ChristmOZ

For our 2 week Christmas break Quinn and I decided a few months ago to go to Sydney, Australia. We left for Apia, Samoa on Tuesday the 20^th right after our last session of mid-service. The only places you can fly to from American Samoa are Samoa and Hawaii, so in order to go to Australia we had to fly to Apia first. Our flight to Sydney left early on Wednesday morning so we stayed overnight with some peace corps volunteers who live about 5 minutes from the airport in Apia. The taxi driver who dropped us off at their house offered to come pick us up in the morning to take us to the other airport about 45 minutes outside of Apia, where they have more international flights.

Between going out to dinner with the peace corps people and waking up early for our flight, we didn’t get much sleep that night. It didn’t help that the taxi driver came at 3 am when we had told him to come at 4 am. We had told him that we wanted to get to the airport at 5 am (since our flight was at 7 am) but he had misunderstood and thought our flight was at 5 am.  We made it to the airport with plenty of time to spare since even though it is the “bigger” airport in Apia it still only has two terminals. The 5 and half hour flight was pretty uneventful except we were annoyed that they didn’t give us any food or drink the entire flight. That’s what you get when you buy the cheapest flight I guess.

We were very excited when we landed, but we had to wait for a while to get through customs. And then we found the train we were supposed to take to get into the city. As soon as we got off the train, WOW talk about reverse culture shock! There were tons of people everywhere and they were all walking really fast! There were fast cars driving on the wrong side of the road! Lots of tall buildings and stores and traffic lights and lots of city noises. It was cold and rainy and there we were bumbling around with our huge backpacks, tired, hungry, getting in the way of all the fast, purposeful walkers, not knowing what to do first. Get a taxi (how? They all went so fast!) or find something to eat? We walked around for a while not really sure what to do. We somehow ended up in a mall type place, by which time we had gotten so overwhelmed we just decided to get in a taxi to go to Quinn’s friend, Amie’s, apartment. A kind man explained to us the light system of the taxis so we were able to flag one down.

When we got to Amie’s apartment we dropped off our backpacks and, since no one was home, we decided to walk around to find something to eat.  We found a little café to get sandwiches and then explored both of the nearby grocery stores in awe. So many choices! Usually there’s just the tuna/weird meat in a can aisle, the packaged cookie/chips aisle, and the pasta/large jars of mayonnaise aisle. After the grocery store foray we headed back to the apartment to shower and take a nap. I took the first hot shower I’ve taken in 5 months and it was AMAZING. I was difficult to make myself turn off the water and get out after 20 minutes. I then had the best nap of my life curled up under a thick comforter in a super comfortable bed.  So those were the highlights of the first day: the pleasantly cool temperature, grocery stores, and hot water. We continued to enjoy these and more simple pleasures throughout the trip.

Bondi Beach

The first few days in Sydney we explored the city. We saw the bridge and the opera house. We walked around the old part of town called The Rocks where they had a pretty cool market. We also explored the fabulous beaches, including the well-known Bondi (pronounced Bond-eye, not Bond-ee, we learned) and went on a coastal walk from Bondi to Coogee beach, visiting all the beaches in between. Oddly enough we didn’t actually want to spend too much time just sitting on the beach like many other tourists. We’ve been in the sun so much all year round that we wanted an escape, and, although the water was supposedly warm by Australian standards, it felt freezing to us! We explored the cool little beach neighborhoods, and indulged in large servings of frozen yogurt which does not exist in AmSam. Dairy products are hard to come by (we drink ultra-pasteurized milk that doesn’t half to be refridgerated until it’s opened and tastes a little funny), as well as anything frozen, so the combination is truly rare. We tended to get most of our food at the grocery store instead of eating out since Sydney is a pretty expensive city and we were definitely on a budget. One of our favorite food items was passion fruit yogurt which I had never had before but is excellent. We enjoyed it with muesli every morning.

