Australia Trip

Yeah so we've been having problems with blogger and i've been lazy, but I feel like posting now so whoever's still reading, here's an update.




School was okay this week, classes for me are one right after the other and they're situated across the fucking campus so I always have to run. And you know those teachers who take all the fucking time to finish the class. You know who I'm talking about, the type that don't have a freakin watch so they rely on their internal clock memories to determine when the class is over, and they always finish at 11:59 and 32 seconds, when the class ends at 12, so I have to run my ass off to get to the next class. Plus these teachers sometimes say, "for those of you that would like to hear, there was this story about..." which means "I know some of you have to go to your classes, but the others, here's whats gonna be on the final exam". Fucking assholes. Anyways I get to my next class where I'm supposed to hand-in an assignment, but the TA isnt due for another hour, just great, took 30 mins to find the fucking building. I love asking for directions here, "How do I get to the Storie Dixon Building?", "Oh... thats easy, go in there, go up the stairs, turn left, then go down the hall, hop on your left leg and run three times around the security guard, then climb the wall on your left, when you're 73.2 degrees with the vertical axis of gravity, swing to your left through the crack and take off your clothes. Drop your clothes in the air sucking tube and jump in the water, swim across and into the drainage pipes, come out the other end, dry yourself off, grab your clothes, go down the reverse escalator and you'll come to room U440". "WHAT THE FUCK? IS THERE AN EASIER WAY?". "Nope, I think that's the easiest one.....there's another way but you need a second-degree skydiving license".

But anyways, besides for how it's impossible to find a class, we went to a couple of parties during the week at Manning Bar and actually made friends with the bouncer, we listened to some of his BS stories and nodded and laughed, no matter how racist, unethical or boring. So we should be set for going into parties easily now. More and more of the chinese people in this hotel are speaking to me and trying to be my friends, but I don't understand what language they're speaking half the time. What is it about me that attracts asians? Ay Mike Yee?

Among other things, we went to Bondi beach which was really gorgeous. We saw some sick surfers there and I was a bit jealous, I want to go surfing again really badly. But I love how some of you people from Montreal exagerrated about Bondi beach saying "Oh yeah there are Israelis everywhere, you can find kosher food easily". Bullshit. We couldn't find a kosher restaurant next to the beach, I had to google map it when we got back and it's like 15 min from the beach and hidden next to "Ali Babas", so what the fuck? But anyways on our way back we stopped at Coles at Bondi Junction and I bought a lot of Kosher meat, only to find out the expiry date for all of it is in 2 days, so I have to somehow eat 10 pounds of meat by then.

The gym's getting pretty good, I can almost do 1 lap in the pool, and I realized that you have to tighten the water goggles to the point of your eyes almost popping out to not get water into them. That's what I get for being jewish and buying the $3.99 pair. Life is getting so much better, I'm really enjoying myself. Ever since we started taking trains (which are 3 floors by the way) and going to different places, I'm enjoying life here a lot more. The heat is just amazing and I hope it lasts for a long time.

We went to the Opera house also which was very nice and took a boat tour. They showed us where the Zoo is, it's about $25 a day per person to go, so I think we're gonna go sometime this week or next week and finally take pictures of kangaroos and koalas. Although I heard koalas here are carnivores and eat little human babies, so I'm a bit scared of that.




We met a lot of annoying people on this trip, among them:
1) Woman in line at Manning Bar that kept blowing bubbles with her "Magical" soap water, I just wanted to make her swallow that bottle.
2) Digital Signal Processing teacher who is pakistani and we don't understand what he's saying, ever!
3) The washing machine that only takes exact change. One $2 coin and two 20c coins, WHAT THE FUCK?

Check out our pictures in Photo Album #3 on the top left of this page.

This is Gaby signing out as usual, with a finished beer.

