More than any other time in my life, I’ve really come to see that you’ll miss 100% percent of the shots you don’t take. After I left you wondering how my run went today I’m here to tell you I found myself at a crossroad. I could either go left toward where I could see the water in the distance or go right toward the direction the front desk told me I’ll find the beach…eventually. But no matter what I chose, I knew I would find what I had my head set on, and that was the beach. The shot I’m talking about missing is this idea, “We’ll we’re gonna be here 5 weeks, we don’t have to do it all in one day.” When everyone was still sleeping or just hanging out, I knew I wanted to just put on my shoes and go for a run and stumble upon something, anything, because at least I’ll be out there seeing whatever this city and country has to offer. In the end I chose to go right.
I ran until I found the “Bondi Beach” sign pointing the direction I was already going. I passed beautiful parks filled with families and children trying out rugby drills, I passed fresh sushi and fish markets that kinda got that scrunched nose look from me as I passed and the same color shop wasn’t seen all the way down to the beach. I was on a slight downhill run and I felt like I was playing that game, “Red light!...Green light!” every time I came to the end of a block and had to cross the road. With the fear of being hit by a car coming from the right, I didn’t even risk jumping across the street until the little green guy walk sign gave me the A-Okay. 
Bondi Road was the road I was heading down and it reminded me of a beach-like district back home, but so much more diverse when it came to the people eating in cafes, walking the streets and going about every day life in their aged-looking shops. 
When I first saw the dark blue water from a distance I was already breaking down my steps to try and take it all in. But wow, I’ve been thinking all day about how I’d be able to describe to you the lookout I saw today over Bondi Beach and well, the best way I can describe the site is to tell you how it affected me. After college I’ve considered traveling to Ireland or Holland to give professional field hockey a go for a couple years, but now, I am certain I could find Sydney as a Home Sweet, Sweet Home and play professionally here. Not to mention, if I moved here, it would make my parents have to trek the 14 hour plan ride to visit me. 
Back to Bondi… The water was spotted a dark blue, like the diamond necklace in Titanic is what pops in my mind, with torquise splashed here and there around the jagged rocks and cliffs. The sandstone cliffs were sunken in and weathered by the misguided gusts of wind hitting the crescent shaped beach town. I met a Dutch couple who I spoke “Ik hou Van you” to and some explicit words I learned from a few Dutchies I love. I continued along the rocky running path carved into the Bondi Beach lookout and was just in awe of this view. After a couple hours running around the cliffs and taking pictures in the park, I was on a quicker run back to the apartments when I was about 4 blocks away and saw the 5 members of the study abroad group who had come in early like me, heading toward Bondi Beach. They asked if I’d like to join them and even though I was dead tired, hot, winded and whatever else…How many times do you get to see a sight like that? So I headed allllllll the way back to the beach with them, thankfully we walked, and we were only able to spend about 5 minutes at the closest lookout because he we had to head back to meet the 20 other students coming in from their flight.
Long story short, Adelle, Gabby and Desiree are my roommates for this trip. Adelle and I play field hockey together at Michigan State where Desiree is a soccer player on the women’s soccer team. Gabby also plays field hockey, which I mentioned earlier, but she attended art school in San Francisco. As a group, we were given groceries, a brief overview of the program in the lobby and some facts on Australia before we received our bus pass and hoped on the train to downtown. 
We toured the streets and Hyde Park and the Botanic Gardens which I already saw on my first day running around and Russ (our head honcho) and native Aussie, gave us brief facts on monuments, the legalized prostitution distrct, the transportation system and more. Four areas in Australia have banned water in plastic bottles and won’t sell them, the voltage coming out of sockets here can fry your blow dryer and they eat Kangaroo which has less than 2% of fat on the meat. (Yea, I know, they eat the little guy they put as stuffed animals in airports.) We walked down in front of the Opera house and around the back of it where we found high-end bars and food as well as a beautiful sunset view of the harbour bridge and city skyline. We took a boat ride under the bridge to a farther part of the city where we had dinner at a restaurant overlooking the water. Looking to commemorate the night, a bunch of us ordered a $10 drink at the bar. (Once again, this is legal for us 20 year olds in Australia) I noticed they had this drink called Ginuine which included the drink Absinthe in it, which is illegal to drink and be sold in the U.S. so of course Adelle and I had to get one. One drink set us pretty well for the rest of tonight. We had plans to go to the bar across the street tonight, but I had so much I wanted to write about and we have to get up quite early tomorrow for some tour…I guess I’ll let you know what happens when they fill us in on it first. I’ll try and shorten up the posting tomorrow. I don't have any pictures of tonight really because my camera died, but I'll post the pictures when my friends here post them.
Love,
ME
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