Life's a Beach and I'm Just Playin' in The Sand

Ever since I arrived here, I can't seem to sleep in past 9:00 no matter how late I go to sleep the night before.  It probably has something to do with the sun that rises early in the morning along with the birds in the tree outside my window, but today I turned over to look out my window and saw the green leaves of the tree and just behind them, nothing but blue sky. Definitely a beach day.

One of my housemates and I decided to pack some lunches and take the 5K cliff walk from the beach near our house, Coogee Beach, up the coast to Bondi Beach, a popular surf and swim location for locals and tourists.  The walk was absolutely beautiful, passing by heaps of smaller local beaches and bays and was up high enough to catch the right amount of breeze.  The water was an unbelievable shade of turquoise and everywhere we swam it was clear to the bottom.  I caught myself thinking "Is this real life?" almost constantly, and I wondered what I had done to deserve days like this one.

Some of the scenery on the walk from Coogee to Bondi

The beach was packed with people, but it's not hard to tune them all out when you lay out your towel, put on your sunscreen (that one's for you, mom!!) and lay back to listen to the waves and feel the sand between your toes. We bought iced push-pops called "Callipoles" that are really popular here and soaked up the sun, talked, and watched people surf. My life is seriously good.

Also, the waves were gnarly. (Can you say "gnarly" in a sentence if you're not the one surfing on the waves??)  Growing up around Lake Michigan and Florida ocean waves, these were definitely the biggest I have ever seen and the surfers on them were all so good! I still can't figure out how they manage to miss hitting each other...there must have been at least 100 in the water at one time and 5 or 10 riding the same wave only feet apart. I'm hoping to take some lessons soon, so I guess I'll find out!

Later in the day, the tides shifted and the whole beach became a surf beach and no swimming was allowed past waist deep.  The lifeguards spent the rest of the time we were there coaching the people who didn't listen out of riptides and back to the sandbars.  They were also filming parts of a local show called "Bondi Rescue" which we're pretty sure is a low budget, cable access version of Bay Watch. In other words, most definitely worth finding on tv sometime.  Helicopters kept flying across the water, which wasn't strange until 3 of them went across all right next to each other.  We decided they were looking for sharks...I guess we thought that was the coolest thing they could possibly be doing.

Overall it was a perfect beach day, not a single cloud the entire day.  We're hoping for the same luck again tomorrow!