Noooosaaaaa

I spontaneously went on a trip up the Sunshine Coast to Noosa this past weekend with some new international kids (3 American girls and 3 Italian girls). It was only for one night, but we packed lots of activities into the hours we had there, and it was a sweet couple days. We took the train up (with bus transfers on either end), which only cost $9, and it took about 3 hours to get up there, not a bad deal. We arrived about 11AM on Saturday and I went jogging while the others were shopping around for stuff. I went through this community hang out park area that is along the water, and it was such a nice environment. All these families were there having barbecues and kids were running around and it just seemed like a really nice place to live. They have a weird futuristic park course set up too, they have machines like arm and leg presses where it uses your own weight as the resistance, kinda a step up from the Menlo Park wooden sit up benches. There were also some huge pelicans on the footpath that were intimidating, I ran past one of them and it looked like it was going to take a lunge at me, and it's a really big bird, just a bit scary. But I somehow survived, thank the heavens.

We met up after that and went hiking in the national park down the road from the hostel. It was really beautiful, the track goes out on this hill/cliff along the ocean where you can go down to different beaches or climb around on rocks. The views are amazing and it goes all the way around a point if you do the whole thing, but we only had a few hours, so we took the return loop that went through the eucalyptus forest. There are supposed to be koalas there, but we didn't spot any. We saw some huge spiders and a lizard, and a lot of bush turkeys that one of the girls was seriously afraid of and would scream every time they crossed the path, which was often. It was a good walk, probably about 14 kilometers total and all the surroundings were awesome.

I had one of the best kebabs ever for dinner, and was really really glad I didn't wait to eat with the rest of the group. They took over an hour to pick a restaurant (one frustrating thing about traveling with girls.. they are usually so indecisive and nobody will just choose something), and all the choices were crazy expensive. Noosa is a town that caters to more cashed up older tourists, and there is one food court with Subway and kebabs and stuff like that, and the rest of the area is super fancy restaurants. Somehow all the rest of them really wanted to eat at one of these places, and it really did not work out very well for them I thought. We ended up at this Italian place and they ordered weird stuff like a plate of mussels (literally a plate of shells and a piece of bread) or calamari (literally three small steamed squids and a piece of bread) for about $30 a pop, and they were still starving afterwards and wanted to go get kebabs, hilarious.

The next day we had a surf lesson that we signed up for through the hostel, and it reinforced my previous experiences with surfing, meaning that I still suck a lot at it. It was a lot of fun, I definitely always am up for being in the ocean, but wow, I'm terrible and just can't seem to get up. I can catch waves, but the standing up part really isn't happening, I think boogie boarding is the way to go, just a lot more fun in my opinion. It was a really nice day out, and after a couple hours of being tossed around in the surf, we hung out on the beach a bit and then went kayaking. The kayak hire came free with the surf lessons, and it was sweet. There are a lot of estuaries around Noosa that you can paddle around in. I saw a lot of resorts around, I didn't know the place had so many of them. It really is a huge tourist place, but it still seems like a small Aussie beach town. It was probably one of the more expensive places I've been through, but you can also hang out there cheaply. There were a few backpackers, but definitely not as much as other places I've visited. It was nice to get out of Brisbane and hang at the beach, I'm really looking forward to it heating up here so that we can at least go to the fake beach at South Bank (It's this pool with sand next to the Brisbane River) on weekends and hang out in the sun.

One last thing about the trip: the train ride home was epic, it even rivaled some of the experiences I have had on LA public transit (conversations with heroin guys, recently released prisoner substitute teachers, really loud gay people...), which is saying something. I went to go sit with my friends Dave and Sarah, because they had been at home in Noosa for the weekend and were coming back to Brisbane on the same train. There was a family right across from us that was just going off, pretty much the most dysfunctional group of people ever. The mom had no front four teeth on top or bottom, and she had two small kids and an older girl with her who was probably 16. The kids took turns having shrieking tantrums for the first half hour of the 2.5 hour trip, and she pretty much ignored them, but then the older girl got in on it. The mom refused to give her a cigarette, so she started screaming and saying things like, "I hate you! I hope you get hit by a train and die! You're a sadistic bitch!" She then called her dad and said she was getting off and coming back to where he lived. The mom then wanted the mobile phone back, because it was hers, and the daughter flipped out. They then got into an epic battle about whose SIM card it was, and the girl was punching her. The mom then went, "I don't hit any of you, but if you don't stop right now I'ma deck ya!" This all went on for the entire trip, everyone in our car was silent for awhile, but then just started talking again because these people clearly were not going to simmer and we all just sorta got used to it. The little boy was tapping on the mom at one point, and she didn't even look over, she just put her arm out and shoved him away to the next seat. It was crazy, there are for sure white trash people everywhere! It made my family's arguments seem very weak sauce.

Anyways, photos are: kayaking, friends, and extreme shots on our bushwalk through the park.