Tangalooma has been on our list for so long. We missed out on the QLD Beach Volleyball Tour Stop in February, and we didn’t end up going for my birthday due to bad weather. But mom’s last weekend here we booked it in. Only for the day. But what a day it was! We had the water package and didn’t sit still for one moment. Except for lunch. By which time we were all so exhausted.
In one week’s time, Mikael and I have explored Natural Bridge in Springbrook National Park in full. During the day, in the twilight, and in the dark in the company of glow worms.
After 14 months in Australia, my mom has finally arrived after one hell of a trip. All went well, she slept most of the way, but taking off at 9pm local time, flying three flights for 25 hours and landing 6am local time must be rough. We were lucky to have a super early flight and landing late at night. But flying in so early in the morning, we had to keep her awake until it was time to go to bed to make sure she wasn’t suffering from too much jetlag.
I do believe we did a good job of keeping her awake. Breakfast at Alkemist, 6 koalas and hundreds (probably, I lost count) of kangaroos at Coombabah and dinner at Fricken Chicken in Broadbeach. It would have been on the beach if it hadn’t started pouring along with some distant thunder out at sea.
Mikael and I signed up for another free event from the City of Gold Coast and ended up in one of my favorite places in our hometown: Coombabah, but this time trying to spot and hear birds rather than koalas.
GC Botanical Gardens in Benowa was the perfect place to regain some energy after a period of intense work for both of us. Lots of beautiful nature and wildlife.
Highlight of the day: Our very first snake in Australia since moving here eight months ago!
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I haven’t done too many hikes in my life, well a few. But Warrie Circuit in Springbrook National Park was definitely one of the best ones. Hot tips: Go after a period of heavy rain to lose count of how many waterfalls you see.
Don’t forget to scroll down to the very end of the post to see a couple of videos that I filmed and edited, almost all by myself (Mikael the pro helped of course).
Due to the ever changing weather in SEQ QLD, we decided to take a last minute mini camping vacation up north to Noosa Heads where we hadn’t been before. It was both the perfect and worst day for it.
Continue readingDue to the ever changing weather in SEQ QLD, we decided to take a last minute mini camping vacation up north to Noosa Heads where we hadn’t been before. It was both the perfect and worst day for it.
Continue readingToday was a fun day, 16 000 steps, not too much. We did two things, or three really: Petite France and Nami Island and then ended the day with Meerkat Friends, an animal café in Hongdae.
Petite France
This was part of the tour we got from Klook, to visit the small village that was supposed to look like France. It was cute, but I have been to both Paris and Marseille in France and almost 2 hours of walking around there was a bit too much. Usually the stops at tours are too short, but not this one. Here is a picture of what it looked like in 360. What is funny about this place is that, almost nothing was actually French, lots of German old ceramics, paintings from Italian painters and so on. But I guess that doesn’t really matter for the Asian tourists coming there who never went to Europe.
I miss exercising, so this was at least a small effort today.
In Petite France, there were Swedish stamps.
Nami Island / Namiseom / Naminara Republic of Korea
The main stop for this tour was Nami Island, which is also its own country since 2006: Naminara Republic of Korea. It has its own passport and even currency and government. It is a small half-moon-shaped island, only 5km in circumference. Really pretty place and Winter Sonata, a K-drama has been filmed there. It was pretty, but most of the leaves had fallen off the trees compared to in Seoul. This was an island located in the city of Chuncheon, about 1.5h from Seoul.
There was a main boulevard with restaurants, the famous Metasequoia Lane and other cute stuff. Many snowmen which I think are from the TV series? We had lunch, I tried tteokbokki carbonara. Really delicious. Tteokbokki is stir-fried rice cakes.
We were there for about 3 hours. I will let the pictures speak for themselves. Here is a 360 picture as well.
This is the place where the first kiss between two people on the show Winter Sonata took place.
There weren’t many red trees, but the few ones were glowing and lighting the dull surroundings up.
