

cool views of the opera house - from the inside!

<--Luna Park Ferris Wheel (Harbor Bridge in the back)

At the Harbor Bridge on the other side of Sydney