- Gaby

To summarize the past 3 days you missed, we went to a party and stood in line for 2 hours, then when we got in we actually had to wait in line again to go upstairs (this was a 3 floor party). That was a fucking annoying night, but once we got into the place the DJ was really good. What sucked is that we walked to the Bottle Shop to pre-drink and each had a Jack Daniels + Coke mix and some Bourbon and Gingerale mix, so I was pretty drunk waiting in line, and by the time we got to the door I was completely sober. So we had to drink some beer to get back into party mode. But all in all that party was sick, if we had bought tickets in advance we wouldn't have waited in line.




Leor bought his guitar and has been playing it in the room ever since. He's really good, he knows how to play some relaxing songs. Sometimes when he's hungry he starts playing Blues songs about how he needs food, it's enough to bring tears even to my eyes.




I've been going to the gym all week, swimming every second day and working out every other day. The gym is actually the worst gym i've ever been to in my life. Not only do they not have a lot of machines, but they have duplicates of the shitty machines, so that when you walk in and you see 8 machines, there are acually only 4 and they're all shitty. I have to workout using free weights for everything. Oh and you should see the line-ups to get onto the machine. I had to flash my biceps like 8 times in line to make the little chinese people in front of me give up on working out, knowing they could never reach that level. *cough*

But out of all the days on this trip, I think today was the worst one for me. We woke up at 6am, really happy to go surfing, and the day began with a simple oil burn on the stove, ok, not so bad, at the time it killed and it was hurting all the way to the beach but I was putting ice on it. Finally we get to the beach and i'm all happy and ready to go out surfing.




And for the first 30 minutes I was in heaven, I caught 3 huge waves and was able to ride them for such a long time, it seemed too good to last. And it was. Because when I headed out after 30 minutes, I suddenly felt the sharpest stinging pain I've ever felt in my life on my arm. I lift my arm and I had these blue dots over a line on my arm, I just got stung by a Bluebottle:




Thats what those little fuckers look like, and they float on top of the water, but because of their color you can't see them. Once you hit one it pops and these blue needles fly out and hit whatever's near it. So while my arm is killing I yell to Josh to ask him what to do, and while I'm yelling, needles hit the 4 fingers on my left hand and at that point I'm in so much pain that I'm about to go crazy. They say getting stung on your fingers is one of the worst. I got back onto shore luckily without getting stung anymore and rubbed the blue needles off of my skin but I could feel my arm inflaming and killing. I ran to the First Aid booth and they gave me ice to put on it and told me to take a cold shower. After 25 minutes of severe pain, the ice had melted and I went back to get more but they wouldn't give me more ice. He said "bear with it for the next 20 minutes". Like, this wasn't even something medical, he just didn't want to use up all the ice, i'm sure he wanted to keep his ice cream cold in the freezer or the body parts from the last whore he probably raped and killed. At that point I was just pissed off and I just sat on the beach for 20 minutes trying to pass the pain. Finally the pain subsided to the level of an oil burn (which is still really bad but I was able to tolerate it at that point). We stuck around the beach for a bit, some of the guys we went with were doing some skateboard tricks at the roller park and then we headed back. When we got to the room we took a picture of the one on my arm:




Those dots on the left in a straight line are where the needles went in, you can see there are a bunch of them, at this point it doesn't hurt much, it's just itchy like poison ivy.

We paid a months rent and went to the broadway shopping centre to pick up some food. It's funny how we came out with 3 bags of junk food and a case of 24 beers, thats nourishment right there. But we grabbed 1 milk and eggs also so I guess we'll be able to have breakfast tomorrow morning. It was a lot of shit to carry and Leor stole one of those hand baskets that you shop with so that he could carry it back home. So we stole a shopping cart and a basket so far, nice. Tomorrow we'll go back and buy some real food but for now i'm munching on jellies thinking "Ahhh, this is the life".

The longest day of school ever.

