Dream Team

A 21 hour journey on a Greyhound Bus and I arrived in Sydney.

Sydney is a great city. It is very like London with interesting cafes and restaurants lining the streets, beautiful parks, big shopping centres and hip people. It's huge, sprawling over miles of streets and suburbs, and I'm really struggling to orient myself - I spent a couple of hours this morning on the same few streets trying to get back to where I'd come from, walking in circles. I even had a map and couldn't figure it out! (I blame the map!)

I am here with a 1 year work and travel visa, on a 2 week orientation package with AIFS - the American Institute for Foreign Study. There are 6 of us on the programme, all from England! From left to right, Marcus, David, me, Cara, Lauren and Jonno. Everybody is great and we get on really well. We are thinking of getting an apartment in Sydney together and staying here for Christmas and New Years - they are BIG in Sydney!!

Marcus and I have an interesting back story. We met, not in Sydney, but in LA. We were sat together on the flight from Los Angeles to Fiji! And in Fiji we just happened to stay in the same hostel for a few days at the end of my trip. He stayed in Fiji while I was in the Sunshine Coast, flying over a week later, and yet we still somehow managed to walk into our hostel here at the same moment!

Time has flown! So far we've been so busy without actually doing much! We've had a few talks about working here and travelling. We've set up bank accounts and applied for Tax File Numbers. We've done a great walking tour of the city, sat around in the sunshine, and worked on CVs, looking for jobs and apartments.

We've also done lots of socialising!! Lots of places here do free pizza and drinks evenings, before moving on to a bar. Our first night we joined the party in the Greyhound store and made friends with the guys who work there. We got free drinks all night, Lauren won a skydive, and we have been promised an incredible deal travelling up the East Coast. We are going in to see them about it today, so more on that later...

We took a day out from job hunting and headed into the sunshine with a couple of other friends. We got a ferry from Sydney Harbour, sailing past the Opera House and Harbour Bridge, and 30 minutes later arrived in Manly beach, one of the most beautiful beaches in Sydney. White sand beaches, sunshine, waves, the perfect place to chill out. Surprisingly the water was FREEZING! Much colder than the Sunshine Coast, though perhaps not as cold as England.

We've split our 2 weeks in half, and in the middle, we've booked in to another great deal. Tomorrow we are going to SURF CAMP! We travel down to Seven Mile Beach where we will live in cabins on the beach for 5 days. 2 surf lessons a day, with bbqs and camp fires and 100 people. From everything we've heard, it is going to be epic. I am ridiculously excited and acting a little bit like a kid on Christmas Eve.