Melbourne Comedy Festival

Melbourne Comedy Festival is one the more famous international comedy festivals. On Dylan's recommendation, I dragged Andy, Sophie and Chris to see the Irish comedy rock band -Dead Cat Bounce. They were absolutely brilliant! We were all in stitches the entire show! I bought a cd at the end and mentioned to them that I was friends with the Brother's Streep (Dyl and Simon) - who had met them at the Edinburgh comedy festival- they were like "oh yeah, those guys are awesome".

They played at the famous Spiegeltent in Melbourne (awesomely cool venue)

Road trippin'

So over the long Easter weekend (we got 5 days off cos of Anzac day plus the Easter days) eight of us piled into to cars and began our road trip along the Great Ocean Road.

This road is pretty famous in Australia- it runs along the coast from Melbourne towards Adelaide and is reeeeaaally windy but very beautiful. We stayed in a little house in Apollo Bay- one of the little beach/surf towns along the coast. We bonded over drinking games and food (obviously). On Easter Sunday, Jenna and I got up before everyone else and hid chocolate eggs all over the garden. Later on Luke supervised the cooking of a delicious pork roast - yum.

We drove a bit further inland off the road to the Otway National Park where we did the famous Otway Fly walk in the tree-tops. It was absolutely stunning walking up in the trees looking down on the ferns and little rivers.

We also did a forest walk where there were these awesome dinosaurs everywhere (apparently this is where these dinosaurs used to roam). I bonded with the velociraptors :)

Another day was spent driving further up the Great Ocean road to see the Twelve Apostles

                                                             Loch Ard Gorge

                                                    and London Bridge

It was an awesome awesome weekend away with some really great people :) great success!

                                            Jenna, Alex, Gavin, Andy, Mel, Luke and Chris

Random Swiss guys and suprise house parties!

So living with three kiwi's is pretty awesome. This has resulted in me meeting heaps of these awesome people :) These kids sure do know how to party though- I often find myself coming home to a house full of people drinking goon (box wine- very classy) and playing some epic (said in kiwi accent please) drinking games! Always fun and pretty much unavoidable.

We had a guest not long ago, Sean for Switzerland. The boys met him at the hostel they stayed at when we first arrived in Melbs. I met him once at that point too- he's pretty awesome and crazy as anything. He was away travelling for a bit but came back to Melbs and stayed with us for a week. He ended up staying in the lounge...which happens to be my room...so I found myself sharing a sofa bed with Sean the Swiss guy, good times :) one way to make new friends!

Healesville Animal Sanctuary

Being in Australia I figured I should really see some of the strange animals the Aussies go on about...so Alex, Jenna and I drove out to the Healesville Animal Sanctuary out in the country and spent the day there wandering around learning about wombats, echidna, Tasmanian devils, kangaroo's, wallabies, koala's and platypus. It was pretty awesome. Florence the wombat was my favourite, although the platypus put on a great show, doing backflips and stuff. The tassy devil was a bit crazy and just ran around this tree for like 20mins...scary creature. I have yet to see these animals in the wild- although I have seen some cool birds flying around.

Sydney Slickers

Alex and I embarked on an epic weekend away to Sydney a couplde of weekends ago. It was a truly fantastic weekend and we managed to fit so much in just a couple of days!
We stayed with my dear friend and husband,  Lars Garo, is just so much fun and a super host :) (thanks Larsy). So we stayed in his little room in Glebe- the uni student suburb, all artsy and vibey.

Al and I arrived early Saturday morning to be picked up by Lars at the airport. We enjoyed some delicious  breakfast in the Sydney sun (SO hot) and then made our way to the famous Bondi Beach. Beautiful beach, full of tourists! I had a swim in the lovely blue water and then Ally and I bought bikini's (they were on special ok! $10!! thats pretty awesome).

We spent Saturday afternoon wondering aroung the Glebe markets looking at vintage clothes, stunning jewellry and artwork and tasty food.

Saturday night involved some thai for dinner and happy hour cocktails at the Different Drummer then more drinks at the Opera Bar at the Sydney Opera House. After hours of ridiculous but very entertaining conversation and changing tables about 300 times we made our way to a club called the Chinese Laundry- although we were convinced it was in fact called the Japanese Washingmachine! What a fantastic night drinking fancy cocktails, frangelico and plenty of tequila, getting lost in a club, playing the slapping game with random dreaded boys and meeting a Morroccan on the way home :)

Sunday included a walk around the city, a ferry ride around the harbour and lunch at Darling Harbour. Sight-seeing involved the Sydney Opera house, the Harbour bridge and the many great walls of China (personal joke...). Lars and I had some wedding photo's which was nice :)

Monday morning meant a walk down St George Street (where, much to lars's shock and horror, ally bought some Ugg boots) and a stroll through the Botanical Gardens, folloed by brunch in a little cafe where the guy working there thought Alex and I were bunking school! haha do we really look that young?!

We then took a road trip to the Blue Mountains where the mountains actually look blue.We stopped in the town of Katoomba for a pie (or three if you're Lars) and then made our way to see the Three Sisters - some rocks that have "great spiritual significance"

We did an awesome hike down the Wentworth Falls- absolutely stunning! Was a pretty steep walk up some hectic stairs and ladders- made very amusing by good old gramps (aka Alex).