We woke up early in the morning to add a course, we figure if we add Introduction to Sociology then we can drop it up until March 17th, we're trying to replace Economic Geography because it's one of the most boring classes i've ever been to in my life. So we added the course and switched the sections at Madsen building and headed to our first class, Digital Signal Processing. I'm actually pretty happy with the course because it's just like Signals and Systems 1 at McGill which I already took and the teacher looks chill. School is different here, instead of 2-3 lectures per week we have one 2 hour lecture and a tutorial (which are bullshit, you don't have to attend). So basically I only have this class once a week. Right after class, we ran to our Jewish History class, Palestine: Roman rule to Islam. It looks pretty interesting and the past final exam had questions like "What are tzitzit?", "What is a mitzva?", so I don't think it's gonna be very hard. The prof in that class was very bubbly though, you know what I mean? She was always smiling and giggling like one of those people who you think they love their lives but probably go home suicidal and beat their kids. So yeah we sat through that class for 2 hours with a break in the middle. During the break we went to find a water fountain and we saw the University workers painting the grass with mini paintbrushes from the dollar store. I don't know if I was THAT dehydrated that I was hallucinating that but it looked really weird. Next me and Leor split up because I had to go to my Artificial Intelligence class. It seems pretty interesting, I'm not gonna go into detail about it because I'm surrounded by nerds so it's competition for who's smarter in class. Finally I headed back to our room at 5pm when classes were over. I went for a 45 minute swim at the pool next door and then we made supper, pasta with sauce. We emptied a 5 person serving bag into our plates (so 2.5 servings each) and went into the common room to eat it. Then the chinese guy there kept asking us where we got the pasta and shit while I was trying to eat, the whole time I was thinking: if Alex was here he'd beat the shit out of him for interrupting him while he's eating. Anyways we watched some TV and went back upstairs. We downloaded Season 2 of Ali G and headed out to a party around 9pm. I got a little tipsy and we spoke to a bunch of people from the Hillsong group. There were some OK bands playing and this phillipine prostitute whore sat down next to us at the table and started bumming cigarettes off our pack. She took 2 and another girl came and asked for one. So I guess the way to pick up girls in Australia is to leave a pack of cigarettes on your table while you're talking to your friends, and then they come to you. Fucking sluts. If you're offended by this then stop reading my blog. This is how I write and I won't change for you, yes you, stop looking around, I'm talking to YOU <insert your name here>. I watched an episode of Ali G and passed out.

Yo mothafuckas, this be Gaby and I iz here wif my main man Leor Kidouchim, check yo self before you wreck yo self.

Today was a fun day, the first day of classes. My first class started at 4pm so I had a lot of shit I could do in the morning. I started off by taking a shower and me and Leor went to the Gym 1 street up to eat breakfast at their cafeteria. $6.50 for toast + 1/4 of a plate of scrambled eggs, and Leor paid $7 for a coffee and 2 waffles. Talk about price inflation. After that we went to change our class section so that we have fridays off (yay!) and that didn't take very long. I then called RentACenter to get our goddamn fridge that we've been waiting for and I used my jewish powers to bargain the price down. So we're getting a fridge on friday morning :). I went to the pool at the gym and swam 4 laps before almost dying of exhaustion. I don't think i'm out of shape, it's just that I haven't eaten a big breakfast in a while and I haven't been to the gym in 3 weeks, but it felt really good after because it was intense cardio. I headed back to the room and worked a bit before going with Leor to my first class of the day, Economic Geography. Now we both assumed this class would be bullshit but when we got into the classroom we realized we might actually have to do work. Assignment 1 = 1,000 word essay, Assignment 2 = 1,500 word essay, Assignment 3 = huge project, Final Essay = 2,500 words, Final Exam = short answers + essay. Yeaaaaaah, no. The teacher kept making wisecrack jokes and you know the nerds were laughing at them and giggling to themselves during the rest of the class, I was just thinking meow meow meow meow, meow meow meow meow, meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow. When we left we went to the Broadway shopping centre to get food and stocked up on a lot of shit. Once we finished buying everything we realized we had to walk back with 10 heavy bags or so. Smart gaby, smart. Anyways, we found a shopping cart in the street (one of the many signs that there is a G-d). We put all our shit in it and walked back to the hotel with the shopping cart, YES, people stared at us all the way but it doesn't matter. I didn't want to work my forearms by carrying the bags because I wanted to hit the gym when we got back. And that's exactly what I did. I went to the gym for an hour and a half to work-out. What a crappy gym, but it got most of the job done. Australians are puny, I think I was the 3rd most ripped person in that gym and 1st hottest. *cough*. I got back and took a shower (Yes, Naked). And ate some tuna for supper while watching the Oscars on TV (we get that here before you guys, oh, just to ruin it (eyal style), George clooney won the first oscar). Leor found a course to replace that Economic Geography shit course, so we're gonna drop this one and add that one tomorrow morning so that I have mondays and friday's off (and possibly wednesdays depending on if that tutorial is mandatory). That means more Gaby time :).

