Good Morning Starshine! The Earth says Hello!

WHY YES I AM ALIVE.

No, I have not ceased to exist. I am not floating through a black hole, forever without a sense of time or space, slowly shrinking and becoming a tiny particle of a being that used to exist on planet Earth.

Right now, I am like the end of Carrie, where she doesn’t actually die and her hand pops out of the grave because she’s ready to come back and unleash her evil powers on all the other awful high schools and insane mothers of the world. Or was that a dream sequence? I don’t remember. I just remember Carrie’s hand popping out the grave (or was it her mom’s hand?) and that was the only time in the movie where I jumped out of my seat.

Ah HA! It was a dream sequence:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAXU_7EyXFE

You see, you, dear readers, are the lady with the super perm in the white dress, who have come to my grave, thinking I am dead and gone, to leave me some flowers because you actually thought I was a nice person even though I burned my fellow high school students alive at prom, but SHAZAAM!! Can’t get rid of me that easily! Hahahahahaha!!!! Now I haunt your dreams and you will probably be stuck in a mental hospital for the rest of your life! Yeah. That's how my blog is.

Anyway, I am going to go through these past two weeks very vaguely because there is sooooo much to cover, but if you would like a more detailed account of the wonderful things I have been doing, I would like to direct you to my mom’s blog, since she actually wrote down everything we did and described it the way you guys like descriptions, as in super detailed. Gooooooooo here!

http://susangoingtoaustralia.blogspot.com/

Well I have a TON of stuff to cover. Ok. Here goes.

First of all, while my mom was here, she and I ate SO MUCH FOOD. AND IT WAS ALL DELICIOUS. I got sooooo spoiled. I went to dinner at Queens last night, like I would normally, but it was just so bad compared to what I’ve been having, it was hard to eat it. I ate about half, and then I was like… that’s all I need. The best places for me were Coda and MoVida. They were both sort of fancy places, like you are supposed to drink wine there and have little portions and they were both expensive, but they were both soooooooooooo good. Coda was my favorite I think. Coda was best overall, to me, but MoVida had an AMAZING beef cheek dish and AMAZING potatoes with a spicy sauce. Mmmm the potatoes were soooooooooooo goooooooooood. AGH. But Coda had these crispy rice papers rolls that I LOVED and a broccolini dish and a lettuce dish that I also adored. And maybe I enjoyed the experience more. Mom and I sat at the bar and got to get advice from the super attractive bartender and the people sitting on either side of us that could recommend stuff to us. Phew, I will have to put in pictures. The food was completely amazing.

Oh, I also had eggs Florentine for the first time. WHY DIDN’T ANYONE TELL ME EGGS FLORENTINE WAS SO GOOD?!? Jeebus, it was delicious. I had it in Apollo Bay, a tiny town along the Great Ocean Road.

Oh, and Mom and I also got hot chocolate at this one place called Chokolait that only serves chocolate, of course, that was A-MAZE-ING. It was pretty much melted Belgian milk chocolate that you could drink. So so so so good.

And now I’m going to have to get used to regular food again. Sighhhh. :(

So while Mom was here, I did tons of things. I played chicks footy for Queens!!! That was awesome. I’ll have to put pictures of that too.

