Burleigh Heads

I wanted to check out Rainbow Bay on Boxing Day, and I was running low on bread as well, so I took a stroll to Aldi's in Tweeds. I went out late, but the shop doesn't close till 6PM anyway, so I walked around town for a bit. Bought myself a coconut juice from the grocer that cost me $4!! Went through the mall and found that there's a cinema upstairs. They were playing American Hustle, Anchorman2, Hobbit2, and Hunger Games2. I was gonna come back and maybe catch a movie, but then saw the tickets were $15 for a regular movie!!! And I thought $12 was expensive back home for AVX. Then I headed towards where I thought was Rainbow Bay, passed by where I got dropped by by the Greyhound, and ended up on the other side of Rainbow Bay where there was a grass bit and a circus was either setting up or taking down, and a boardwalk along the water. I just sat by the water and watched the sparrows flew around me. A few of them landed on the cables on the railings and kinda created music notes. I went and got my bread just before Aldi's closes. Passed by the little carnival that they had set up in town. It was really small with only like 5 rides and a few game stalls, mostly for kids.

A couple European girls checked into my room that night and in the morning they just kept making a ruckus talking really loud, coming in and outta the room, slamming doors. I don't know if they didn't care that there were people still sleeping or they didn't know, but it was really annoying. I finally got up and was about to go for a morning shower when a bloke stopped me and asked if I had anything planned for the day because he was looking for something to do as well and was looking for company I guess. I told him we could meet up after I've had my shower and some breaky. His name is Saul and he's a local Aussie, apparently a life guard. He said he could show me around town, so we just hopped on the bus and headed north.

First we stopped at Tugun because he wanted to get Subway. Then we went to Currumbin. I'd already been to the sanctuary, so he took me to Surf World across the street. It was a showcase of evolution of surfboards, some of them looked pretty funky. There was even a gigantic surfboard that was in the guinness record for having the most surfers (47) riding a single board. Then we went to a surf club for a couple drinks, that's when I learned that surf clubs are basically restaurants where anybody could go eat and drink, but primarily they are surf life saving clubs where parents send their kids to learn about surf life saving, or you could join to become a surf life saver, lifeguards basically. Apparently it's a big thing in Australia.

We got to Burleigh where was actually one of the places I wanted to check out. Walked down a strip of shops, went into a drum store with a bunch of aboriginal crafts and other musical instruments, and people were playing bongos. We also went into an organic nut shop. I wanted to get some chocolate covered dried bananas but 2 scoops of them would've cost me $11!! So I got some chocolate covered peanuts for $1 and a few chocolate covered strawberries. We went to Burleigh Beach for a bit while Saul went for a dip in the water. We started heading back because I wanted to catch the piano man playing at the Southern Cross Tavern, the one 5min walk from the hostel. When we got there the piano man was on his break, so we just got ourselves a drink and played pool. It was pretty dead for the pub on a Friday night, don't know if it's just OZ or it's the holidays and everyone's away but it seemed pretty sad, and the bartender said they'd be closing around 8.30PM. So we decided to share a 6pk from the bottle shop and went back to the hostel. We sat outside and just talked till just before midnight and I was getting pretty tired from all the walking today, plus Saul was starting to creep me out by the end of the night, crossing boundaries.... I'll be keeping away from him from now on.