Sydney: Holla' for a Dolla'

Ok Sydney, I get it. You're crazy expensive. But even crazy has limits.

Take tonight for example: I've been meaning to get back into the pool for some good cross training (good for the joints, not as boring as a spin class or as awkward as a Zumba class etc etc) and this weekend I finally bit the bullet and bought a new Speedo. No, I won't show you a picture of me in a Speedo because I'm afraid Sports Illustrated would steal it for their swimsuit issue. Gotta protect the goods.

There are three pools within walking distance of my house so I decided to start with the one closet (duh, path of least resistance).

I browsed on the website ahead of time: $6.60 to swim. Ok, that seems like a lot but I get it-- it's a fancy aquatic center with multiple pools. I'm not sure why they don't round down to $6.50 or $7 but that's neither here nor there.

Anyway, I get there after work to find out it's an additional $2 for a locker. Ok. Now we're up to nearly $9 to swim. There were plenty of people who put their stuff on the side of the pool, but I wasn't quite willing to take that risk.

And then the real shocker hit--they had no towels. NO FREAKING TOWELS at an aquatic center. I can almost understand why my normal gym doesn't have towels- maybe not everyone is going to take a shower- but at an aquatic center? Where everyone is guaranteed to be wet?

The kicker is even better-- you can buy a towel for $30 or you can just do without.

As I sat there furiously drying myself off with paper towels after my swim (and smelling like chlorine because there was no soap in the showers) I texted a few Sydney friends to relay my horror.



Excuse me, am I the crazy one here?

At $9 a swim minus a towel, soap and hairdryer I'm not really sure what I paid for tonight. I'm surprised Sydney isn't trying to capitalize on other stupid swimmers like me-- I would have gladly rented a towel for another $3 like my normal gym and even put in some coinage for some shampoo (note: walking through the grocery store dripping water and smelling like a pool is really really fun and doesn't illicit stares at all).

North Sydney sounds like it's doing it right- no towels and extra for hot water? They must be printing money.

The worst part? I'll probably shell out again. Damn you Sydney, damn you.

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Two Truths and a Lie

Have you ever played two truths and a lie? It's pretty easy...guess which one of these statements isn't true:

1. In true Sydney fashion, it rained most of the weekend.
2. I had back to back great runs
3. This weekend was a blast

Hopefully you picked number 1 as the lie-- seriously, for every weekend (minus this past glorious one) since I've been back it's rained a good chunk. Not this weekend baby! Nothing but blue skies and hot sunshine.

I had a wonderfully mismatched two days of weekend and felt like I got a lot accomplished.




Early morning Park Run attempt with a few friends from work. Forty seconds faster than last time! I also was pumped that I made it up the giant hill and didn't walk at all. Score!





Fresh watermelon juice (and a baller bacon and egg roll) with the girls after our Park Run. Because what's better than undoing the exercise you just did? This juice really was fantastic, and I'm guessing they had to use the entire watermelon for that glass. So worth the $6 I paid for it. (are you choking on that price point? yeah, so did I).

Saturday afternoon was quite monumental. Sadly, I don't have any pictures of the momentous occasion, but I swam in the Australian waters for the first time.

Say what? You're asking yourself. You've been here for 8 months and haven't swum in the ocean? Um, yeah. You read Bill Bryson's book about Australia and then you go swimming. Needless to say, I survived and learned an important lesson: if you can see your feet, chances are you aren't going to die. Or if you do die, you'll at least see it coming.

I'm going to do another post about Saturday's dinner, but let's just say when the cat's away the mouse will play (meaning Ryan's partner is in Singapore so we got to go somewhere NICE!).

I ALMOST made it through Saturday night following Feb Fast, but had to have a glass of red wine with our steak dinner. I mean, c'mon, it's cruel not to have a few sips alongside a beautiful cut of meat. I was proud though because I did stop at just one glass. Guess that means I have to pony up to a charity!




I can't figure how to make this right side up? Just flip your computer. 6 miles in the early morning heat. I stopped after about 4 miles in Circular Quay and convinced someone to give me a cup of water. The lady wanted to charge me for it, but I think the sweat running off my body and the bright red face made her feel a bit charitable. Thanks lady, appreciate the free tap water.



Drag queens in the park. After a shower and a delicious brunch, some friends and I headed off to "Fair Day," otherwise known as the kick off to mardi gras here in Sydney. Mardi Gras bears no relation to Lent or anything Holy, and is best described as Gay Christmas. Let's just say that walking around the fair was quite the eye opening experience and that some things are probably best left to the imagination.

The dog show was a hoot, though, and I almost stole these little guys:



You laugh, but my mom is pretty close to getting a doggie stroller for our lazy but adorable beagle Hunter. Some days just aren't meant for walking.




Group shot! We were watching the drag show queen competition and wanted to show off our own modeling poses.

I capped off the weekend with a roommate dinner (we've got a new flatmate!), some work and an early bedtime.

Pretty perfect!

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Culturally speaking....

Last night my roommates and I got in a bit of a "discussion" over the laundry.

I'd been lazy and left my wash in the machine, and as it was nearing bed time (aka 9 pm last night as I was trying to shake a summer cold) I told Michelle I'd just throw it in the dryer when she walked out with the basket of wet clothes.

"The DRYER?" she asked me, as if the concept was completely foreign to her.

