Pink Palace Pals and a Unicorn Onesie
Sydney, Australia: I reunite with old friends and drink a lot, yet again.
Working at The Pink Palace has introcuded me to some of the most awesome people I have met to date. One of them is Flo from Germany. She has a blog, which you can read here if you understand German, that is. Hollie from Brizzy is another one of them, and she also happens to be a gifted writer (seriously, check out her blog).
Flo arrives in Sydney and we meet up for a beer at The Rocks on a sunny afternoon after I’ve finished work. We haven’t seen each other or spoken much since our Greek heydays (which was 2012), so there’s a lot of catching up to do. Eventually we get hungry, so I suggest we go to Cheers. While we sit and I start on a big, drunken sob story, a group of four Chinese guys choose to sit at our table. I find it a bit uncomfortable, as we’re just old friends trying to catch up and talk about personal stuff, and it’s obvious we’re being approached. But the guys wait until their French friend joins them by sitting right next to me.
It’s all pretty harmless at first, we tell them my now-standard lie about being from Kenya and being raised in a cult called Children of Lexia. We throw a lot of “Amen, Sister” and “Praise the Lord” into the conversation just to get them to back off. The French guy is the only one who seems even more encouraged, and he goes on for ages telling us how he disagrees with everything we say, but he respects it. We learn that Frenchie is married and working for an airline in China with the rest of the guys. He then proceeds to try and pay us to show them around the next day (since I tell him I have work) and moving closer to me and asking me what I want and need from him. I get the feeling he’s feeling like cheating a bit on his wife, so we ask the guys to take our picture so we can go home. They do, and then proceed to pass my phone around, unwilling to give it back to me, until Flo grabs it out of one of their stubborn hands, and we say goodnight, to them and each other.
A few days later, Flo comes over to my place for some goon and Magic Mike XXL, which obviously involves Sharon as well. Flo brings a crap load of candy, and we just eat, drink and drool over six packs until the early hours of the morning. Then, Flo and I get the 6 AM bus back to the city the next morning.
Since we drunkenly agreed that we needed a gay night out, Flo comes back the following weekend with three feather boas and some body glitter. Instead of going out though, we end up just rolling around in the living room with our props, that also include a sombrero that I found on the street the other day. Yes, I am still all about finding free stuff on the street these days.
Fluffy gets in on the fun, too
Before we say goodbye to Flo, Sharon and I meet her in Bondi to watch The Danish Girl at the cinema. Turns out the movie isn’t about me.
Hollie comes by for a week-long visit to be a proper Sydney tourist and catch up after a long time. I haven’t seen her since Stoketoberfest! She is actually from Brisbane, but has been living In Europe since we met her the fateful summer of ’13, and she has also never seen the Opera House, which is a total disgrace. We take her to Tea Gardens in Bondi for a few nights out, but we end up playing Heads Up! instead of meeting new people. We have mimosas at Coogee Beach and end up meeting some Aussie guys that think I’m Canadian and living right next door to Justin Bieber.
After a week, I take her on a day trip to see the giant white music lotus that every tourist but Hollie has seen. We start off with some brunch by Coogee beach – of course, mimosas are had (by me) – and then we’re off for a walk around Sydney Harbour. We see the Harbour bridge and walk around the Botanical Gardens, where Hollie does things like lay in the grass while I am thinking about the bugs in it. It’s Australia, everything here is trying to kill you. Then, we find a nice spot with a good view and I pull out my unicorn onesie and have Hollie take a million pictures of me in front of the bridge and Opera House. Another check off the bucket list!
After the initial embarrassment of wearing a onesie in front of a lot of tourists, I am in a bit of a silly mood, and that’s how our new favourite obsession, parkour, is born. We run around the garden doing crazy stunts and filming them for our own enjoyment later on. We then go back to Randwick and have a nap with Sharon before all going to Coogee beach with a box of goon, where our friends Darren and Josh meet up with us. After finishing our drinks on the cold beach, we take them back to our place, where we introduce them to our parkour obsession. Since we still have our Christmas tree up, Darren starts throwing baubles at me while I hit them with the free cricket bat we found outside when we had just moved in. Baubles will be found in random places in all rooms of the apartment for the next week.