We finally got a fan and desk in our room, Leor stole the desk from the common room and the manager built our fan with his own hands. Maybe I can get him to start wiping my ass for me once i'm done taking a shit, we runz this biatch :)

For all of you that didn't see what the yellow toothed whore receptionist from billabong looks like, here he is (we had to act like we were his friends to get a picture).




Gaby

Today was the sickest fucking day ever. We went to Sydney University in the morning at 9:30 and waited for the bus. We met sooo many people from the Hillsong (surfer) group. 80% of them were Chinese but they were cool Chinese, like Mike Yee. We got to the beautiful Marubra beach and played Frisbee, soccer, cricket, footy, football, and some Swedish game that these two Swedish chicks were explaining everyone. Now the other games were chill but the Swedish game was like a gay game of baseball. People wait in line to swing the bat and there isn’t even a pitcher. They give you the ball, you hit it, and run around the bases trying to get to home. So basically it’s baseball for pussies. Surfing was the best though, it was very hard at first to balance yourself just lying down on the board, but once you got the hang of it and you caught a sick wave, you could ride it for a good 8 seconds before hitting shore, it was sooooo sick. I want to go surfing again so badly.




I couldn’t eat any of the food because it was all meat, so I just drank punch all day. That’s probably why when I got back to the room I felt so fucked up, the sun + no food = fucked up, you don’t need to be a math major to understand that. I’m sure the crooked yellow toothed whore receptionist is working today, because when we got back the internet was down. He’s the only fuck that’s too lazy to go up 8 stairs, reset the router, and go back to his desk without complaining for 3 hours that he has to do it every 4 hours. Fucking pricks. I paid for unlimited internet, UNLIMITED. Here, read: http://www.billabonggardens.com.au – what do you see on the bottom left? UNLIMITED. There’s no fucking star at the corner that makes you look at the bottom of the page to see: “Unlimited only when the crooked yellow toothed whore half-twit no good ski-instructor receptionist is not around”. I hate this place because of the administration. I can’t wait to move to our final destination tomorrow, Royal Hotel. That’s gonna be sick. I can actually unpack my suitcase. I’ve been living off the same t-shirts for the past 3 weeks, we’ve just been too lazy to pass layer 2 of our luggage so we keep washing the shirts we wear and re-using them. I feel weird, because the whole Hillsong surfer group is Christian and they keep asking us to come to church with them. We still haven’t gotten around to telling them we’re Jewish, just because everything is free right now. I guess on the last day I’ll tell them, “Oh, by the way, my people killed Jesus”. They’re all so nice. I think they’re trying to recruit me and Leor somehow. It’s kind of scaring me. It’s like the Stepford wives except they’re not all perfectly programmed robot whore wives, they’re just decent people. But I’m not a dumbass, I know when people are trying to brainwash me. I’m just taking advantage of the free shit for as long as I can and then I’m gonna lay low as if I was never there. When they see me in the street and are like “Hey Gaby, where have you been?” I’ll be like “Uh…. Do I know you? Have we met before?”. The funny thing about the trip to the beach and the people in this club is that they’re Chinese, Japanese, Malaysian, etc etc, but I classify them into two groups:
1) People who know kung-fu
2) People who don’t know kung-fu.

