Day 6 - Bondi Beach/Downtown Sydney

Last night was daylight savings time for Australia -- gained an hour!

On to the more interesting stuff...

I decided to go to Bondi Beach despite the fact that the weather was overcast and windy. Apparently, "Bondi" or "Boondi" means "water breaking over rocks or noise of water breaking over rocks" in Aborigine. Not sure if you can tell from my picture but the waves were pretty giant, especially compared to my standard Pensacola Beach waves!

The beach itself was pretty small, though... maybe three times the size of Casino Beach if you take the area from the pier to Crabs (for my Pensacola readers). I was reading about Bondi Beach on this one website and found an interesting factoid about a day called "Black Sunday":

Some 35,000 people were on the beach and a large group of lifesavers were about to start a surf race when three freak waves hit the beach, sweeping hundreds of people out to sea. Lifesavers rescued 300 people. The largest mass rescue in the history of surf bathing, it confirmed the place of the lifesaver in the national imagination.

Pretty crazy, eh? There's a path that starts at Bondi and goes to the other beaches like Tamarama and the like. I went a little bit of the distance with my German friends but we turned around about halfway because we were all hungry. Remember that picture of Hungry Jacks I took? It turns out it IS Burger King... I'm not sure why they don't just call it Burger King instead of Hungry Jacks, though. Either way, here's a picture of me in the middle of the pathway.

There's a club called the Bondi Icebergs, the only licensed Winter Swimming Club in the world (whatever that means). It was started by a group of people trying to maintain their fitness during the winter in the 1920s. I read that part of their membership requirement was competing in a few "races" every Sunday, which apparently were more novelty than anything else. My host family said that they would put ice in the pool and have people swim in it!

As you can see, it's a pool right by Bondi Beach (Bondi is actually to the left of where this picture is shown). I wasn't able to get to the actual pool because there was a charge and I didn't feel like paying $3AUD for it. But for the boys, click here to check out the Bondi Beach Babes! Haha!

Later that night, the two German guys, a German girl and their Australian friend and I went out to downtown Sydney to a club called Ivy. Apparently it's pretty "posh", and it cost me $20AUD to get in (we originally thought that if we went in early we could escape the cover... wrong!). There's a few things about Sydney bars that I don't like, namely:

1. Always a minimum charge to use your credit card, and they don't really believe in keeping a tab. The minimum charge for Ivy was $30AUD. Worst part? That only got me four drinks for $36!!! I had to give two of them to my friend for paying my cover. Ugh. They apparently use cash here a lot more than I'm used to.
2. The music is TERRIBLE. I don't really know how to describe it. I actually took a video of it with my camera but it broke today so I can't show you what it was like. It was some weird mixture of techno and pop that made no sense to me. And it was the only type of music you could hear in any of the bars I went to. I miss my American hip hop! :(
3. The guys here are, to quote Snooki, "gorilla juiceheads". What I mean, for those who don't dare watch Jersey Shore, is that they are all muscled up with faux-hawks. I'm not sure how they missed the memo that faux-hawks aren't in anymore, but they did. Sometimes it looks good on the right guy but with these guys, they just looked like Jersey boys. Also they are really cheap and don't like to buy drinks. Bastards.

The night ended fairly early and this is when the disaster started. The Aussie guy that the Germans are living with decided he'd go home the same time I did, and I thought we were both getting off at the same bus stop called Burwood Station (where I would have to transition to a taxi). No, friends, he decided to stop the bus at an earlier stop  -- the entrance of his neighborhood. When I got off, I realized that this was not Burwood Station, but rather his neighborhood! The guy knew perfectly well that this was not where I wanted to go! He sent me off in a taxi, but the taxi driver WOULDN'T GO TO CABARITA (where I am staying). I have no idea why, because when I asked him about twenty times why he wouldn't, he just mumbled something. Everyone I told this to later agreed that this was very suspect of him.

The taxi driver then dropped me off in the middle of nowhere, where there wasn't even another taxi to get me. I started to get nervous because it's 2 in the morning, I'm alone and I have no idea where I am. What kind of guy does that?! I eventually found another taxi who took me home. And it all began because the original guy had me get off at the wrong stop... jerk. Either way, this event has made me unlikely to try the Sydney nightlife again because I just don't like dealing with getting home when I'm the only person going the same way.