So came to an end the Sydney experience! Thanks Ally and Lars for such a fantastic time :)

Family Outing :)

One lovely Sunday I was invited to go on a family outing with Alex, Jenna, their mum and Tony. We drove along the Mornington peninsula through all the really nice little seaside/beach holiday towns. We stopped for lunch and a walk at Portsea and made sure that we stopped in Sorrento for a famous vanilla slice. delicious :)

Frankston

This is where Alex and her family live. It's at the end of the train line and has a bit of a bad rep amongst Melbournians (is that the right term?!). They're all like "aaaah you're from FRANKSton...oooh..." and "ooh I wouldn't catch a train there by myself", its rather amusing.

The boys and I ventured there for a night out with Alex and Jenna- to their local, Davey's. The boys didn't get in cos they didn't have their passports (epic fail) which is silly cos in the city their kiwi drivers licence's always get them in...so they run off into the night together.The girls make me all worried about them getting beaten up so I follow them only to be told that "Emma, I'm rom Ashburton..I'll be fine.I know how to fight". Bearing in mind that Ashburton is one of the smallest little towns in New Zealand and i could probably beat Chris up if I wanted too...anyway, I left them and went to enjoy my night drinking cheap vodka rasberry's thanks to Jenna's friend who works at the bar and dancing to Katy Perry.

We eventually met up with the boys in McDonalds for a late night feed where we discover that they managed to get into this other bar and somehow get free drinks all night. Oh and Andy got punched in the face. By a girl. Hahahaha.

Heaven.

So Ben&Jerry's is now available in Australia.
Alex and I indulged in this guilty pleasure.
And it was amazing.

FUTURE

Alex, Andy, Chris and I went to the Future Music Festival on the 11th March. Best day everrrrrrr.

We made an epic punch (with LOTS of red bull in it) and started drinking that around 9am...got to the festival round 11 I think. We saw heaps of acts- lots of Aussie dj's at the beginning, one was playing at a foam party place so we got covered in foam and we danced around knee deep in the stuff- fun.

Alex and I rocked out to Ke$sha in a big way (she was shocking live, as expected- but nonetheless we enjoyed singing to every song).

Dizzee rascal was pretty freaking awesome and MGMT were truly amazing- I think they sound better live than recorded...if thats possble.

The highlight act was by far Pendulum. They were mind-blowingly amazing and we had the most insane time partying to them in the biggest crowd I have ever been a part of.

We finished the night off in the slient disco. This may be the coolest party I have ever been too- you enter this tent and its queit but everyone has a pair of headphones on. There were two channels on the headphones with two dj's, one on each channel. So everyone is going crazy to different tunes but all together! It was so so much fun!

New Job.

Its been about a month now that I have been working for The Smart Group doing customer service calls for an energy company called Simply Energy.
I loved my other job and found it hard to leave but working solely on commission was pretty stressful and made it hard to budget so I moved on to a less exciting but way more stable job.
I work in a call centre doing courtesy calls for new Simply Energy customers. In Australia they have loads of energy providers and so there is heaps of competition which means that we always have specials offers on and are constantly trying to win other providers customers. Its an easy job, rather repitive and mind numbingly boring most of the time but its awesome to have a guarunteed paycheck at the end of every week :)
Chris works with me and keeps me sane...sort of. So yeah, I'll be there for a while until I've saved enough to do some epic travelling around this massive country!

Best Coffee in the World.

Apparently Melbourne is the place to get good coffee, it has a reputation for being a coffee-drinking city and thus for producing some great coffee drinks. This is true...BUT the best coffee I have ever had the pleasure of drinking, I found in Tasmania.
It was a cold day and Katie and I needed to warm up and get some energy- lucky we were working right next to the coffee shop where, we learned, the oldest coffee roaster (this lady is 102 years old) in the Southern hemisphere was at work creating the most delicious coffee known to humankind.
By the end of the day Katie and I were shaking rather a lot....but its hard not to overdose on latte's from this place!

Tasmania

I went on a trip to Tasmania with work (Taipan). A bunch of us were selected to go there for a week to work for the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) in order to raise support, awareness and of course money for them. They're a really great organisation committed to conserving the amazing Australian environment. We were particularly campaigning against the logging of Tassy's ancient forests.
It was an awesome week of bonding with some great people (we had some Aussies, a Canadian, a Russian, a pom, a Scot and me) in a small house in Hobart - the biggest city in Tassy.
We didn't see much of Tasmania as we worked the whole time but from what I did see I decided I have to go back- its so so stunning! Just super cold brrrrrr it even snowed on the mountains while we were there!

So the week was fun and ended with a bit of excitement- aka a wee party and me ending up in hospital after attempting to climb the fence to get home...ouch.

                               The crew. Rosie, Gav, me, Trav, Katie, Ellie, Shaun, Ksenia and Faith.

                                         I love these girls- Katie (from Canada) and Faith (Aussie)

                                                   Shaun and Katie at work!

                                              My leg! 21 stitches....fun times!

So...

I've been pretty bad at this blog thing...oops. Not really sure what to write about now, it feels like there's just too much! So I think I'll just post random things that I remember as I go....

I went to a rugby game with Alex at the AAMI Stadium in Melbourne. We watched the Sharks beat the Melbourne Rebels- it felt good. I was rpoudly wearing my SA rugby jersey and loved spotting all the other Saffer's in their Sharks tops!