Oh snap! Well now’s a good time to tell you I guess. The other night, I was trying to get rid of old files on my computer because I am running out of space to upload pictures and stuff, so I was going through pictures and word documents and downloads, putting them in trash so I could delete them forever. And I guess I selected my iPhoto library, which means absolutely all the pictures on my computer, and I put it in trash somehow, and I emptied my trash. Emptying my trash means I no longer have the file anymore. It is off somewhere in cyberspace, with no label saying it is a picture file or anything, it is dead and gone. At first, I freaked the eff out. I cried and cried and searched all over my computer for some undo button, or some hidden place where my pictures may still be stored, but there was no hope. I don’t know how I did it, I cannot believe I deleted them, and I am hitting myself for not checking the trash before deleting everything in it. So I looked into data recovery software, and I went to a couple computer stores the next day to ask their opinion, and there are services you can get to have them recover your files, but it wasn’t guaranteed that you could get them back and it cost a lot. I would also need an external hard drive, because now I am freaking out about having important things stored on my computer.
But now, I am optimistic and I have come to terms with it. I definitely do not have a couple hundred dollars to spend on getting the pictures back, so I’m not going to. Most of them are on facebook, and I have all mom’s pictures from her trip, so I think I will be ok. But still… I’m so upset with myself that I did that. I have lost all the ones I had of Cleo, my dog, or Kitty, that I didn’t put on facebook, and I don’t have the pictures from chicks’ footy, some of which were really great because I was covered in mud and looked pretty bad ass. Ugh, I don’t want to think about it though. Moving on.

Mom and I went to a fashion show for Melbourne fashion week! That was cool. Tickets were only twenty bucks, and we sat up above on a balcony. We saw designs made by RMIT students, which is a local university. It was pretty legit too. Not cheesy amateur designs. Very groovy.

Then we went to the ZOO!!!! Yesssss, I love the zoo! As you all know. And this time, I got to see the OTTERS!!!!! I do believe they are the cutest creatures in existence. Aaaaaaaaaand they have officially replaced owls as my favorite animal. I know, I know, crazytown. I do love owls, but otters are just so amazing and adorable and they squeak and groom each other and UGH they are so cuuuute! And fun-loving. I want to be like them. And we got to see seals, and we saw a lot more of them than I did the first time, which was great. We ran out of time though, because the zoo closed at 5 or something, so we didn’t hit up the entire zoo.



Mom and I also went to St. Kilda’s, which is a beachy area in a bay or a port or something. That was very pretty. Quite cold though, because it’s still winter and it’s super windy by the ocean. Oh, we went to this great place for food though. I think it was called the Grapevine. They just had great atmosphere and reeeally tasty steak. I would certainly go back there.



Then last Friday, mom and I went to Phillip Island for the Penguin Parade!!! AHHHHHHHHHH IT WAS SO AMAZING. We went to a farm part of the island, where they had wallabies, and we went to the koala conservatory, where there were only like three sleeping boring koalas hangin’ out, but then we went to see the penguins. It was so adorable!!!! They are so adorable!!! Mom and I paid for extra good seating, so we got to be about seven feet from the penguins and they swam ashore and walked up to the their homes. It was so cool. There are something like 60,000 penguins that live in the island, and each night tons of them swim ashore to rest and recuperate from fishing and so they can take care of their mates or feed their kids. Awwwwww!!!! There was one really old penguin named Harry who had a nest right off the shore, a beachfront home. Hee hee. It was such a great experience. We couldn’t take any pictures, though. Sorry!

Wallabies!

The koalas were super disappointing. They were just balls of fur hangin' out in trees. :/

Haha, Mom got a little angry. ;)

Then last Saturday, a week ago today, mom and I got on a train to Ballarat to then rent a car and drive to the Grampians, an immense, beautiful mountain range not far from Melbourne. Mom and I had some insane luck. We were running late (my fault, of course, I am always late) and we couldn’t find out where to buy tickets for the train, but it was leaving in two minutes, but I asked a man working there about it and he was like, “BUY THEM ON THE TRAIN YOU CRAZY AMERICAN!! GO GO GO!!!” and I was like, we can do that? So mom and I sprinted to the train, the last ones on, and it took off. If we hadn’t made it, we would have had to wait an hour and a half for the next one. Yesssss!

But then, when we got to Ballarat, the car rental place wasn’t actually open, or something, but we called the office number and the lady was like, “oh, you need a car? I’ll come over now” and she just drove in to open the office. It was weird. It was like they still rent out cars on Saturday, but they don’t open the office…? But luckily, we got a car. For a while, I thought we would be stuck in Ballarat. Blech. There would have gone our weekend!

