After arriving in Australia, my first point of call was to sort out my job, but i totally forgot that the weekend coming up was the 5-day Easter bank holiday weekend for Aussies, which meant most of the guys at the hostel were all off work and we could all arrange some group trips and of course do plenty of drinking.

On Sunday a group of us headed over to the local golf club. Although i have been golf before this was my first time on an 18-hole course, as previously i’ve only ever been on the range, or on the smaller 9-hole courses. Now it’s been a good year or so since i last played golf, and i cant really count the Wii fit in any of this, so unsurprisingly i played bad, actually i totally sucked.

I’m not sure why i enjoy golf so much, i love playing it but at the same time it’s the most frustrating game in the world. I’ve played countless times but if you don’t play regularly it doesn’t really matter. Out of 18-holes i honestly don’t think i did any more than three or four decent swings. The rest of the time was a shocking display.

The funny thing was i wasn’t actually the worst player of the day as one of the guys, Howard from the hostel was having a far worse time than me. My particularly favourite moment was when he hit a tree three times in a row, each time deflecting the golf ball further back than when he started. Needless to say he was our entertainment for the day and we all had a great time watching him.

For the Aussies, Easter weekend also goes on a day longer compared to Brits back home, as they also have ANZAC day. This is an important day for the Aussies and Kiwi’s, as it marks the anniversary of the first major military action carried out by the countries during the First World War. To recognise this, commemorative services are held at dawn and marches are carried out by ex-servicemen throughout the country.

In a totally unrelated way, it is also the only time in the year when Aussies can play 2up down the pubs. When i turned up in the afternoon, the game had already been playing for most of the day, and i could hear the crowds before we even got in. In the outside area of the pub a huge crowd had gathered around a guy who holds 2 pennies (the spinner) on a small piece of wood (the kip). The spinner tosses the coins in the air, and the crowd bet with each other on whether the coins will fall heads or tails. Whenever the game was about to start, everywhere i looked you would see people exchanging money between each other. The first thing that came to my mind is that if we played this back home, as soon as you would give your money to the random person they would most definitely run off with it.

Annoyingly by the time i got there, only a few more games were played and then it finished for the day so i never got to have a go. Though not having a job and having already spent quite a bit of money since arriving in Australia, i wasn’t really in the position to be handing money to people. Most of the guys who played had lost a bit of money, but Howard had won $50 from the game, so he was pretty chuffed.

Afterwards we all carried on drinking into the night, which was probably a very bad idea, as the next day all of us were off on our fishing trip. Luckily we didn’t have to get up too early, though Jon was feeling pretty rough and didn’t intend to come along until the last minute. Though he wasn’t to know this was a bad decision. After a train journey and short ferry to Watsons Bay we jumped on our fishing boat and headed out of the bay and out to sea. This is where it all started to go wrong.

As soon as we stopped we realised how much the boat was swaying from side-to-side and steadily one by one, we all started to feel pretty rough. For me just only recently eating a Hungry Jack’s (Burger King) i immediately started to feel pretty sea sick and after an hour or so of fishing, i finally had to throw up. Steadily everyone started to do the same, until out of 11 of us, 8 people had been sick. Thankfully it wasn’t a total waste of a hundred bucks, and i managed to catch a pretty decent fish. I even caught 2 on the same line, but being too small we chucked them back. For the rest of the day i didn’t catch a thing, but by the end of it we had caught about 10 fish between us all and we all headed back, the majority of us feeling pretty crap.

Glad to back on land, when we got back to the hostel i cooked up my fish (with a little help from someone at the hostel) in the oven and had it for dinner. I was pretty pleased with my cooking skills, it was the first time i had cooked fish and i did pretty well and it tasted delicious. It was a good way to finish my first week in Australia.