and we're walking, walking.....

helloooooooo everybody!! time for a quickie post!
q: what have marcy and i been doing for 2 full days?
a: WALKING
i swear, even waitressing, i have never walked so much in 2 days! we've seen the oprah house and harbour bridge a couple of times each, spent time in a ritzy area called the rocks, walked around darling harbour (this BEAUTIFUL area that is yep, you guessed it, at the harbour with all sorts of cafes, etc), when to the aquarium, went to kings cross (another area of the city about a 20 min walk from where we mainly are) and walked up and down george st. (the main drag) a bizillion times to the iep office and to get super cheap sushi. we're doing well budgeting. our trip to the aquarium was free, we use free internet at the iep office most of the time, a full meal of sushi for the 2 of us is only $4 each! gotta love living next to china town. which we also explored thuroughly.
lets get some important things out of the way now. as far as i can tell, the toilets DONT' really flush the other way. the seem to just kind of gush straight. although i've really only used public-industrial type of toilets, so this may change after i've used a real on. but it's weird because the have 2 flush options: 1/2 and full. they're real water savers these aussies are!
marcy and i had origionally planned on heading up north 3 hours to newcastle (because it's a smaller area where we hope to meet more people and get decent jobs and enjoy the wonderful beaches up there as well as save some money- sydney is expensive!)on thrusday, but there was a change of plans. we're going to surf camp on monday! 4 days including 8 lessons, all meals, accomodation, gear, transport and a tshirt for a great deal. the group is about 22 and it's just a few hours south of sydney. a good beginner beach where the waves aren't huge and the water is shallow. this way we'll know how to surf for the rest of our trip! hopefully anyway! because of that we've stayed 4 extra days in sydney and are being tourists. the next 2 days include going to olympic park, taking a ferry to manly beach to spend teh day and catch the great view of sydney at night when we come back on the ferry and go to bondi beach for a day.
last night we went for pub night out with the iep people. we weren't expecting to recoginize anyone, but we did! and even so it was located under a hostle so pertty much everyone was a backpacker and very chatty. had SO much fun which translates into being useless today! didn't do much, but it's raining so it makes it a bit more acceptable! i tried "hungry jacks" the aussie version of burger king. pretty good stuff. but that may have been influenced by the type of appetite i had!
i think of you all often and miss you all! again, i DO promise to send off some more personal emails a bit later on when we're more settled.
hope all is well at home and hope to hear from you guys soon! i miss knowing what's going on.
ps- marcy's bank has a dragon logo :)
xoxo
shan
chris- i'm going to try to txt you. i have a lot of free ones
pps- i have a cell now 04-1126-9105 free in coming calls