Friday, May 18: Melbourne

This was bday day - so later in the evening I celebrated my decay. Before then however, I had to run a couple of errands:

1. En route to the city (about 40min on the train) I stopped at this big and marvelous juggling store in order to buy 5 balls (I had to mail my NZ ones to Israel since there was a good chance the Aussies wouldn't let me bring them in).

2. Afterwords I continued to the city in order to start the refund process for my ticket back to NZ. Of course it takes zero time to charge the card, but 8 weeks to refund it - what a bunch of wankers!

Once this was done, I returned home grabbed dinner and got back to the city to hang out with Ben, Nir and another dude (Ofer) whom they met at their backpacker, which is located in a place called St. Kilda - the "play area" of Melbourne.

Ben bought a car - 3800cc for crying out loud. He is supposed to get it Monday or Tuesday at which point we'll be leaving for the Great Ocean Road.

A few words about Nir: He is a professional "tripper" - i.e., he is very good at tripping people, which is most amusing as we were all trying to trip one another (he was kind enough to show us some tricks, but it seemed that he had years of practice). So we have all become very alert while walking, because you never know when you might be tripped..

Other than that we did some bar hopping. Unfortunately, people smoke in bars here. How revolting! Anyway, I almost got into a small fight with a drunk Australian dickhead about some pool. Oh well, fortunately for him I'm a rather calm chap. Otherwise there was one of him and 4 of us + some other 10 Israelis that were in the bar...

This is a date to remember - I actually had a drink today (well, I wouldn't have but the folks got me one for bday so I couldn't have said ''no'...). Finally, there was the issue of getting back home, which would have involved a cab + a bus. So early on we figured I'd sneak into their room (10 beds) and just use one. This is exactly what we did.