15000 Steps

I cannot believe it has only been a week. It feels like it has been so long because we have done so much! Today was a much cooler day than it has been for the past few weeks. It was nice weather for the day we had today.

Steph and I went into the city in the morning to check out the Hillsong Church. We took a bus to a place in Sydney (Railway Square) where there was a free shuttle bus to the church. It was pretty cool. I even recognized some of the people from when I took them to the Laundromat when they stopped in Regina for a bit last Spring. After the service Stephanie and I walked about half an hour back to the Railway Square, in a pretty "dodgy" area of town (sketchy looking). We probably did the walk in less than half an hour. We didn't think any buses would be coming back to take people back to the Square. We were wrong, half way down the street a shuttle bus came to pick people up. Oh well.

We got to the Square and met up with Tami, a friend from Canada who is also here for a little while. After lunch we decided that we really wanted to check out the Queen Victoria Building (a beautiful building that has been turned into a super expensive shopping mall). We ended up coming out of a different building than we had came in and started walking down a street which we assumed was the same way to where we were headed before. After awhile of walking we decided to pull out our little handy dandy photocopied map and realized that we were going sideways. Luckily we caught it in time to back track and get to the Wynyard Station in time to catch a bus back to Narrabeen. We took the Collaroy Plateau bus. Collaroy is the suburb right next to Narrabeen. In fact, Kristin lives basically right next to Collaroy. We assumed Plateau meant the MAIN bus station in Collaroy. After another rude bus driver we got on to a bus ride full of honking and quick stops. This bus driver was rude, mean and a crazy driver. We had almost made it to Collaroy and then we started going into residential areas off the main street. We assumed it was just a bus that had more stops than the other ones. We then saw that Collaroy Plateau was a totally different place (the mountain above Collaroy). We decided we would get off the bus when the last girl did and pretend that we knew what we were doing. We started following the girl and realized we had no idea where we were going. We saw another bus driver taking a break before he went on a different bus route so I decided that we should go ask him for directions. I went up to him and asked him how to get to Collaroy (and thank god for our Canadian accents) he told us that it was about a 20-30 minute walk downhill from where we were. He then asked me what our bus driver said when we asked him. I giggled a bit (haha) and told him that we were scared of our bus driver and did not ask him because he was mean. He laughed and said, "well, if it is who I think it is, judging by the way he drove off, I would have to agree with you." That made us feel a tad bit better about the whole thing. He started to explain to us how to walk to Collaroy and then changed his mind and offered to drive us as far as he could on his route and then drop us off (where there would be a 10 minute walk down a steep hill). We were pretty excited and more than happy to take him up on his offer. This was our first good experience with a bus driver!

The title? Well my cell phone has a pedometer on it and we definitely racked up a who 15000 steps with all the walking that we did today! When we finally got home we had good laughs with Kristin who had been wondering where the heck we were. We ordered some Thai food and watched Into the Wild. Another great movie.

Tomorrow is Australia Day! Stephanie and I have bought some sweet Australian clothing for the occasion! We are looking forward to celebrating it!

Take care.