Transcending Borders With Seeds in Our Hands

G’day! I have to update you on what happened on my second day in the Sydney area. I took the bus to Bondi Beach, which is a world famous beach just outside Sydney. It certainly lived up to all the hype. The beach was huge and because it is still “wintery” it was largely unoccupied. I got off the bus way too many stops away from the town center because I was going to go to Bronte Beach (which is two beaches up from Bondi) and then take the walking trail along the coast and end up at Bondi, but I became disoriented and didn’t realize that we had gone past both Bronte and Tamarama. It was all good though…”no worries” as they keep saying here (even in lieu of “you’re welcome”) because I was up in the residential area which is situated up on several large hills with absolutely breathtaking views of both the Sydney harbor area and Bondi Beach. I wound my way down the back streets, trying to remember the general direction of the beach. I stopped in a coffee shop both to ask directions and get a little something to eat and drink. The prices are quite inflated here. I thought that the dollar would be strong and that the prices would be about the same in the states, but a “frosted” (frozen) coffee was A$5.50 and a piece of banana bread was A$4.50. Oh! I have to tell you about the banana bread. It apparently is an Australian thing to have banana bread toasted and slathered with butter and sprinkled with powered sugar. This was all new to me because, as you know, we eat our banana bread untoasted and quite plain. It was AMAZING! They put it on the sandwich griddle and it got all golden brown and just like french toast. I met a girl who was working there and she said that she was from Iceland and that she was over here studying. She had an American accented English, so we talked quite a bit about Icelandic and American things : P. She had just come from Bombay where she was in a Bollywood film. She must be an aspiring model because she was about my height and had that kind of bone structure. She said that they are always casting white people for the films but that Bombay is WAY too crowded and dirty and the people are destitute. And I said, as a terrible American, isn’t all of India that way?

I eventually made it to the beach, thanks to her scribbled directions on the back of my receipt, and I just sat down on the cold sand and took in the view. The water was beautiful, a fantastic shade of green in certain areas and bright blue in the other ares (I don’t know why it is like that). After that, I walked up on the trail that hugs the cliffs and leads to Tamarama and Bronte beach which were just as awesome as Bondi but completely without a soul on them. I thought to myself, how can these beaches not always have someone laying on them, enjoying them?

I came back around to Bondi Beach and stopped at the Bondi Icebergs Bar, which is a very famous bar/cafe/restaurant/fitness center. It has a pool that hangs out over the ocean and the waves come crashing up, and with the spray you loose track of where the edge of the pool is exactly. I noticed that there were a bunch of stylish people hanging out by the pool and they were wearing feather shoulder wrap things and stillettos. I also saw somekind of screen that was covered with fabric all around and a couple people holding cameras. I knew I was going to see something pretty out-of-the-ordinary. So, I stuck around on the second level, thinking that any moment Tyra Banks or Heidi Klum was going to emerge from the Icebergs and start posing. Neither of those two appeared, but guess who did? Eva Mendes. She was dressed to the hilt and she went over to the edge of the pool where it meets the ocean and they started taking pictures of her as she bended like gumby into awkward stances, walked towards them while looking out on the ocean, etc. Once, she almost got hit with the spray of the ocean which I thought was quite funny because at that moment she “lost her sexy” and sqwaked. There were several paparrazzi guys swarming around and I felt like one of them as I just started snapping photos left and right. They kept yelling “Hey Eva!” and sometimes she would turn and look at us and say “hiiiii!” in that little model-like voice. After about 10 minutes, Eva left to go back inside and everyone started packing up. I left to catch a bus back to Sydney with my invaluable Eva photos in tow.

On the bus I met a lively bunch of ladies from Melbourne and they gave me all kinds of tips on what to do and what to avoid when I am in the southern part of Australia. It was their first time coming to Sydney and I was like, “You’re kidding, right?”. Nope. They were country folk who were coming in for a girls weekend out. They were hilarious and I suppose we made quite the entertaining group for the other transit passengers. I headed back to my hostel, musing at how everyone was wearing scarves and coats like it was freezing out and I was quite comfortable in a tee shirt.

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