a final entry

I arrived in Sydney after dark and was pleasantly surprised at how close my host lived to the airport. We met at the train station and walked back to her apartment in the Alexandria neighborhood of Sydney. I spent my time hanging out with Ali and her friends or wandering the city.

First stop - Sydney Opera House. Both exterior and interior of the building were incredible, and the overall area is beautiful... right on the water, next to a bridge, botanical gardens. Really a nice place. Here are some photos:



From there I walked through the botanical gardens. Strange plants, huge bats (flying foxes?) and some pretty creepy spiders:





Also did the coastal walk from Bondi to Coogee Beach. Bondi was kinda of busy and touristy but a very nice beach nonetheless. I did hear more North American accents here than anywhere else on my trip. Most of them didn't have Canadian flag patches on their backpacks, so I will just assume they were from the US.

The walk itself was not too crowded and very scenic:







From there I left for Fiji. This ended up being more of an extended layover than part of the vacation. It was raining the entire time I was there and I didn't even go to the beach yet alone any of the other islands. My host there was a nice guy and had a couple of other couchsurfers staying there. One guy, Raymond, had actually come from Portland where he had spent 1/2 his life. He was returning to Fiji (where he was born) and waiting for his parents to arrive. He had a lot of tattoos, one that he had given himself, and was really into it. Had made some *sketchy* tattoo gun out of a little battery powered motor, a needle, and bic pen. He seemed like kind of a tough guy until he started talking about how into Dungeons and dragons he was.

There is another German guy staying at this place who didn't know about D&D, so Raymond explained:

"Aw dogg you dun know about Dungeons and Draggons? You know what a role playing game is? Aw DOGG?!?! Yo check it out...it's like .... "

This went on for like 10 minutes. The German guy couldn't really understand at first, so Raymond said:

"No? A'ight.. you seen Lord of the Rings?"

German guy: "Vel, no but I read them a ven I vas a teenaga."

Raymond: "Alright so you know how Gandolph is like, the wizzard right? And The dwarf... they's like characters knowm'saying?"

Entertaining at the very least. I tried to video tape some of it but it didn't really work. Here's a picture:



Nadi itself was a very poor city. I was definitely singled out for being white and asked to come inside of everyone's shop for a good deal.

So I stayed for 2 days and then got on a plane. only 9h45m flight to LAX. Not horrible. And now I'm back in Portland, going back to work on Monday. Hope you all enjoyed my trip as much as I did.