Went to SegaWorld yesterday afternoon. I got a picture of Owen and Felicia
with Sonic the Hedgehog. We played a few games and got on a few rides, but
there were lines for everything and it got old after while. I played a game
called Indy 500, which was pretty kick-ass.

Then I went back to Eva's to play cards with total strangers. Met a girl
named Victoria, who is "not from London but very close to it". I told her I
was "not from Houston but very close to it". She also wanted to travel up
the coast by bus, so I might run into her again.

This morning, while eating my Bubbles (the Australian counterpart to Rice
Krispies) and reading Who (the Australian counterpart to People Magazine), I
discovered that my future wife, Sarah Michelle Gellar, was at the Sydney
Opera House for New Year's. It's fate, I tell you. Tom Cruise and Nicole
Kidman were also there, in one of the boats in the Harbour. By the way,
Sydney's New Year's fireworks were voted the best in the world.

Then I went across the street to Oz Experience, supposedly the best local
touring company and travel agency. Their tours are exclusively for
backpackers and tourists like me. The buses are full, rowdy, and
adventurous. The bus driver is the tour director, stopping at all of the
touristy sites, giving us a bit of history along the way. Other local
companies, like Greyhound and McCafferty's, offer plain old bus rides
without any special stops or touring.

I booked a tour up the coast to Cairns, and left the rest of my trip open
for the time being. There's so much I want to do, and so many different
ways of doing it, that I decided that I'll just book it as I go. If I
really like Oz Experience, I'll just stick with them for the rest of my trip
around the country.

I leave Monday morning at 8:50am. Should take a few weeks just to get to
Cairns. I'm considering extending my trip a month so I can visit Tasmania
and New Zealand, making my return to Houston some time in April. No regrets.
That's my slogan for my Australia trip. Sure, I'll be taking a large chunk
out of my life savings to have all this fun, but if life savings aren't for
crazy trips to Australia, I don't know what they're for.

I will definitely be e-mailing less frequently while I'm on the road, since
I'm not sure where I'll be able to stop to dial in with my iBook. Finding a
phone line to use in Sydney was difficult enough, and finding a phone line
in the outback will be even tougher.

Decided to treat myself this afternoon to a yummy chicken sandwich at Cafe
191 on Oxford St. I'm sitting next to some deck doors which are wide open,
with the sun streaming in and a cool breeze blowing across my table. I'm
sipping an ice cold Coke, which came out of a bottle, so it tastes fresher
somehow. All the waiters are prancing around me in tight black tank tops,
and they're playing a techno remix of Cemine Dion's "Your Heart Will Go On".

Thanks to the posting of my letters in Netsurfer Digest, I've been getting
e-mail from total strangers. I got a couple from people who have moved here
from the US and one yesterday from a Sydney taxi driver who carts
backpackers like me around Sydney all day long. He told me that
experiencing Sydney through the eyes of a foreigner is refreshing, and that
I should submit my letters to the Sydney Morning Herald.

Leslie: The Contiki tours are very expensive, more than double the price of
what I'm looking at now...

More oddities:

-There are no entrances or exits, only a "Way In" and a "Way Out".
Furthermore, restaurants don't have "pick-up" or "take-out" orders, only
"take away".

-Cockatiels (I think that's what they are) fly around free in Sydney.

Until next time,

Jeff