A Bushwalking We Had Gone!

We went trekking at the Royal National Park, the second oldest national park after Yellowstone in the USA. It was one of the best days I've ever had in a lo-o-o-ng time. It was beautiful, I can't think of any other way to describe it. Just purely beautiful and perfect.

Of course, it helps that I'm such an appreciative person and a true, true lover of wildness and nature :-) I found everything beautiful, and I, not less than once, heard 'Jerusha, those are just weeds!' I don't care if they are weeds, they were still beautiful to me. I wonder who decided to brand them as weeds in the first place. I can consider them God's ready made garden flowers. Never weeds.
It's been years since I've done any real trekking, but I was surprised at how good I still was. We decided to stray off the track and climb down some rocks closer to the sea and walk along it instead. I still don't run out of energy, I have never needed help climbing down, or up, or squeezing through crevices, and I found out I still don't, unlike the other trekkers, heights still don't scare me, a jump from a challenging height and landing safely still makes me glow a little with pride.

The white sands and limestones were amazingly...white. They hurt my eyes and I couldn't find my shades but conveniently found several strips of aspirin in my backpack. What would I do without aspirin!
We came upon this beach - Little Marley, I think it's called. Completely empty, stretched out all for us. It was like having our own private beach. It was pretty hot and we had been trekking for quite a few hours, so finding this little isolated beach was like finding paradise. And it being there all empty meant stripping and owning the water :-)
This is the rocky side of the beach - look at how clear the water is!And chock full of living creatures. A crag on the sea side will hold so many varied life forms I could understand for a minute what drives people to want to be marine biologists. This little pool of water, what would look like a small puddle on our Mizoram roads after a heavy downpour, had that much starfishes and sea anemones and other molluscs inhabiting it.

One thing that stuck me was how much the people here seem to care for the environment and animals. Everytime I picked up a starfish, or something of the like, Kate kept reminding me to not touch the inside because the sunscreen on my hands would make it sick.

We ate our lunch under a low hanging rock, then trekked back and went for a swim at Wattamolla. And that's Wattamolla right there -
I finally wore a bikini, in public, for the first time in my life. Jinx, you were right. I was so comfortable in it, it felt like I had worn it all my life. Well I'm exaggerating a bit but yeah, I was not overly shy or conscious. In fact, I'm gonna go buy myself a second pair, maybe even a third pair, since I'll be spending a whole week snorkeling at the Great Barrier Reefs soon.

Katie also taught me how to float, I loved it so much that my entire time at Wattamolla was spent floating. I never would have believed I could be such a good floater. I guess it must be the empty head :0)

The whole trip also made me turn green with envy - why can't we have these beautiful, blue waters, these blue skies, these beautiful weeds, these green grass instead of our plastic garbage laden lakes and streets? In the end, I still believe it all comes down to our frigging uncontrollable population. What can be done about this?

*groan* I can't believe I'm moving on to negatives again. Despite all my new found complaints, I have also discovered so many things I never realised before that I love about India. But am saving that for a new post.

Why I’d Hate To Die

How many times do you think of death and dying? “How, when, where, why….”

I wonder about death every day. I know it's a morbid topic to dwell on and I have been told that it’s unhealthy and sick. But if I do think about death and dying, it’s mostly because I love being alive so much, that there are so many things I would hate to leave if I have to die. And it’s not about having suicidal tendencies, or unhealthy obsessions. Death is the great unknown. It’s natural to be curious.

My life is so blessed and I’m so happy to be the person living this life, to be in this moment of time and space, to be alive and breathing. I’m lucky to be waking up every day on top of the world – both rhetorically and literally :-)

I’m not pretending to have the perfect life. There are still so many things that I’d change if I could. I have raged against my parents for ever bringing me into this world. I have prayed and cried and raged against God and accused Him of being unfair and denying me even my simplest dreams.

Still, I have always believed that human beings are more good than bad, that I’d find more good people than bad people, that it is easier to love than to hate, that it is easier to like other people and be liked than dislike or be disliked. That there are more good music than bad music. More good than bad in this world - in simple words.

I believed that if I can make an effort to be truthful, people will be truthful to me. If I can make an effort to be loyal and faithful and loving, I will be truthfully loved in return.Yet, I have been lied to and cheated on. I have been made to feel like I have nothing in me to love, to be proud of, I have felt like I was trampled on, dirty, a fool to be jeered at. I have hurt so much that I got out of my bed and slept on the floor – because I didn’t know what else to do.

But the beautiful thing is that you wake up the next day and if you allow it, it’s not going to hurt as bad, and wounds do heal, if we’ll let them. Dignity and pride can be regained. I don’t always wake up feeling like the fool I felt I was the night before. I love life for this choice I have. Whether to stay defeated, or to rise and walk away.

Despite all the mistakes I've made, life is still good to me. I got a promotion, when I was least expecting it. Hoorah for me! Only snag’s that it has to happen while I’m here in the Sydney office, if you can call it a snag. And a previously non-existent ‘project’ that I’ve been secretly dreaming about has suddenly appeared out of nowhere and offered to me – to be owned and done with as little ole me pleases. I thank God for all these - also the biggest bonus I’ve seen in my life :-) (Not at all about the money, but the fact that my work is being appreciated). Also meetings where I suddenly find my picture and my name being projected on a screen and everyone is applauding for me. It’s like a dream.

And I’m rambling. And I haven’t gotten to the more important parts. But I will save those for a new post. I’m also happy that it’s a Friday evening, that it’s been a fulfilling week, and the weekend’s got exciting plans for it that I’m excited like a kid!

