Charli's birthday

So Charli, one of the English girls who came over from Lancaster uni, recently turned nineteen, so she decided that the English lot and Flic and Tim (her Aussie house mates) should take the train a few stops north to a little village called Austinmer. The only things in Austinmer are a few houses, a beautiful beach, and fish and chip shop.

First things first though, I'm going to talk about the trains. It was a double decker (blah, blah, seen them before they're all over continental Europe), but then we also got told that you can flip the seats around to be either forward or backward facing! Needless to say, all of the English were dumbfounded, and every Australian in the vicinity looked at us funny. When we got to Austinmer we went to the chippy and found out that the standard "fish" in fish and chips is shark! So of course I had to have it. Once it had been battered and fried though it didn't taste any different to standard cod - bit of a let down really! Despite the shark/cod/shod, the portion sizes were huge given that we only paid $10, which is refreshing in Australia!

After letting our food digest for a bit, we went to the beach. At one end there were rocks with rock pools etc, and at the other end there was something which is apparently pretty common on Aussie beaches (probably worldwide, but I live under a rock), which was a pool that gets filled by the sea water. It was a pretty good beach - no one was there because it is, of course, the middle of winter here, so we had the whole beach to ourselves! We splashed around a little, played football (or "soccer" ...) and buried our feet to our hearts' contents until it started to go dark and we headed home.

The following Wednesday night, Charli had an opp shop (charity shop) party - something I'll definitely be bringing back to Sheffield. Everyone looked amazing, and for $10, I managed to get some technicolour boxer shorts that I just wore as normal shorts and a pruple Hawaiian shirt. Unfortunately I don't think anybody got any pictures of me! But I'm sure the outfit will be reused so you will get to see it one day!

Instead of getting the usual 8.30 party bus (which I'll tell you more about another time), we decided to get the 9.30 bus because Flic said so. I was very, very drunk, so I would have done anything anyone told me to do. To our devastation though, getting the later bus meant we missed the free pizza at the Grand! Never making that mistake again! Because I was so drunk and there was no pizza to sober me up, I was pretty much chucked out at 10.30 and decided it would be a great idea to walk home instead of getting a taxi. It must have taken about an hour, and should have just waited to get the free party bus home at midnight! I guess it's just another lesson learnt: Never listen to Flic.