Contessa Condominiums Main Beach

... like a new semester is upon me. Although give it another 48 hours and I'm sure I'll tell you otherwise! However, for my roommates these are the last few days of freedom before they have to dust off the books and calculators. So we made our last weekend of vacation an eventful one! Thursday night Matt and I normally have dinner with some of our friends, but this week we postponed it, allowing for us and Jess to cross the river for a toga party at the RE. The place was ...

... sifted through my endles MP3 collection, ready for the next part of my trip. I'm really getting into a band called Feeder at the moment. I remember always seeing their posters up and around in London but neve realised what a top notch band they are. A quiet evening and night relaxing with the Ferris's and their family antics. The plan for the next week is a few more days here on the Gold Coast and then I fly to Uluru (Ayers Rock) to hopefully find some spiritualness and tradition.

... up well here with some awesome hostels (and i mean AWESOME, some of them are flasher than a lot of hotels!), really beautiful places to see and lots of swedish, germans, english, and irish to meet en route. I really love Australia... It would be a fantastic place if it wasnt for all those australians! :P (Sorry guys, but as a Kiwi it is obligatory to give aussies some stick) Next stop: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.... Cant wait!

New Year's Eve should always go off with a Bang! Last year, Colin & Melissa celebrated in Manhattan and the year before that they succeeded in keeping warm in the frigid cold of Ottawa. This time around, they intended to ring in the New Year in Brisbane, by watching the fireworks from the top of Kangaroo Point. Unfortunately, it rained that day - In fact it rained A LOT and continued to pour down all across the coast of South East ...

... drinkin a pile of Jager Bombs! (Jager and Redbull) 25th December Felt pretty rough so we just sat around the apartment with a few beers, got pizzas and watched films. 26th December Shaun and Ewan went out to a shooting range and shot some hefty guns, at night we just had a few drinks in the apartment after Ewan and Eve had been on a pretty cool looking fair ground ride, I wis too much o a chicken though!

... day, we went for a ride (in a car rather than on a surf board) between the beaches in the area. From Kirra to Burleigh Heads to Coolangatta, with each beach as beautiful and spectacular as the last. To phrase it as an Aussie might, our trip down to the Gold Coast was "Too easy, no dramas, had a good one... Take it easy Mate - No worries." Yeah no worries... Next Up: Back to Colin's home town of Brisbane City and Melissa's first Vegemite Experience!

... First Jame-O takes us through the steps involved in surfing on a raised board in the car park. These are mounting the board, paddling and popping up onto the board. Then in the car park he puts us on a car-board, a big skate board which is really wobbly, to give us an idea on how the surfboard will feel in the water. I'm amazed how good my balance still is given how long it's been since I've been on a skateboard. Then we get our rash-shirts on, grab ...

We heard so much about the Gold Coast, especially Surfers Paradise, that we couldn't leave Brisbane without going........ Now we've seen it, we won't come back....Sorry for those of you who adored it, but with the huge skyline, we thought we were going the wrong direction (no joke), back to Brisbane.... But no, it was Surfers Paradise. We gave it the benefit of the doubt and parked up to check out ...

... stuffing my face with free food and exchanging insults and other slang from our home countries between me and the Aussie chefs. The strangest one they came out with that I've heard before is that in England if your telling a mate that you've just had sex you might say "I just shagged her" whereas in this stupid country they say "I just rooted that Sheila"! As they were so quiet they let me off at 3 instead of finsihing at 5. Friday night was ...

... recruited some friends and we took a trip to telstra stadium (at olympic park) to see the wests tigers vs. the north queensland cowboys. i guess these were the two teams in the finals last year so it was a big game. forgot the score but the wests tigers won...and that's good because they were the home team. other than that cant tell you too much about the sport...haha. it's a bit like football as they try to advance the field and the point is to get a 'try' (6 points) which is ...