Cheers,
Gaby

Today was “line day” because we stood in line for half the fucking day. We woke up in the morning and checked our courses online but couldn’t see our schedules because of “time clashes” between courses. So we went to the International office and waited in line for 20 minutes for them to tell us to go to Madsen building and wait there. We met an Austrian guy in line at the International office and a couple of Americans from Philadelphia in the Madsen line. Now this line-up was huge, it took us 1 hour to get inside the building to wait in another line. We finally got to the computer geeks that were fixing the schedule clashes and fixed all of mine except one. Which meant I needed to drop a class. So I went back to the International office and dropped one of the classes that clashed and added another one. Then when I checked my schedule online, it was another clash, but this time even worse because I would miss an entire class once a week. But you know what, I’m tired of waiting in line so I think I’m just gonna do that. I don’t go to class anyways at McGill and I seem to do well, so how bad could this be? (famous last words). Oh, on our way back to the International office we saw John (the guy you met earlier in our first two days in jail), and spoke to him for a bit. That was funny running into him. We went for lunch, there was a free BBQ and while waiting in line, Eric, one of the surfer club guys came and gave out flyers. We asked him when we were going surfing and he said tomorrow, we just need to signup at the booth downstairs. So we ate lunch and signed up. It was free transportation, free surfing and free BBQ at the beach so we couldn’t resist. Now we’re really excited to go surfing, I’ve always wanted to do that. We headed back to our rooms, went on the Internet and watched some TV. There was this gay Australian show, I forgot what it’s called, but basically it was really really retarded. There were two groups that had to play against each other, the first competition was running across wet floats in a pool to the other side and slapping a pie in your teammate’s face (what the fuck??). The team that slapped the most pies would win round 1. Oh god, what the fuck is round 2 gonna be then. Round 2, they chose some random hoe from the audience and the losing team from round 1 had to have a hoola-hoop competition against her. Surprise, surprise, she was a professional hoola-hoop circus freak, so she was able to do 14 hoola-hoops at once and destroyed the guy doing 3. The next round, they had to catch their team’s balls that sprayed out of an elephants mouth and put their balls into a clowns mouth as quickly as possible. Whoever came up with this game show was definitely on crack. Once the show was over and I recovered from the seizure I just had watching it, “The Hunted” was on so we watched it, and then we got kicked out of the room because they were closing. We went to sleep early because we have to wake up early to go surfing tomorrow, around 8am.

I'm writing this drunk, so don't judge me or my writing skills.

We woke up this morning freezing cold once again, we're both too lazy to turn that fan off so we leave it full blast. It's funny, we go to sleep boiling hot and wake up freezing, I guess we do feel part of Canada in our stay here (suckers..). Wow im so fucked up I can't remember what we did today, hmmmm. Oh ok well I remember we went to school and I went to change a class. Trying to take some easier shit so that we can relax more during the week. My schedule is pretty sick considering i'm taking 4 classes and one is basically Jewish History. We met another German guy in line and this American from New York who had a twitch in his eye. I don't know what it is about me but I always notice those things, I blame Eric Cohen, he's brought out the over-analyst in me. We then headed to watch today's band, who were pretty good but I can't remember their name right now, and walked around the booths to pick up free shit (shampoo, 2 x lipton iced tea, cotton candy and slush). We then walked in the wrong direction because I kept telling Leor I knew where we were going. We got to the other side of campus and they told us we were in another city so we were like FUCK and walked back the way we came, guess I fucked up lol. We headed back home and I worked on work-stuff for a couple of hours. Then we went to watch this tv show about a cop and his dog upholding justice in a city, followed by an old Smallville episode. It's all good in the hood. We went to this party but on our way we stopped by "The Bottle Shop" to buy some booze and the cashier was Canadian, from Toronto. We drank on our way to the party at Manning Bar and got there pretty trashed. We waited in line until we couldn't wait anymore because we had to pee so we found a bathroom, peed and went back in line. We were basically in line for an hour and a half until we got in and the bitch told us we needed IDs to get in which we didn't have, so Leor begged her to come in and she said "OK, BUT NEXT TIME...", yeah, whatever bitch, we didnt wait in line for an hour to get sent back home. So we went in and scoped out the place...




