we interrupt your reading pleasure with some modern-day romance

Immediately following this post I am posting Day One of my Outback adventures, so please feel free to skip this reallllly long post on Andrei's visit and my parent's visit if you're so inclined. 'Cuz no one but us probably cares about the following :)

***

It was Thursday night, or rather the wee hours of Friday morning, only hours before Andrei's flight was scheduled to touch ground at the Sydney airport, and I was sitting on my couch with no desire to move an inch. Sitting there, I felt immensely thankful my roommate was still on her spring break trip, lest she were to try to rouse me from my nearly comatose state. Like the decent girlfriend I am, I promised Andrei I would be at the airport waiting for him when he arrived at 8AM, but at 3AM I was beginning to weigh just how much I liked the kid (quite a lot) against whether he would still like me if I stood him up in a foreign country (probably not). I hadn't showered since returning from a five-day epic journey through the Australian Outback, my clothes were all covered in a dusty layer of bright red Outback clay (the kind that is impossible to wash out), and all I wanted was a bowl of Cheerios, but unfortunately I had cleaned out the contents of my fridge the week before in preparation for my trip to Alice Springs.

But at that same moment, no doubt Andrei was being woken up every twenty minutes by some peppy flight attendant or being slept on by a morbidly obese man-woman on the 14-hour trans-Pacific flight. I figured there was at least *some* justice in the world.

Somehow I managed to get to bed by 4AM, having finished all the important tasks I had set out to do: washing and hanging up three week's worth of laundry, and plucking my eyebrows in preparation for Andrei's arrival. Looking back on it, none of those activities were really crucial since like most boys, Andrei doesn't care what his girlfriend wears or what condition her eyebrows are in. And people ask me why I don't wear makeup anymore.

At 8AM I was dutifully present at the airport and I was pondering whether it would be cheesy to buy some overpriced flowers/balloons/greeting cards (the greeting cards confused me a bit) when Andrei loped through the international arrivals gate, looking like some morbidly obese man-woman had indeed been using him as a pillow since San Francisco. Just kidding, he was as fresh as a spring daisy. Ok, just kidding, he smelled like he had been on a plane all day, and the second thing he said to me was, "Xu, I don't think I should've eaten all that airplane food."

Despite my sleep deprivation and Andrei's jetlag, we managed to get in a cab and make it back to UniLodge without falling asleep on each other. I was in a great mood to have him here with me in Australia, and Andrei was probably feeling pretty good thinking about all the suckers who were still in class at BU (he left Boston the Wednesday before the start of BU's spring break, effectively skipping all his classes Wed, Thurs, and Fri so that he could arrive in Australia on our Friday).

Upon arriving at UniLodge we showered and left the room around two in the afternoon once our bellies began aching for some Thai food. So we got some on Glebe Point Rd and returned to UniLodge, finally managing to drag ourselves out of bed hours later. That first afternoon I took Andrei around the necessary sights of Sydney (Opera House, Harbour Bridge, Darling Harbour) and instead of cramming in more touristy crap we stopped for beers at a harbour-side bar and watched the sun settle behind the docked sailboats (an A++ decision, and totally in character with the lazy bums that we are).

Posing with the Roo in Darling Harbour

We ate dumplings that night in Chinatown, and checked into the Holiday Inn Darling Harbour, which was about a five minute's walk from Darling Harbour and a 30 second walk to Chinatown (best location EVER for a hotel, I must say). We were bumped up to a bigger room with two queen-sized beds in it, and the clerk at the front desk winked at me and told me that if Andrei were to misbehave, I could always go sleep in the other bed. I gave Andrei a menacing look, and we all had a good laugh over this.

The next morning we took a train to the Blue Mountains and got off at the Blacktown station to visit Featherdale Wildlife Park along the way. This expansive wildlife park is located in the middle of Blacktown's residential area and is only accessible by one bus, which made me wonder what exactly the locals did for fun around there (Aw mom, not the Wildlife Park again!!). Incidentally, George Foreman and Nicholas Cage? have also visited the wildlife park, among other celebrities who got their pictures taken while petting koalas or carefully avoiding the emus. (Seriously, emus are crazy animals. Watch Mike Rowe's Dirty Jobs episode on emu farms if you don't believe me.)

Two Koalas Kissing -- way keute!

Me and Koala, who looks more excited?

Andrei as a Kangaroo (a pretty good imitation I must say)

Words can hardly describe how much fun Andrei and I had at Featherdale. We discovered our new favourite animal...the wombat! It looks like the love-child of a bear and a guinea pig, and best of all, it sleeps all day and only gets up to waddle around every few hours. Among other highlights of the wildlife park were the koalas we got to pet and the kangaroos and wallabies we could feed as they hopped lethargically around us. They were so fat and tame, which was probably expected since they munch all day on the ice cream cones and grains that tourists like us were shoving in front of their faces. And they didn't mind us petting them or little kids poking and prodding at them. At one point, to test the pacificity of one kangaroo (and just to be an idiot), Andrei attempted to place his aviator sunglasses on the kangaroo's face, and it definitely LOOKED unamused but didn't make much motion in protest. It was pretty funny, but I don't think I'll be sending the video to PETA any time soon.

