August 4th: The Ivy

 our French friend Ben

Today it felt so good to sleep in and just lay and read in bed for a good few hours. Then I checked my email and talked to some people from home. Once I had finally wandered downstairs, I made my breakfast and waited for Danielle to go to Macquarie Center so we could finally restock on groceries. We walked to the mall and shopped around for a little hand bag for Danielle and we got a new dress for the evening. We also checked out “The Reject Store” which is like the dollar store so I got some necessary cleaning items for a total of $8. Once we made it to Woolsworth we made sure to get some food we had really enjoyed. Mostly the lamb sausages. Lamb is a really popular meat here and so is beef, but chicken and fish are super expensive. I’m a bit upset at how expensive the fish is here considering I thought I would be eating a lot of it fresh. But there is fish that I’ve never seen before like Dory. Fish can go for about $30/kg, so if you want to pay a reasonable amount, you can get one bite of fish. But I’ve been really enjoying the lamb here since it’s so cheap and easy to come by, actually half the meat isle is lamb. We shopped around for a good hour or more and then had so much food we had to smuggle out our shopping trolly. We got lost trying to leave through the parking garage so we had a pretty good laugh at the looks we were getting. We walked for over 30 minutes from the Center through the center of campus and past the football games to the Village. Finally back home, I reorganized the freezer to fit all my new food and started doing the 3 day old dishes that haven’t been washed due to a lack of dish soap. I cooked some pasta and lamb sausage and went to go get ready for the night. It cost me $5 to pay for a “party bus” into the city. This was no more than a rickety bus with a flashing light on it, but we got into the city fine. Once there we had free admission into The Ivy which is a pretty fancy club with a pool on the roof. Everyone looked very nice in their dress clothes but the crowd soon dispersed when they found out the promise of free drinks from 8-9 was no longer in place because the club had reached their promised limit of $1500, which to them is about 100 drinks. Danielle and I had met this kid from the States but soon left him to wander with our new friends from France. They were very nice and told us that they were going to their flat party. It was a huge group of French students and they thought it was very funny how I am French but neither know it or have been to France. They were a bit surprised how we call ourselves American but know we are other nationalities. Because the group was so big we kept losing the stragglers and Ben kept running back to find them, this took us about an hour to walk to a liquor store 5 minutes from the Ivy. Danielle and I were getting pretty bored of it so we asked the cashier how to get to the bus station we needed to take and luckily it was 2 blocks down the road. Once we found it we got on the bus and left to get back before midnight. We’ve agreed to no longer go into the city if we don’t know 100% what to expect of the night, it’s way too far and can cost too much if we did this too much. Luckily with transportation being my only expense that night it only cost me $10. Once home with blisters on our feet, I made some more food and we went to bed. Tonight was pretty pointless.