A pine tree that turn yellow.
Snowman-shaped tteokbokki of course.
I decided to try to be half-asian at least. No posing here!
This is the most bizarre statue I have ever seen.
And of course, the other tit is on her back, feeding the other kid, haha.
The famous Metasequoia lane.
These colors!!
Haha, why bother removing the selfie stick when taking a call.
A setting sun over Seoul was amazing on the way back when we were stuck in rush hours trafic.
We got back to Dongdaemun after 5pm and decided to quickly check out the Dongdaemun Design Plaza for a bit before heading to Hongdae and the special café. It was such a cool place! Here is a 360 picture of it, or at least the bottom of it.
There was a LED rose garden there. Really pretty.
We then took the metro to Hongdae where we went to Meerkat Friends café. It was a cafe with meerkats and other animals such as racoon, cats, wallaby, foxes. It was the cutest place and the animals were so nice and friendly. We even got to feed them all. It was a nice place and it honestly felt like the animals had a good time there with big windows, so much air, and it was kept very clean. Six of the meerkats fell asleep in my lap, the racoon wanted to escape and begged for food. The foxes were so adorable and one of the wallabies had a baby in its pouch. We were there for a long time and got unreasonably many pictures, but due to space limitations, I can’t upload them now, sorry. I will as soon as I possibly can though!
UPDATE 2018-11-10: I didn’t want to wait, but decided to upgrade my blog. I have now 6GB, that should at least be enough for this trip! Here comes the pictures from Meerkat Friends.
They were digging everywhere to try and find food. My hair was completely ruined after those 10 minutes in that Meerkat pen.
When they calmed down and realized I didn’t have any food, they climbed up in my lap one after one and fell asleep. Eventually I had 6 of them sleeping there! So adorable!
Baby meerkat playpen!
One of the babies had a cast!
This was one was not allowed to be touched because she has a baby in her pocket!
Feeding and kissing foxes.
So beautiful creatures!
The most beautiful cat ever. I’m glad my cats can’t read this.
New profile pic everywhere perhaps?
This post used to contain pictures, but due to new storage limitations from WordPress, I had to fix the problem and decided to create a new blog that works as an archive for all the posts from my two years in California. This full post can be found here.
It was harder than I anticipated to update my blog while couchsurfing, even with a good wifi. I will try to remember what we did all the days.
MONDAY
Monday started in a very good way with breakfast in the sun with a view over the Golden Gate Bridge. It was a perfect start of the day. Right after that we took an uber to the Cable Car museum and I was surprised at what I learned there. It is not just a museum, but the place which runs the whole cable car system. I don’t know why I thought it was called a “cable car”, but clearly the logic didn’t hit me. So under the city there are cables pulling the cable cars and they are being powered in this cable car museum. Pretty cool!
The rest of the day we went shopping at Union Square. I didn’t buy much, but necessary thing. We went to Nordstrom Rack for the first time ever and I bought two pair of underwear and a bra. I also bought a pair of jeans at Gap. They fit like a glove and I didn’t even need to think about it. They were perfect!
In the evening Julianne and three other girls from SLO came into the city from north and we had dinner together close to where Helena and I was staying. We had crepes and it was so good. I have been so unhealthy in San Francisco and that needs to stop now! My stomach’s been hurting real bad.
We saw the bridge every single day!
There was a big group of surfers in the bay, but no waves so they just paddled back and forth.
Here are the cables that run the whole SF cable car system.
We walked through Chinatown.
TUESDAY
Yesterday morning Helena, Patrick and I went for brunch and then to Sutro Baths. In the late 19th century it was the world’s biggest private indoor swimming pool but it was too expensive to run, it was closed and while being demolished in 1966 an arsonist burned it to the ground. Now there are only some concrete walls left. It was a cool spot.
Then we drove (luxury not to be limited to ubers, but have a driver) to Castro District and walked around there for a bit. Went through Mission Dolores Park and sat down for a fika. Oh, right, the Castro is the gay district in San Francisco.