Me To Earth

Hi everyone. Not to sound like a loser, but I'm kind of homesick, well just a little, but yeah, I can't wait to be home. I can't wait for it to be Christmas and I'm home and I can "ruai theh" - the true, indigenous, tribal way.

That doesn't mean that I don't like it here. I love the office and the people. I love the city, how clean and how beautiful everything is. But, it seems to me that Sydney is a very slippery city. Yeah, slippery. In the literal sense. I'm not graceful really, but I have never been a klutz either. I don't even remember the last time I slipped and fell. That is, before I came to Sydney. Then Sydney happened, and I've had several ground-encounters already.

The last time I fell, I fell pretty hard. I had been dreaming about falling hard, but not this kind of falling hard. Anyway, this may be gross, but I took a picture anyway, since the last time I got something like this was when I was 8 maybe ? :-)Friday night, we were a little bored eating in restaurants in the same street, so we decided to have a nice girls' night out. Got all dolled up, hailed a taxi and ventured out to the deeper recesses of the city. It was fun, had a great time, then a taxi took us home. An almost perfect night...but when I stepped out of the cab, something went very wrong, so that my knees touched the ground faster than my feet did. And there I was, splat on the pavement in the middle of a busy street, in my little black dress and my high heels, knees badly scraped and bleeding, then I think what people call 'zoning out' happened to me. It was too embarrassing to even be embarrassing, if you know what I mean. Now I have an ugly big bruise on my knee which hopefully will remind me to watch my steps, and hopefully will also be the last of its kind here.

And now, the things I love - the beaches mostly. This one is Bondi (Jinx, per your recommendations :-))
I love the beaches, and I can sit there the whole day and still never get over how clean and pure the air and the water is. Bliss for my lungs, and I now smoke like maybe only one cigarette a day.

One reason I like going to the beaches are the ferry rides and other boat rides I can take to go there. To be on a boat, with the clear blue sky overhead, and the pristine blue waters, and the wind on my face...***sigh*** Moments like those, it's almost possible to believe that I've never known sadness. One of our ferry rides -
I was in Bondi the whole day yesterday. There was this 'Sculpture By The Sea' thing going on. I don't care much for sculpture, but yesterday's was pretty interesting even for artistically-demented citizens like me. I thought this one was pretty cool -
I admire their genius and deep thinking and all that, but I'll never pay $8000 for something like this, even if I had more money than I know what to do with. Well, whatever amount I'm supposed to pay for them, I just wouldn't want to buy them at all.

But I found something I could genuinely appreciate (...but sadly couldn't buy. Life always works that way doesn't it?) -
Yep. Skateboarders. Skateboarding is the only sport that I've been able to watch for hours without dying of boredom. And to watch it live was absolutely thrilling. (I hope it's okay to use their pictures, the world is so frigging testy about privacy and copyright and all that crap nowadays I'm afraid to do what would have been perfectly okay during the Stone Age :P).
They were so good, me and my friend stopped at the rink and didn't move for several hours, and hardly even talked.We just stood and watched and sighed. There was this one guy who was really good (not in picture), and my friend would show signs of glee every time he'd come on, then after watching him for a while, she dreamily said out of the blue - "I think I'm partly in love with him.." Yeah me too, I think I want a skateboarder, not a sculpture :P

Now for the depressing part - this is me and Seva, doing the first thing we always do the moment we step in -
That's green tea ice cream on my hand, and ginger beer on hers. Shameless really, cos' we get depressed when our clothes don't fit us the way we want them to, yet gorging on ice-cream. But I have fallen in love with green tea ice cream. The thought of coming back to a green-tea-ice-cream-less-India is, in fact, a little disturbing...


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Manly Beach

For the sake of an update. And also because I think I did a pretty good job on this picture, not easy to click at the exact moment the waves break against the shore and they reach their optimal height (click on pic and see how 'optimal'!), and I also caught a boat speeding away, and a man fishing...

Such is Sydney!

It's a Tuesday afternoon, and it's also the Melbourne Cup day. I betted on a horse called Blue Monday, but a horse called Efficient won. Never been lucky when it comes to money *sigh*

So at 3, we went down to the cafe where they'd put up two giant projectors where we could all watch the race. And champagne, wine, and beer flowed. And all sorts of food waiting to be eaten. And this is work :-)

Now remind me why I don't mind losing $5 betting on the wrong horse? :D

(Also check out the new 'About me' section. That's from the poem called 'Phenomenal Woman' by Maya Angelou. I've never found a poem that describes me better.)

HELPPP!

I don't know if this is happening for anyone else but MyBlogLog won't let me sign in! And I just can't help but blame Yahoo. I started using it considerably less after Yahoo took over, because they made changes that didn't make sense, the overall result of which was that MyBlogLog became less user-friendly and more user-hostile.

And now, for the past several days now, when I try to log in (with the demanded yahoo account), and then it takes me to that next page where it asks you if you have an existing account, or if you're new. I go to existing account option, where I enter my old account info, then it tells me that that's already been merged, so to create a new account or something. I've tried everything, and I can't go any further than that. What am I not doing right?

I don't want a new account, I just want to access my regular, existing account.

Also, my peeps who writes me on mybloglog, since everything's been fucked nice and lovely, and I don't even get email notifications anymore, and I can't even read messages or reply, scrap me on Orkut or something, anything other than MyBlogLog.

Would also love to have some advice on bloglog alternatives...

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