Day 280! Wow! We’re starting to close in on 300 days of traveling… so far, Australia has been off to a good start, but I’m sure it’ll keep going up from here. Today was a fairly relaxed day and it ended with a fun trivia night at a nearby bar.

I got up around 8:30am today and wasn’t able to go back to sleep. So I decided to get up and get my day going.

I went downstairs, threw my laundry in the washing machine, and got my breakfast ready.

With my new groceries, I made myself a decked out bowl of oats and some toast. It was a delicious way to kickstart my day. Also a plus for getting up early is that I didn’t have to scarf down my food.

I then took my book to the TV room and played some guitar. After I played for a bit, I read a few chapters of my book. And thennn got sucked into the moving 13 Going On 30, so I put my book down and watched that.

That movie wrapped up and my laundry was finished in the washer and dryer. So I took it up stairs to fold. When I got back down, Callum asked me if I wanted to watch more Heartstopper, so we started watching season 2.

I eventually went and made myself lunch. I had a couple tuna sandwiches and of course hummus! I’m so happy I’ve found such a cheap tub of hummus. It’s one of my favorite foods.

After lunch, and a bit more Heartstopper, I ran upstairs and grabbed my laptop. I wanted to start the process of looking for different jobs up north. Today I was looking into working or volunteering at surf camps!

I applied for a few different ones while we watched the movie Sully. This movie was about the airplane miracle crash landing in the Hudson River. Eventually, I got invested into this movie as well. So after applying to only a couple jobs, I put my focus on the movie.

I’ll work on job applications more tomorrow and the days to come!

6:30pm rolled around and it was time to head out of the hostel for the first time today. It was a chilly day out, but my friends and I had plans to head over to a nearby bar for their trivia night!

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to participate in trivia, rather than host it! And I felt a lot smarter when I had the answer sheet in front of me…

This trivia was quite hard, and it was reflected in our poor performance. But we had fun still! The first round was general knowledge, the second was a music round, and the third was a picture round.

Our general knowledge was very subpar… especially on anything Australian. Our music round was alright but there were plenty of songs we flat out didn’t know. We crushed the picture round but so did everyone else… oh well!

At the end of the trivia there was a little game where one person on each time had to guess the value of their “prizes.” My team picked me to go up and I actually ended up winning somehow. Every time you guessed the price the MC would say higher or lower and we eventually got to only one number left that made sense and the woman in front of me somehow said the wrong thing.

It then turned into a guessing game of what celebrity would do “x,” each celebrity was on a board. If I chose that celebrity, a prize was written on the back and it would be eliminated. It was a silly game and in the end I got a pill splitter… not sure why that was on there but I gave it to Callum.

I was starving by the end of trivia… I decided to put off dinner till after the trivia, but trivia ran a lot later than I thought it would. So I headed home and warmed up my meal.

Immy is working with some sort of cafe truck and it had extra pies and sausage rolls. So she brought back food for us.

After I ate the subpar, but free food, I joined some of the French travelers in a few hands of shithead. I didn’t lose today which was pretty nice! But it was a good way to round off the day!

Tomorrow I have intentions on going to the Queen Victoria’s Market, work more on job applications, and potentially hang out with a couple of other friends I made in Koh Tao.

We’ll see which (or all) of that actually happens…

– Elie