"Um, yeah," I responded. "Why wouldn't I put all my clothes in the dryer?"

Well, this set the two of them off in a tizzy. They'd never dried their clothes before, never wanted to risk ruining them. Their mothers only did laundry on good days, and hung up the wash on a clothesline in their backyard. You get used to clothes being stiff for the first 30 seconds when you put them on. And no, their fathers didn't seem to mind any sort of lacy bits hanging out on display.

I'm sorry, did I just step back to the 1950s?

We have a dryer in the apartment. It works wonderfully. It takes all of about 2 seconds to throw my load of clothes in instead of the 20 minutes it takes me to drape each item over the "clothes horse" in the living room. I do get the point about retaining quality longer and about risking potential shrinkage by hand drying, but I also like knowing that in an hour or less I can have dry clothes, as opposed to 2-3 days depending on the weather outside.

We concluded it must be purely cultural- so while I will happily convert back when I'm home, for now I've been shamed into slowly hanging out my clothes (and hoping their boyfriends don't peek at my undies).



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Week 3 Training Recap

I could sense that you were getting tired of all of my awesome runs, so I think I got a healthy dose of karma kicking ass this week.

My training from two weeks ago and from last week for the Brisbane Twilight half were night and day. If two weeks ago was characterized by "gas in the tank, felt great, tough but good" this week would be summarized simply by one word: shit.

Don't get me wrong- I know that not every run will be awesome and that's just part of the deal, but one decent run and 2 absolutely terrible ones made for a pretty low running confidence week.

Here's how they broke down:

Tuesday: 3 x 1600s at a 7:50 pace. That's a really aggressive pace for me, but I managed to hold on and get through all three intervals. I don't know if my legs were just really "trashed" (I see that as a running term on other people's blogs so I'm going to go ahead and use it) or if I was tired or what, but I skipped the Wednesday tempo and pushed it to Thursday, opting for a rest day on Wednesday.

Thursday: 5 mile tempo run at 8:25 pace. HA. If you'd seen me on Thursday morning trying to attempt this you would have laughed. I got up super early (for me that's 5:30) and was at the gym by 6 am. You know those runs where you step onto the treadmill and within 30 seconds know if it's going to be a good run or not? Yeah, first step that happened. I was determined to try to make it work, but about 1 1/2 miles in I just couldn't.

So I grabbed a cup of coffee, walked to the gym closer to work and figured I'd try again, hoping that the caffeine would provide some assistance.

Wrong. Another mile down and I was about ready to throw in the towel. I managed to do some 400 intervals to get me to 4.5 miles and then I just called it a day. Fail.

Saturday: 10 mile long run. Double HA. I woke up and it was raining again in Sydney (seems standard these days). What did I do? Download some more Mindy Project episodes, don my compression socks and make a bag of craisins for fuel. Got through just over 3 miles and wanted to die, so attempted to run 5 minutes, walk 1 1/2 minutes. After 2 more miles I quit.

And then tried to run outside in the rain. Turns out I hate running in the rain as much as I imagined I would, so after 2 more miles (7 total) I scrapped it.

After some tears (yep, that kind of girl) and some stretching and a rest day today, I'm hoping this week will be better. I'm going to do some yoga tomorrow for another semi-rest day and will plan on attacking Tuesday full steam ahead.

What goes down must go up again at some point, right?

Feb Fast

Last night, I went out with a bang.

KB and Michaela (the other girls in this pic) are doing FebFast, too!

What was I going out of? Drinking. Don't worry, not forever- just for the rest of February.

My roommate told me about FebFast and I decided it would be a great challenge for me for the month. Might help with the clothes not fitting thing, too. FebFast is an Australian charity group that essentially asks people to give up alcohol for the month of February. If you drink, you are asked to give the charity a $50 donation. It's all honor system based obviously but still a good accountability check if you ask me.

They've got a pretty nifty calculator on their site that lets you see how much money you're blowing on alcohol each month. Pretty crazy to see it all add up (and I hope you get the idea about how expensive it is to drink here in Sydney!) I'm thinking of donating 20-25% of my hypothetical alcohol spendings to the cause, because it does look like a great charity. Lord knows the Aussies probably have some drinking problems with the consuming they can do.

I didn't sign up online because it costs money to sign up online (hello, no!) but there are a number of people doing it at work as well as my roommate. We've decided that for every drink we have Feb 3-March 2 we'll have to put $10 into a kitty. At the end of this we'll take the money and buy drinks.

You must be asking yourself "so why did you drink on February 2 then?" Great question. I'm asking myself that same question at 3 pm the next day as my head pounds on and on and on. Essentially, I already had 2 birthday parties on the calendar that I just *couldn't* not drink for (insert sarcasm, of course I could have chosen not to) and my roommate had a similar situation, so we both agreed we'd do it until March 2.

So yeah, this happened:

Don't worry, those aren't all mine. Happy hour was ending in 5 minutes so we all stocked up. Part of being able to afford Sydney is knowing all of the deals. Every drink on that table is $5, and the prices go up significantly after happy hour. Gotta plan accordingly!

I'm excited to see how I do on this challenge. So far pretty much all of my social outings revolve around alcohol, so I know it will be a challenge. BUT I think it'll be pretty cool to say that I made it at the end. And I'm looking forward to not being hungover for at least a month (preferably never again).