Day 343! Another, currently, normal day in Yamba. This fractured foot is causing these days to be pretty mundane… but it’s important to be resting my foot and hopefully cause a speedy recovery. Even though it was another lazy day, I still got up to plenty of fun!

After yet another late night, it was time to sleep in some more. But, a late night means I’m having fun with friends, so that’s worth a little sleep deprivation!

To combat this, I slept in till about 10am. I kept snoozing my alarm and decided to just keep going till I didn’t feel tired anymore. When I finally decided to get up, the sun was well up and shining… however, I could see the clouds slowly rolling in for another storm.

I made myself breakfast and after I finished, I received an important phone call. It was from the fracture clinic, calling about paying my invoice. I’ve been waiting for this to happen but I assumed it would’ve been an email…

I ended up having to bank transfer the hospital because their card reader was down. It seemed a little bit sketchy at first but all things were in order and it was all official. But because of this phone call, I was now able to submit another claim to Safteywing (my cheap travel insurance).

Now we get to wait and see if this process goes as smoothly as the last! If it does, all the months I’ve spent on it will be starting to pay off! Thankfully, since I’m in a country with universal healthcare, it’s very affordable still, even if insurance decided not to cover it.

But I’m optimistic that it’ll go smoothly again!

For the rest of the morning I read a bunch more of Oathbringer, the third book of the Stormlight Archive series. To break up my reading, I played guitar for an hour jamming away on the acoustic.

But then I went right back to reading until I had a late lunch.

And… after lunch at 2:30pm… I read some more!

But finally it was time for work, so I set out up the hill for my shift. It was drizzling when I left and by this point the sun was hidden by the many rain clouds in the sky. Thankfully it didn’t fully start coming down till well into my shift.

Work today was originally scheduled from 4pm-11pm… but it was insanely slow. So much so I was struggling to find things to make me look busy because I had done all the regular tasks (such as, cleaning fridges, wiping surfaces, cutting limes/lemons, etc.).

Thankfully I had good coworkers to spend the hours with and we did plenty of chatting. I even met a guy from the US from Boston and a nice family from Canada. A little North America representation here in Yamba..

8pm rolled around and I took my break, since my shift was scheduled for over 6 hours. For dinner, I decided to get a Thai wagyu beef salad. I’ve heard good things about the wagyu at the hotel and since it’s half off while working, I thought why not try.

This was the best thing I’ve had on our menu yet! Not only was having wagyu a wonderful treat, but this salad had such a familiar flavor to it. It reminded me a ton of one of my favorite Thai/Laos dishes, Laab! But with much higher quality meat. It was such a pleasant surprise and brought back a flash of wonderful memories from my time in SE Asia. Specifically, when I was in Bangkok with Nico and he introduced me to it. Also the many times I ate the dish in Koh Tao.

Unfortunately, because of how slow it was, when I finished eating my manager told me to clock out. So I had a beer with his son Paddy and then we decided to sneak another jam in before calling it a night!

We ended up jamming for about 1.5 hours, him, Bella, and myself. It was a great way to finish off the day! And by the time we finished, it was starting to rain again.

I hope the sunny days come back soon, especially once my foot is healed! Maybe the weather’s just sad I can’t get out and surf…

It was another lazy morning and night of work in this cozy town of Yamba. I have a few more weeks of days like this before I can get back to the excitement of enjoying the beach and riding the waves! But I’ll try and stay patient!

– Elie