Gold Coast

Last weekend I attended a YFU orientation on the Gold Coast. For me it wasn't that much about the orientation since I'd gone through the same stuff already in New Zealand's orientation. I booked a surfing lesson for Friday afternoon and as soon as we arrived at Surfers Paradise I went and signed up for my lesson. There were two guys, Ro and Danny and one lady, Reneé who all were super nice. Before the lesson started I walked to Starbucks and had a delicious ham and cheese croissant and an ever so amazing vanilla frappuccino.

The surfing lesson was my second one and it went already better than the first one. The waves were bigger and it rained a bit but nothing could have stopped me... until I got stung by a jellyfish. I had just said I don't believe in Friday the 13th and look what happened. Anything could happen. I did continue surfing after I got over a slight panic attack caused not so much by the stinging but actually seeing that light blue fist size bubble floating right next to me. I screamed and I ran and it was overall embarrassing but little did I know the worse was yet to come.

The surfing lesson ended happily and when I walked down to the grocery store a big smile on my face I thought I was invincible. But when I was walking up the escalators I tripped and the sharp edge of the escalator step tore my my skin of my toes. It hurt, I have to say, and killed a little part of my good mood. At the end of the day, no one died so I survived Friday the 13th pretty well.

On Saturday we had an early morning because the day's trip was to O'Reilly's Rainforest Retreat. The place was so beautiful and reminded me of those trips we did when I was a kid. We got to feed some birds, walk through the rainforest on suspension bridges.

The rest of the weekend was spent by shopping, shopping and shopping. I finally found bikinis after couple months of looking. It wasn't that successful though my bank account stayed alive so at least someone won.