Days 387-393! In this week, I finished off my week with my parents in the city of Sydney! It was such a fantastic time!! Not only was Sydney an incredible city to explore, getting to spend a week traveling with my parents was amazing! I’ve never had the opportunity to travel abroad with just them, so this was a special treat. I’ve missed them a ton, but in just a few months I’ll be back in the US getting to spend plenty more time with them!

Continuing my time with my parents, we’re on to Thursday, January 23rd! January is whizzing by! After breakfast at home and of course a hand or two of Casino with my mother, it was time to set out for the day.

Our first stop was into the busy Paddy’s Markets in Haymarket. This market gave me instant impressions of all of the markets I went to in SE Asia. But this was full of Australia souvenirs, clothing, groceries, etc.

My parents found a couple souvenirs to get and a couple to think on and come back for too. We spent a little while weaving through the city of stalls and then started on another long walk across the city towards our next adventure of the day.

We made our way to the Royal Botanic Garden, a site home to more than 4000 species of plants. With displays of impressive trees and flowers, it’s another must see in Sydney. I may be biased though because I love botanical gardens and find it super cool that cities can have such a green space near/in them. It’s also home to a historical site, Mrs Macquarie’s Chair, which we plotted a course to go see.

This chair was carved for the governors wife at the time to overlook the sea.

Now, this was well before the building of the Sydney Opera House… so she missed a big opportunity to face the chair to see that too. But we had a nice view of it on another part of our walk.

We finished off the day with a home cooked dinner and game playing! My cousins, after hanging out with me in Thailand, taught my parents the card game Shithead. So we’ve been playing that! It’s fun to bring a game I learned traveling into the repertoire of my families game playing.

As we’re starting to tick off all of the big tourist items, our days started getting less eventful but still wonderful! We were getting to spend plenty of quality time together. It’s just as fun to enjoy a city like it’s home, just like I did in Bangkok this year. In my opinion, it makes the experience much more enjoyable!

Friday, January 24th rolled around and we started it off with a FaceTime to my sister who’s back in the US!

We’re missing one and it’s not AS impressive as our multi-timezoned FaceTimes… but how crazy is technology that we can chat face to face from so far apart!

After wrapping up our FaceTime, we went out into the city for our days adventure. Today we were headed to the Museum of Sydney!

Unlike our tour of The Rocks, which was all about the prisoners who immigrated to Australia, this museum was all about the Aboriginals, their interactions with the colonizers, and the aftermath of it all.

We spent a few hours in the museum soaking up all the information we could. It’s a very small, and free, two story museum. But there were multiple videos to watch that dove into the history of Sydney. There were also a couple galleries, one of which displayed models of all the different ships used to come to Australia from the UK.

I’d highly recommend spending a couple hours in this museum and learn all that you can about this part in the very present and major issue of how terribly the British treated the Aboriginals. The aftermath is still very present and can be seen while spending any length of time in the country. Unfortunately, I don’t come from a country that did much better…

After a heavy morning of information, it was time for lunch and another walk! We ended up finding some food to take away and eat at by the harbor we started our trip in Sydney at. And after finishing, we made our way up to Barangaroo Reserve (a small park by the water) to walk around. By this point in the day, the wind had picked up a ton which made our walk to the park easy, but we were being pushed around on our walk back home.

On our way back, we passed by an area that had a circus trapeze set up and an area with kids playing with juggling balls, pins, and other various circus juggling/balancing act equipment. Now it was definitely geared towards kids, but my mother and I couldn’t resist the urge to juggle!

For those of you who don’t know, she has taught me, my family, and a BUNCH of other people how to juggle. It’s been a while since we’ve juggled together, but we picked up the juggling balls and immediately were able to make many passes in succession just like we used to!

For dinner, we made a family favorite, tuna noodle casserole! It was a nice treat to have a familiar meal. And after dinner we made our way to a nearby pub, called the Glebe Hotel, where we enjoyed a few drinks, listening to live music, playing cards; and watching the Australian Open!

This hotel/pub was a great little local spot that had some good live music going on. The setting was exactly what we were looking for, so much so we even went back the next day.

Saturday, January 25th was a day filled with more walking… but walking to new parts of the city!

We set out into the city and walked for a while (uphill mostly) to a neighborhood, called Surry Hills, that was supposed to have a Saturday market! Emphasis on supposed to… turns out it was on the first Saturday of every month.

