Everybody's surfin, Surfin AUS!

Here in Australia during Easter time the “uni students” (university students) get two weeks off in a row. The first week is called Project Week and it is supposed to be a time for the students to catch up on homework and complete semester projects. The second week is their break week after Easter which is like the American Spring Break. Since the American students go on a group trip during break week, a lot of us planned fun trips to explore Australia during project week (maybe not the best idea but I’m only here once!). So a lot of people from the ASC program ended up taking off and going somewhere else in Australia for the week. Several people flew up to Cairns where the Great Barrier Reef is, but I decided not to because it was really expensive and I’ve snorkeled before so I decided to be adventurous and find somewhere else to go. After some intense online searching for a location and a plane ticket my roommate Emily and I decided to fly to the Gold Coast and stay at Coolangatta for the week. We got round trip plane tickets for $90 and stayed at the YHA Coolangatta hostel for $25 a night so I was pretty excited for this trip.

Our flight was at 7:10am on Sunday morning but the buses don’t start running until 6am. Since we wouldn’t be able to get to their airport early enough to check in if we took the 6am bus, we had the brilliant idea to take the last bus into Sydney at midnight Saturday night and literally just pull an all nighter at Circular Quay. It was definitely a long night and we were exhausted by the time we got to the airport. We slept on the plane (which was only about an hour and a half flight) and when we got to the hostel we found breakfast at a little dive diner called the Eat N’ Run and then went across the street and fell asleep at the beach for five hours straight. I’m going to blame my poor sunscreen application on my lack of sleep because I definitely got a little (or a lot) fried the first day. I woke up and I had twisted on my side like a pretzel so only one half of my body got all the sun but at least I was rested!

Our hostel was right across the street from a beach and if we took the free shuttle from the YHA to the actual city of Coolangatta we could go to the bigger beaches, shops, and restaurants. Our favorite beach quickly became Snapper’s Rocks where there was a beach area called Rainbow Bay. In the morning water came all the way up to the beach but by midday the tide at gone back out and it created a lagoon area and there was a sandbar between the bay and the rest of the ocean. It was pretty neat. Rainbow Bay is where we took our surfing lesson too. We got a great deal and two hours of surfing instructions with a retired professional surfer who coaches for the Quicksilver competitions. I was amazingly not awful and stood up and rode the waves all the way into the beach several times! I feel like surfing is like sledding though. You work so hard to get to the top of the hill (or out to the waves) and then the ride down (or in) is quick and then you have to do the work all over again. My arms the next day were killer sore and I couldn’t lift them very far over my head! It was definitely a work out!

Emily and I were beach bums the majority of the week but some of our friends from Wesley and some of the other American students drove up to Coolangatta to hang out with us and we drove about twenty minutes to Surfer’s Paradise which is another section of the Gold Coast. Surfer’s Paradise is mainly like the party zone with tons of clubs at night and tons of surfers and people on holiday during the day. We just walked around Surfer’s Paradise so we could see what all was there but it was just like a Miami Beach back home in the states. I didn’t like the beaches at Surfer’s Paradise nearly as much as the ones in Coolangatta. The Coolangatta beaches reminded me of Hawaii. They were quiet and there were neat rocks and cliffs all around.

Throughout the week we met several people from all over the World at our hostel and some of the days we all went to the beach together and hung out. I met Cedric and Quentin from France, Sabrina and Shanen from Austria, Pedro from Portugal, Kaji from Japan, Christopher from Denmark, Luke from Poland, and Ryan and Mark from the UK. The hostel was such an interesting place to be! There was a hostel BBQ one night and several other nights everyone just hung outside at the hostel. It made me want to travel so much more and see all those parts of the World that they were from or that they had seen on their journeys. There were a couple other Americans at the hostel but not many and some of the people said that when they met Americans who were travelling they had a much better impression of them. They said if we were travelling it must mean that we had an open mind about other countries and cultures and weren’t the stereotypical ethnocentric American. Some students had experiences that the second someone found out they were American and not Canadian they stopped talking to them and left. It’s quite interesting and sometimes a bit rough being an American here but fortunately I have not had any experiences like some of the other Americans have had.

Overall my trip to the Gold Coast was fantastic and I want to go back already! The people at the hostel were so incredible and when I was leaving they kept trying to get me to sign up to work and live there and just stay! It was so tempting but unfortunately classes were demanding that I return to Sydney! Coolangatta, or “Cooly” as they all call it, was a really laid back place where people surfed all day long and worked just enough to be able to stay and keep surfing. It was gorgeous there and there were families everywhere taking walks together or playing cricket on the beach. It was really different from the crazy go-go-go attitude of Sydney. It was a nice break from the hectic public buses and people constantly in a hurry to get somewhere. The nice slow pace made for the perfect break week but now I must go get all my homework done that I didn’t do ;)