Andrei's Kangaroo Experiment

After our animal adventure we rode another train up to Katoomba, the gateway into the Blue Mountains. We were picked up at the train station by the owner of Lurline House, the bed and breakfast where we stayed two nights. It was the most darling B&B, complete with cookies and tea upon arrival, an indescribably fantastic spa tub in the room, and made-to-order breakfasts in the cozy little dining room in the morning. By the time we arrived it was nearly 4 o'clock in the afternoon. In the last few hours of daylight Andrei and I managed to walk down Lurline Street to the Three Sisters and squeeze in a hike along the cliff walks nearby. It was really quite beautiful to watch the sunset and walk back into town.

The two of us at the Three Sisters

Since Katoomba is pretty much a ghost town at night, we ran over to the convenient neighborhood Liquorland and bought some beer and champagne. Then we made a pit stop for bubble bath at the Coles supermarket next door. When we got back to our room we were pretty giddy and thought we were being so romantic with the bubble bath and bubbly. Little did we know that it was industrial-strength bubble bath (or maybe I shouldn't have poured in half the bottle and then turned on the wildly powerful spa-jets). Five minutes later we were submerged under a mountain-sized amount of bubbles, and we spent the next ten minutes heatedly debating on just how to get rid of the bubbles. (Eventually I scooped up the excess bubbles and threw them into the separate shower room, where they remained without diminishing in bubbliness or volume long after we had both gotten out of the tub.)

The next morning Peter drove us to High 'N' Wild, an abseiling and canyoning tour company. Abseiling is synonymous with rappelling, i.e. using a rope and walking/hopping down cliffs. Canyoning is the practice of swimming, jumping, and grappling through narrow, claustrophobia-inducing canyons. Our day-long journey started with abseiling, a short canyoning experience, followed by an abseil down a 100-foot full-force waterfall. It was... quite intense.

At the office, they suited us up in straight-jacket-tight wetsuits and gave us abseiling equipment and helmets and sent us along to rappel down 50-foot cliff faces. Ok, it didn't really happen exactly like... We tried on wetsuits at the office and then stuffed that and all our gear into a waterproof bag. We were given helmets and harnesses for the rappelling. The harnesses wrapped around our butts and cinched at our hips. And of course, my harness was a little big on me so it looked like I had a big black diaper on me the entire time (it's a shame the pictures don't really capture how silly it looked). We were first driven to a five-meter cliff (v. small, about 15 feet tall) and taught how to rappel/abseil down it with ropes strung through our harness. Then we moved onto a taller 15-meter (50 foot) cliff and ordered to get down the cliff with just our ropes and our wits. Needless to say, it was quite the nauseating experience. For one thing, the Blue Mountains is half-covered in mist most of the day, and so looking down at the forest floor, all I could see was a canopy of trees that looked miles away and an eerie fog settling across the leaves. It was something out of a storybook, truly.

Me abseiling down 10-metre cliff

Andrei about to descend a 15-metre cliff

A view from above (notice how far down the trees are... gulp!)

After the amazing morning of abseiling, we broke for lunch. Our tour group consisted of a family of eight Australians, who were all at least 30, and who probably found Andrei and my lovestruck stupor for each other very aggravating. Nevertheless, they were super nice and very informative about Australian culture. Andrei and I picked up all sorts of Australian lingo from them, the most random of all being "bogan." (Go look it up if you're so inclined.) After lunch we climbed down a million flights of stairs to the forest floor and donned our incredibly, achingly tight wetsuits (which were actually rather flattering on second thought). Then we dove right into the bone-chillingly cold canyon water. With our bright yellow helmets on our heads and our waterproof, floating backpacks on our backs, we drifted along the currents of the canyon, stopping ever so often to jump off from rocks into adjoining pools or slide down some natural rock slides covered in thick slimy green moss. It was the adventure of the lifetime, and all the while surrounding us on each side were massively tall canyon rock walls that seemed to envelope us sinisterly. If it weren't for our frequent whooping and screams of delight you would never have known we were there. It was something out of a ghost story, mixed with a dash of National Geographic.

Finally, at the end of the canyoning portion we reached the top of a giant waterfall over 100 feet tall. Our guides calmly set up the ropes and Andrei and I were among the first to rappel down the waterfall. It sounds pretty scary--"Oh hey guess what I rappelled down a waterfall"--and it WAS pretty scary. At one point my rope got too much slack and suddenly I found myself hanging upside-down on one rope in the middle of the rapid-flowing waterfall, with the water rushing down and smashing me in the face continuously. The guides had hinted that it was possible we would end up upside-down if the rope got too loose, but they never mentioned how to correct it--so for a crazy twenty seconds I couldn't think of what to do. I could hear nothing but the water cascading down the rocks and feel nothing but the water hitting my face and getting up my nose. Meanwhile, all I could think was, "Jesus, of all the ways to die, I am going to die from drowning upside down, hanging on a rope in the middle of a waterfall. What a way to go."