Part of the coastal walk from Bondi to Coogee

 

Vineyards we visited in Hunter Valley

We took a couple day trip to Newcastle where we stayed in a hostel. It’s a smaller city, but still on the coast with nice beaches and a nice coastal walk as well. One of the days we were there we went on a wine tour in Hunter Valley which is famous for Semillon and shiraz wines. Our tour guide, Tex, was a large Australian with a thick accent and good sense of humor so that made it even more fun. We visited a total of 4 wineries, two large ones and two smaller ones, and a cheese shop where we got to sample many delicious cheeses. We learned a lot about the local wines and vineyards and drank a lot of wine throughout the day!

 

Back in Sydney we explored more of the city including the botanical gardens and Chinatown which was filled with tons of cheap stuff so it was definitely the place for us. Christmas and New Years to me felt more like the 4^th of July or Memorial day at home than anything else. I’ve never had a Christmas or New Years in a place that wasn’t cold and snowy. But in Australia it’s summer during that time so everyone parties and has barbeques and goes to the beach all day. On New Year’s there were fireworks from the bridge at midnight which were pretty awesome. We watched from the little beach near Amie’s apartment since going into the city would have been madness. We had been there earlier in the day visiting the gardens and there were already huge lines of people waiting to get into certain places, no doubt prime firework viewing spots, at 10 in the morning! Even getting out of the city at around 6 pm was tough because certain streets had been closed off and the buses were rerouted and packed with people. I think we got out just in time!

We were also able to take day trips to the Blue Mountains and to a wild life reserve a couple hours west of Sydney. It was nice to have public transportation that had a schedule and came on time and didn’t stop running at 6pm! At the wild life park we were able to pet kangaroos and koalas and saw a lot of other cool animals like birds, wombats, wallabies, bearded dragons, and penguins. The Blue Mountains were one of my favorite things that we did. The temperature was a lot cooler there and it was perfect for hiking. We saw a lot of beautiful mountain scenery and waterfalls. It reminded me of hiking in Pennsylvania in the fall.

Waterfall in the Blue Mountains

We left Sydney to fly back to Apia on the night of the 1^st. It was a long trip that is kind of a blur in my mind because of sleep deprivation. I pretty much had half a seat on the way to Apia because of a large Samoan sitting next to me. We also arrived in Apia just a few days after they had switched time zones, so we got there on the morning of the 2^nd which was a Monday. We had a while until our next flight and also had to travel 45 minutes back to the other airport (we had to go back to the other airport because we had originally bought our tickets for the wrong day, not taking into account the time change) so we decided to stop by the market. However, there wasn’t really anyone at the market and everything seemed sort of dead. We even spied a few people who looked like they were going to church, so maybe they still kind of thought it was Sunday the 1^st instead of Monday the 2^nd. Then we thought we should just head to the airport and we might be able to get on an earlier flight since we had done that a couple times before. The airport seemed kind of like it was closed too. There was one other person waiting there who said he was supposed to be on the 8:30 am flight. We had also heard from someone else that there were supposed to have been flights even before that. Ours wasn’t scheduled until 10:30 so we still held out hope that a plane would come. Confused and exhausted, there was nothing else to do besides take a nap on the bench. After waiting for what seemed like forever, more passengers started showing up and when we saw a pilot walk by we knew we were truly in business! I think our plane probably left around 11 am. I’m not sure what happened to the earlier flights but that’s just how it is in Samoa.

After our 30 minute flight from Apia to Pago Pago it was like we had traveled back in time because it was then the morning of the 1st again. We slept the rest of the day, woke up for a few hours to eat, and then slept the rest of the night. It was good that we got a couple of days to recover before school started again on Wednesday.

All in all it was a fun trip, but I wish I’d had more time and more money to explore some other areas of Australia. I also think the experience was different for me coming from AmSam than it would have been coming from the US. While things like petting koalas are cool no matter where you are coming from, we also immensely enjoyed things like not sweating for an entire day and wandering up and down the aisles of the grocery stores. It’s good to be back but that also means I have to go back to eating tuna and pasta and sweating 24/7.