Thankfully, we didn’t walk all that way for nothing because there was another market just a bit further up the road in Paddington.

This market was a lot bigger than I expected! It had stalls from artists to jewelry to food with some delicious looking deserts too. One of the stands had the same selection of jewelry that you’d see in a Thai market, which I thought was interesting. Definitely making more than that Thai market seller…

We sat for a bit of a snack in the food section of the market, cooled off, and then headed to a nearby section of Sydney called the entertainment quarter.

This area reminded me of a place in the outskirts of Kansas City. This quarter was full of restaurants, bars, and activities. My guess was it was built for tourists and corporate outings like I used to do with the engineering company I worked for. There were also circus tents set up for a cirque du soleil performance.

There ALSO happened to be filming studios in this district, one of which being was for Disney. So we took a picture for my sister who works for Mickey Mouse.

Hot, tired, and ready for a nap, we walked all the way back to our apartment airbnb. We stopped by some statues of South American liberators, popped into the city market near our airbnb to get a couple souvenirs, and then showered and napped before dinner.

For dinner, we made our way back to China town and enjoyed another tasty feast of our favorite Chinese dishes.

After dinner we walked around a bit and saw a beautiful sunset and went to go check it out. We luckily caught it at the perfect time, because after this picture the spectacular colors pretty much vanished!

We walked back to the Glebe Hotel to play more cards and enjoy a few more drinks while watching the women’s Australian Open final. This concluded our last night all together in Sydney and what a fantastic week it was!

It’s been a while since I’ve gotten to spend time with my parents in person and I’m so happy I got to do it in a country I’ve grown to enjoy so much! What was even better was we got to see all the sites and enjoy quality time together just like we would’ve back home. For my first time traveling with just my parents, I really had a lovely time and I look forward to the next time I get to go on an adventure with the two of them!

Their Australia trip is nowhere near done yet, but I needed to head back to Yamba to keep working and figure out what I was going to do for my 88 days of “rural work.”

So on the morning of Sunday, January 26th, we woke up at 6:30am and headed to the train station!

Now the game playing wasn’t done yet… my mom and I play a heated card game called Casino and she currently was up 3-2 (we keep track each time we’re together on the score of who’s won). But if my memory serves me correctly, we weren’t able to finish up this game and my mom was victorious in the Australian series of our match.

With that I gave some big hugs to my parents and hopped on my train bound for Grafton, NSW. Their train to Melbourne was about 5 or 10 minutes after mine, so they headed off to theirs as well. I’ll be seeing them again in May and I’m sure it’ll feel like it’s come way sooner than expected! But I can’t wait to give them another hug in person soon!

The train ride was a solid 9 hours, in which I read pretty much the entire time. When I got to Grafton, I had to take the bus to Yamba… and crazily enough, I had the same driver as before AND he remembered me somehow.

Well it turned out he was the only driver for this route, so not that crazy that he was my driver again… but that he remembered me! It was just him, myself, and one other older man on the bus. And we all ended up chatting for a lot of the ride. The driver was curious how things were going and glad to hear I was enjoying my time in Yamba!

When I got to Yamba, I dropped my stuff off and then headed up the hill to eat some dinner! I had only had some light snacks on the train and I was hungry. The pub was pretty busy because it was Australia Day and most everyone had the following day of work off. After eating, I ended up hanging out at the pub and chatting with my coworkers who were working and hanging with some who weren’t!

Also the men’s final of the Australian Open was on and I was having a fun time watching that too!

Eventually I headed home and had a wonderful nights sleep after a very long day of travel.

For some reason, I wasn’t scheduled for work this week, except on Saturday… so on Monday, January 27th, I got a lot of to-dos done!

I did laundry, ordered groceries, and relaxed.

I took my book up to a beautiful spot in the park overlooking the ocean and enjoyed reading for a couple hours too!

The big to-do though was sorting out my “rural work” for my visa requirement. Now… I thought I had this sorted out. But the job that I thought I had seems to be falling through EVEN THOUGH it seemed like a surefire, guaranteed job. But… life loves to have twists and turns.

So now I’m a bit stressed out and have about 2 weeks to figure out a new job that will satisfy my visa requirements. Now TECHNICALLY, I don’t have to do this rural work. But, that would mean no more work holiday visas in Australia… which would be disappointing.