Somehow I managed to pull myself up and get right-side-up. From there I got down to the bottom of the waterfall with no more major mishaps. The rocks behind the waterfall were slippery, and every so often my feet would slip out from under me and I would hit the rock, BAM, before I spun around a few times on the rope and renegotiated my feet back into proper position. It was awesome and one of the scariest things I've ever done.... and I probably looked like a total idiot. Once at the bottom of the waterfall I let lots of slack through my rope, and dropped not-so-gracefully into the pool below with a big splash before unbuckling my ropes and swimming to shore. From there I could only see the last half of Andrei's descent, and although he swears that he was just as ungraceful and ungainly as I was coming down, I think he probably abseiled circles around me, so to speak.

We stripped off our wetsuits after getting out of the water and dried off before trudging up literally a thousand stairs to get back up to the van. By the time we got back to the office we were all exhausted and I could barely even swallow the free after-tour beer (both because I was tired and because I am a lightweight. Andrei finished mine, a pattern that will likely continue and lead to his inevitable future alcoholism if he continues to date me).

For dinner, we went to a nearby cafe called Common Ground that is run by a group of modern-day hippies/cult-members (it's hard to draw the line). A group of about thirty adults and their young children live in a commune housed above the cafe, and all the members of the commune work in the cafe, pooling together the money and splitting the labor and profits. I had an amazing barramundi burger washed down with a drink that the teenage girl behind the counter had just created and asked us to try. It tasted exactly like a peanut butter and banana sandwich with a hint of honey--in a milkshake form. It was supremely satisfying and I didn't want to ask what was really in it.

Our walk back to the B&B was really surreal. It was only 9PM as we started heading back, but the entire town of Katoomba was covered in a dense, greyish white fog that muted all the street lights and created a sense of foreboding. The clouds above began releasing fine droplets of water that coated the streets and made the asphalt look slick and shiny like a dark river. My heart was pounding every time I could see a figure in the distance. I would turn to Andrei and ask, "Can we cross the street? That person over there looks like an axe murderer." To which Andrei would always patiently reply, "That's not an axe, that's the guy's umbrella." It was a much longer and cautious journey back to Lurline House, since walking every block felt like being in a horror movie. It was so other-wordly, but by the time we arrived to our room and turned on all the lights, we laughed it off like little kids and forgot all about it.

The next morning we headed back to Sydney so that I could go to class, and then Tuesday morning I started my internship at VE+T and delicious. It was pretty shit timing that Andrei was visiting during my first week at work, but it ended up working out all right in the end. We would hang out at nights and go to restaurants or bars and usually end up back at the hotel room at an embarrassingly early hour like 10 o'clock.

Andrei in front of the QVB, holding his precious bubble tea


Us at the Opera House

Yesterday I asked Andrei what exactly he did those days while I was at work, but all he could really come up with was eating pastries at the Chinese bakery down the street and walking to Newtown a few times just to look around. And reading the newspaper. I can't say this with absolute authority, but based on empirical evidence I think Andrei is going to make a very good old dude one day. In fact, I can already see him turning out to be like my Chinese grandfather, walking down the street--hands clasped behind his back--and slowly waddling to the next cafe or park bench or other old dude hangout.

Epic Shot of Andrei, Sydney Skyline, and the beautiful blue Australian sky from the Manly Ferry

That Saturday I took Andrei to one of the mandatory sights of Sydney: a Sydney beach. We took the ferry over to Manly Beach and it was an exquisitely beautiful ferry ride. By the time we got the beach we were only able to lay out for about 30 minutes before it began to rain and so ducked under awnings and walked around the town of Manly a bit before attempting the coastal walk to Spit Bridge. We only got about twenty minutes away from the town before we sat down on a park bench and enjoyed watching all the dogs and their owners passing by. We decided that the 4 hour walk to Spit Bridge was highly overrated (code for we were too lazy to do it) and so we trudged back to find dinner.

Sunday was Andrei's last day in Sydney, and the day my parents and Kevin arrived. I picked them up at the airport and we all met up in Chinatown for one rousing meal of dim sum. It was utterly delicious, and A+ to Andrei being so chill with my parents. (Sidenote: Since meeting my parents in KC over Thanksgiving, Andrei has began his process of fitting into the Xu family, and it is all-together very cute and disturbing, considering I am only 20 and my parents are already talking about when I'll be popping out babies.)

Having Andrei in Sydney was great, but it was even better to have my family arrive the same day he left. Being away from my family never ceases to make me appreciate them more, and even more so since I've been away across the world for the last three months. I got to stay at their hotels and show them around Sydney when they weren't traveling to Cairns, New Zealand, or the Blue Mountains. Most notably, we had a TON of Chinese food (literally no meal they had in Sydney was NOT in Chinatown), and we walked through the city parks to visit the Art Gallery of NSW, which I had never been to on my own.

I think what surprised me the most about my family's visit was how TALL my brother has grown. Kevin is now officially taller than me, and not just by a hair, but by a noticeable amount. It's seriously depressing, especially since I remember the days when I used to be able to use his head as an arm rest....

Kevin the giant.

Final picture: mom and dad got me and Kevin a cake for our birthday!