We drove to the Grampians to stay at Hall’s Gap at the YHA hostel. Mom drove the whole time! On the left side of the road and the right side of the car! And she was very good at that. I don’t think I ever feared for my life, haha.

THE GRAMPIANS OHHHHH SNAP.

They were amazing. Here are pictures. Like. Oh. My. God. It was like I was above the earth looking down at it. Such an amazing feeling. Oh and we went to Mackenzie Falls. Beautiful. I want to go back.





HAHA BEST SIGN EVER!!!!

















Moving on!

Driving down to the Great Ocean Road, mom and I start the road in Warrnambool, where there is supposed to be good whale watching. On the way there, I drove a little!!!! Mwahahaha! Only for like, half an hour, though, I think. Still, it was great. Now I can say I’ve driven in Australia!! In Warrnambool, we didn’t see any whales, but we did see a beautiful beach.

Then we decided to drive to the Twelve Apostles and see them when the sun sets. Oh my God, it was life changing. I always thought the world was beautiful and amazing, because it does such amazing things, but I have never seen anything like this with my own eyes.











That night, we drove to Apollo Bay to stay in a hotel for the night and get dinner. We ended up getting dinner at a very good restaurant where we got garlic and cheese pizza and very yummy stir fry veggies, and our waitress was AMAZING. I know that sounds weird, but we ended up talking about tons of stuff. Her name was Sinead, (I know! An actually person named Sinead other than Sinead O’Connor!!) and she was British and travelling everywhere and just living and working wherever she wanted. She was nineteen. And she had been EVERYWHERE. I think she said Thailand, Lau, Vietnam, all over Australia, New Zealand, and of course Europe, because she’s from there. I was speechless. I want to be just like her, and she’s a year younger than me. She gave me her email address, so I am going to email her about what to do in New Zealand. She said it was the most amazing place, and so beautiful. I cannot emphasize enough how inspired I was by her.

The next day, Mom and I drove down the Great Ocean Road to stop sometimes but mostly just take in the ocean. We stopped once to see a waterfall, which turned out to be a bit of a hike away, but it was very pretty. We also stopped in Torquay, I think it was, to try to see surfers and get fish and chips. The surfers we saw seemed like they were still learning, but there were a ton of them. A lot of teens, I think. And the fish and chips were GREAT of course.

And after that, we drove back to Ballarat, because we needed to drop the car off there, and then took the train back to Melbourne. We ended up not having to pay for the car for that day, and we had luck on our side yet again when the train was set to leave ten minutes after we got to the station.

And that was the Weekend of Awesome.

Pretty cool, huh? Yeah, I think so.

We got back Monday night, I was completely wiped out, and somehow I still wanted to go to Turf with Olivia. Ha. Not much story there. I got a couple glasses of one dollar champagne, Olivia was flirting with this guy most of the night, so I was sort of just hangin’ out. Some of the Newman girls I had hung out with before along with Andrea came later, but they weren’t very fun. Luckily, Olivia didn’t want to stay long, so we walked back to Queens to snack on crackers with jam and watch an episode of Friends before I passed out in bed. I have been so permanently tired lately. So so much that I feel I need to do.

Tuesday to Thursday, mom and I didn’t do too much. We went to Queen Victoria Market and GPO, this big shopping center that used to be the post office. Wednesday night was the night we went to MoVida. I am still recovering from that. My meals are so much smaller now, because I ate so much at MoVida. And that was three days ago haha. It was a bad idea to get that second beef cheek, mom!

Thursday night, I stayed with Mom at her hotel. She was leaving in the morning, so we thought that was the best idea.

And I will write another post for yesterday and today! A detailed one! Because I know you guys like those more. And this post is already ginormous. I hope my absence wasn’t too hard for you guys! Hee hee. I love and miss everyone a TON!!! Xoxoxo!