So, I started contacting everyone I knew to try and find one… keep your fingers crossed for me!

Tuesday, January 28th, I started my day nice and early with my first surf session post my fractured foot!! However, when I went to hop on my bike, it turned out I had a permanent flat back tire, even after filling it up with air at the nearby petrol station.

This wasn’t going to stop me! I was determined to finally get back to surfing. So… I walked my long board up the steep hill and made my way to the north side of Pippi Beach. It was doable, but quite the walk.

It was a gorgeous morning to go surfing and my foot held up great! The waves were nice and small and had plenty of time between waves to get some good paddling in out to the “lineup” (there weren’t many people out surfing).

I caught some small waves and had a blast paddling around and getting knocked around by waves again. I spent a good hour out surfing before calling it a morning, sitting on the beach, and then heading back on my walk home. My arm was pretty sore from carrying the board, but I’m glad I got out still!

I got home and relaxed until the shops opened up, because I had more errands to run. This will be TMI, so anyone squeamish with gross things should skip over the next paragraph. BUT I want to include all the good, bad, and ugly of my travel experience.

With all the walking in Sydney… I was fairly sweaty. Somewhere along the way, I got a rash which I believe is a bout of Jock Itch, Whoopie! So the first stop of the morning was to the local chemist to help combat this issue. You always have to make sure to take care of yourself (in general) but especially while traveling! It would be too easy to let something like this slide by unattended because of laziness or the go go go of traveling.

The next errand was to the bike shop to get my tire replaced.

I dropped it off and they gave me an estimate of how much it would cost. I later went to pick it up and I spent $84 on a new tire, inner tube, and front brakes which I asked him to check for me since they were super noisy.

Later in the day, I got my groceries delivered and then met up with my friends Sam, Max, and Max’s girlfriend to play tennis!!

I haven’t played tennis in forever. But I surprised myself with the skills I retained. It was a blast playing with them and I’m hoping we do it again soon! We had a gorgeous sunset while we played too!

Sam dropped me back home and I quickly showered before meeting up with him again. His dad, Simmo (my manager), was celebrating his birthday today and they invited me over for dinner with them! This family is so sweet and again showed just how wonderful they are by taking me in again.

We had homemade tacos, by Sam’s sister, and we had a nice time chatting and drinking. We then headed downstairs to the pub to continue on and listen to the live music that was being played. We played some pool too and during it I found out the Australian DJ Flume came to the pub while I was away. Not only did he come, but he somehow forgot his wallet!!

Pretty freaking crazy! It’s too bad I missed him, I enjoy his music a lot and have seen him before. But maybe he’ll be back in town to pick up his lost belongings.

To close out my week, I woke up early again on Wednesday, January 29th to go surfing again! I was pumped to finally use my bike rack and ride to the beach. But… turns out I didn’t tighten everything to the max and it was a bit of a struggle getting to the beach. I did make it and had a great morning nonetheless.

The waves this morning were small again but not the most surfable. There were a number of people out again and it was basically all of us just paddling around for a while. I had caught one after 30-40 minutes of paddling, so I went back to the beach to relax and evaluate if I wanted to keep at it.

In the end I decided to go for some more. And this time around, the wind had changed just enough for me to catch a few more good waves! I also took a couple nose dives too… still fun though!

After another 30 minutes, I was exhausted from all the paddling. So I made my way back to the sand to sit and relax. I ended up spending the first two hours of my day at the beach, which is pretty much the perfect way to start the day for me.

I then spent the rest of the day stressing about my visa and my rural work. I’ve contacted a lot of friends and people I know. Lots of them are asking around for me too… so I’m optimistic something will come up!

But, even if nothing does and I can’t work in Australia another year… there’s plenty of other places to work holiday too! I also can scuba dive pretty much anywhere in the world now too! So we shall wait and see!

I eventually posted a post to the Yamba Noticeboard Facebook group as well. It received a lot of traction and I have loads more places to reach out to now! The community here can be super helpful!!

I spent the rest of my night relaxing. There was talk about playing some more tennis today, but it didn’t pan out. Maybe tomorrow!

It was a fantastic week (outside of the job stress). As I said before, spending a week with my parents was something very special and I really needed. As great as it was to see them, it was nice to have a break from the constant bar shifts too. I’m so happy to be back surfing as well! And once I have this next job lined up, I’ll be set for the rest of my time in Australia!

See you next week!

– Elie