Birthdays and Bondi

The blog has definitely gotten a little boring lately - both to read and to write, I imagine. I feel like I'm not making the most of my experience every night that I write "I didn't do anything today", so I did my best to change that these past couple days.

Last night, 7 of us went out to eat to celebrate Tim's 21st birthday. We went to The Orient Hotel in The Rocks and had a great dinner. [Fun fact: any place that ends in "hotel" here is actually a pub]. It was decided that we all wanted to try and surprise Tim with cake when we got back to the apartments. We split up all over the place, and Julie and I went to the grocery store to get cakes. We successfully gathered everyone in the apartment and got everything set up, and Matt went to go get Tim so we could surprise him. Initially, our surprise looked like this:

Perfect, right? Unfortunately, a slight miscommunication involving Tim's arrival caused our surprise to look like this by the time Tim got there:

It's a little bit hard to see, but all you need to know is that this cake looked like a disaster. Every single candle melted basically all the way down to the cake, so Sam, Brian and I had to blow them all out to prevent the cake from starting on fire. After that point, the cake was covered in colored wax. The best part? We had just finished blowing them out when Tim walked in the door. He came downstairs and started laughing when he saw the cake, and pretty soon, we were all in hysterics. We agreed that the second picture is much more representative of our lives - it's how the cake was meant to be.

Today, Julie, Laura and I did the Bondi to Coogee walk. We basically walked along the coastline for a little over three miles, and had great views of some gorgeous beaches. We stopped pretty often to take pictures, which unfortunately don't capture the scenes nearly well enough. It was a gorgeous way to spend an afternoon, and the best part was that it was absolutely free. When we started off, we wished we had brought swimsuits so we could enjoy the beach when we finished, but by the end we were glad we hadn't. I'm pretty sure our walk was more uphill than down, and we were all pretty exhausted by the end.

Bondi Beach - our starting point

Since then, I have literally spent the past 4 hours procrastinating the paper I'm supposed to be writing [which includes the time I've spent on this blog post] so I should probably get to that right about now. Tomorrow is the final day of my 4-day weekend, and I'm planning on heading to the market to buy souvenirs for everyone I've been missing back home. Can't wait to spend even more money...!