Finally, a weekend in Sydney

G'day mates!

As you can tell, I've been doing a lot of traveling. I had been gone almost every weekend for a month straight, so as you can imagine, it was very nice to have a weekend at home in Sydney. One of our friend, Justin, who studies at Wollongong (about an hour away) came to visit Gabi and I this weekend. We met him during our bus tour through New Zealand, so we were excited to see him almost a month later! We took him to all the touristy spots that everyone needs to see when they come to Sydney, which was a lot of fun for us since it was so long ago that we saw everything in Sydney.

Saturday night, Justin bought us tickets for the AFL "footie" game: the Sydney Swans. Now let me explain AFL footie. It's the Australian version of football and it's intense. It's played on a field similar to soccer, the football is shaped like our football, and the sport itself is a mixture of football, rugby, and soccer. The men don't wear pads, they run around the field and never stop unless the whistle is blown (which is very rare), and they slam each other into the ground. They can only pass the football by hitting the ball similar to an underhand serve in volleyball, they have to dribble the ball every so often, and the object of the game is to kick the ball between two poles. Sounds confusing, right? Yeah..I thought so too. We all had no idea what was going on and just stared at the field, cheered when someone got slammed into the ground and when they scored. Clearly we were awesome fans.

Other than showing Justin the ins and outs of Sydney's touristy spots and nightlife areas, we hung out and enjoyed are nice weekend at "home." It was great to catch up, relax, and spend time with all of our friends.

Cheers!
Whit