Merry Christmas everyone!!

Well we had a lovely Christmas in Sydney even though it wasn't what we were used to at all, it was so hot! We had a traditional Christmas dinner at Gavin's house, which was ok, I made Yorkshire puddings which didn't turn out very well at all, they tasted like really thick pancakes! After lunch we had a sit down and a rest before heading off to the beach to make the most of the hot weather. It was really busy at the beach and it was pretty funny to see the majority of people in bikinis or swim shorts with santa hats on!!

After we had sat down and sunbathed for a while we went and had a bbq by the beach for our tea. We thought we would combine an English Christmas with a traditional aussie one! The bbq was good, and after we had eaten we got the bus back to Gavin's house and had a few beverages before bed!

Boxing day we were up and packed readay for our 5 day camping trip to Jervis Bay. It wasn't the most succesful of camping trips as when we arrived at the station we were told there was no public transport to the campsite and we had to get an $80 taxi! The whole point of the camping trip was to make the time between Christmas and New Year as cheap as possible and so far it didn't start off that cheaply! It didn't get much better when we arrived at the campsite and there were no facilities for cooking so we ended up eating out for the entire time in Jervis Bay! Gavin came down the day after Matt, Kate and I had and he brought with him the awful weather! It rained really hard for half the time that we were in Jervis Bay which meant that we were pretty restricted to the tent! Jervis Bay was beautiful but with the weather being so bad we decided to cut our trip short by a day so we could be back on 30th December in time for the New Years eve preperations!! One good thing that came out of camping was that the campsite didn't ask us for the money we owed them so we got away without paying for the site!

Yesterday (New Years Eve) we set off late afternoon for Balmain via the supermarket to get supplies for our picnic and some booze for the night. We had a really good spot with an amazing view of the Harbour Bridge. We saw both the 9pm and the midnight sets of fireworks. The midnight ones were brilliant. We stayed around in the park we were in until 2am and then got the bus back to the city. We got off the bus and Matt realised that he had left his bag somewhere. We didn't know if it had been left on the bus or in Balmain, so Matt and I headed straight back to where we were watching the fireworks, while Gavin, Kate and Drew tried to look for the bus depot. We eventually got a call around 4am to say that the bag had been found with the passport and travel documents which was very lucky as we are flying to Singapore tomorrow! (2nd Jan), however his camera, i pod, nintendo ds etc had all been taken out and someone stole them. So it wasn't the best start to 2009.

As I mentioned before we are flying to Singapore tomorrow. We have had an absolutely amazing time in Australia. It has been awesome and we will miss it and the friends that we have made, but on the other hand we are looking forward to getting to Asia and seeing some of the places there. So it's goodbye from Australia and I will be in contact from Singapore!

Happy New Year to you all

Liz

xxxx