We got some beers and chilled out, it was a 90's party so they were playing old shit like MC Hammer, Vanilla Ice and Queen. WHERES THE RAP MUSIC??

Anyways, we drank some more once we got there, on Leor's tab:




And had a great night!

Check out pics on the left. I'm gonna go pass out now, or make soup if I can.

Gnite folks!

Getting tired of having to continually update yourselves on our lives? Well too damn bad, because we're gonna keep writing this shit, it's what keeps us sane and happy.

Today was a fun day, we woke up at around 9:30am which means we were already late for adding/dropping classes at the International office. We ate breakfast quickly and got dressed quicker, and we walked down with the list of our courses. When we got in there, there was already a huge line up, but we managed to squeeze our way into the middle of the line. Then we realized that everyone had forms that they had received at the back of the line, so I asked this guy behind me where to get the slip and he told us we cut in line in front of him but we kept the conversation going in other directions to throw him off topic, about 20 minutes later it was too late to tell us to get to the back of the line so I guess he gave up. He told us how he was sitting on a bench reading a book and this old man started touching him and asking him if he was gay. I guess reading in Australia is a big no no. He also told us that he was in mechanical engineering back in his home town, and that he just wanted to relax for the semester. Like an idiot, I thought about how i'm taking Jewish History as a joke so that school would be easier and so I told him, why don't you take German History or something. And suddenly, when I realized what I just said, we all became uneasy for a minute. Yeah, he really wants to recount German History, with one of the most ruthless dictators of all time. So I quickly told him to take German Geography or something and tried to change topics once more. We finally got to the front of the line and got the forms to fill out, we filled them out and submitted our course changes and got out of there without getting beaten up by the other half of the line behind us. We grabbed some free lunch (yay, veggie burgers). We then walked over to the 100 or so booths for different clubs and societies at USYD. A lot of them were interesting but they were all christian for some reason. Christian Football Team, Christian Lacrosse Team, Christian Water Polo Team, Christian Jews for Jesus .... what the hell is going on. We found the hillel booth and I bought myself this t-shirt for $4..




Then there was this guy that gave a speech and kept talking about "Liberal Scum" and bashing anyone who was liberal. Following him was a band called Dappled Cities Fly which Leor loved, he says they sounded like Radiohead and the guitarist looked like Richard Zednick (the hockey player), and he got a picture with them. We headed back to the rooms to relax for a bit. Then I saw it, a fucking cockroach ran into our room and under my suitcase, when I lifted the suitcase it had disappeared but we caught it running under Leors bed and then under mine. We tried to find it and kill it for 10 minutes before we headed back for movie night. We watched kung fu hustle, a very funny movie and it was followed by very nice fireworks which we weren't able to take pictures of, it's kinda hard catching them on camera. What a party, right Leor?




When we got back to our rooms I went to pee. When I opened the door to go out I saw the cockroach on the side of the door but again I didnt want to get my shoe dirty so I started rolling up toilet paper to stick under my shoe before I squash it. It realized I wanted to kill it so it ran under the door and back into our room and disappeared again. This time I was pissed because I knew I wouldnt be able to sleep if I didnt kill it. Luckily I saw it running across the floor at some point and whipped the toilet paper roll at it. It back flipped 8 times before landing on its back. A-HA! Who's running this bitch now ay? Leor then grabbed it with the toilet paper and squashed it. I told him to throw it off the balcony but he said he would just flush it down the toilet. I've seen enough movies to know cockroaches can swim in toilets so I'm never peeing in the upstairs toilet again. Nothing worse than taking a shit and feeling something crawling up your ass.

Damn these blogs are getting longer, good night people!