Patrick then dropped us off at Jacob’s place and we said goodbye. Helena and I were craving sushi and found a place with good ratings on Yelp called Akiko. We went there and it was the tiniest place ever, but we came before everyone else and managed to get a spot by the “bar”. We ordered so much sushi and it was so delicious! I love sushi.
It was still early when we got out, so we found a bar and sat there until midnight. I had four drinks and I haven’t had that much to drink since beginning of January. I was pretty buzzed, haha! We went to a bar called Sugar Café and I really liked it. The bartenders didn’t check our ID’s and we had tabs and I felt so like a grown up!
On our way home we stopped for pizza slices and then took an uberpool back. I think the driver and the guy with us thought we were crazy Europeans for getting drunk on a Tuesday, haha! They were laughing the whole ride. It was the most fun uber ride I have had so far.
Castro District.
Limited edition gay Absolut Vodka.
Mission Dolores Park was full of hippies of all kinds. It was a weird place.
Pretty view over SF.
Helena at Sugar Cafe.
WEDNESDAY
Today we didn’t do much more than getting breakfast and then started the long traveling down to San Diego. First we took an uber to the closest BART station, then took the BART to the airport where we missed the first train going around the terminals and I almost got cut in half by the doors, then flew down to San Diego, and then I had a long uber ride up to SLO.
I was excited to ride the BART for the first time. It is the subway-whatever system they have in SF and we have talked about it a lot in my classes at Cal Poly. It was okay, but very loud…
The flight was 1.5 hour long but very nice. The flight attendants were friendly and the pilot was funny sometimes. I saw SLO when we flew over it, that was cool.
It was hard finding an uber at the airport, but I finally got one, and he drove me to SDSU where I looked at an amazing apartment if I get an internship here in San Diego. It was a big room in an apartment and in the complex was a pool, a gym, a movie theatre and close to trolleys. It was the perfect place. Everything was included in the rent and it was only $840. Too good to be true! Let’s just hope I get the internship now :).
The uber driver waited for me and then drove me all the way up to San Diego. All of this for only $67. Super awesome!!
I got to the house at 8pm, hung out with the kids a little bit, but not too much since they still had homework to do.
I should really go to bed now if I am to get up at 5:30 so I will be down in Mission Beach at 7am for beach volleyball practice! What will one don’t do for love?! (love for beach volleyball)
Two long days are at its end and I could probably fall asleep standing if I just let myself. Yesterday after work me and Chad went to Landvetter to camp for a night. We found a nice spot right next to a lake, put up the tent and everything and then went in the water before the sun set. It wasn’t cold at all in the water but I didn’t want to stay in for too long, it would have been very cold when the sun was gone. We had dinner after that, some cold cuts and a tuna/bacon/pasta salad which were both really good. And when you are camping you have to make a fire, so we did that too and sat by it until we ran out of firewood. Spent a short while on the beach after that and watched the starry sky. We even saw a few shooting stars. Very romantic!
I slept until 9am and I couldn’t go back to sleep so I read for an hour until Chad woke up. We slept very comfortable on two air matresses tightly put together and with a sheet on top of it it looked like a real bed. Surprisingly comfy.
This was the view over the sunset from our tent. Sweden is so beautiful!
After that our big mission was to get all of his stuff to my place. So first we packed the last of his things, rented a van and drove all of it to my place. It didn’t take that long but it was rough. And especially in this heat and with his heavy couch that we put in my basement. I am gonna be so sore in my arms and hands tomorrow.
The whole evening we have been unpacking and I have packed most of my clothes. I am just gonna stay in Sweden for a little more than a month so I might as well pack most of it now when he needs somewhere to put his clothes too.
We aren’t completely done yet, but we’re getting there. It probably will be done tomorrow, at least I hope so. I think I will go to bed now, I am starting to see double…
Bemm 