Day 357! Well, we have two countdowns going right now! There’s currently 10 days until my boot comes off and 8 days until I’ve officially been traveling for 1 entire year! A full lap around the sun. Today, I was able to FaceTime with my family and “celebrate” my dad’s birthday all across the world. I also had a night of work, which turned out to be quite a busy Tuesday night.

I woke up this morning and decided it was going to be a chill one. But, in good news, I was feeling pretty close to 100%! The cold is finally going away.

I made myself breakfast and got ready for my day… then I plopped back down in bed and started decimating chapters of the book. I’m currently over 1000 pages which means I only have a couple hundred left to go! And of course, the book has ramped up like crazy and it’s even harder to put down.

I decided to try and get a haircut this morning, so I went down to my local barbershop. It was packed and only one barber was working. I waited for about 30 minutes and still no movement so I decided I’d just come back after the holidays.

While I was waiting, I was messaging my siblings to try and find a time where we could all hop on a FaceTime to sing, an early, happy birthday to my father. Not to anyone’s surprise… it’s hard to find a time that works for everyone when we’re all on separate timezones! Especially when one of them is 16-19 hours ahead (me…)!

But funnily enough, pretty much right then was the best time! So we made it happen!!

Technology is pretty crazy! That we were able to hop on a FaceTime from all around the world is incredible. Singing a coordinated happy birthday over FaceTime, always proves to be difficult, but we managed! It’s been since my birthday in May that we’ve all been “in the same place.” But soon enough, I’ll be spending time with my parents in Sydney… and soon after that I’ll be spending time with my entire extended family celebrating my cousins wedding!

After the FaceTime, I went back to reading and then had a small lunch before heading up to work at 4pm.

Work wasn’t super busy when I showed up. But soon after clocking on, we got fairly busy… especially for a Tuesday night! I guess since tomorrow everyone has the day off, they treated it like a weekend night. We worked all the way till 11pm and were pretty much busy all the way till that point. We had a great local band playing, which made the night fly by.

To round out the night, I played some pool with my coworkers and we discussed the craziness of Boxing Day coming up. Apparently it’ll be so packed that none of us will leave the bar and we’ll just rapid fire serve drinks the entire day! We’ll see how much I end up selling.

Tomorrow, I was invited to spend Christmas with my managers family. I’m looking forward to having a family to hang out with on my day off and see how Christmas is celebrated in Australia! It sounds like we’ll finish off our day with a jam session, so I’ll very much looking forward to that!

– Elie