Bronze me up Hawko! A JBronze self tanner review

Something new and interesting today – and totally different – dear readers! A product review! None of that travel nonsense and Christmas hoo ha I normally write about. Nope, today I’m going to be extra white girl trashtastic and blog about fake tan.

So I haven’t used fake tan many times in my life. Maybe…five times. At the most. This was all mostly when I was at university and you know, concentrating on anything apart from my studies. Despite this relative inexperience I have miraculously never come away with fake tan hands (it just makes sense to scrub the shit out of your hands after applying fake tan doesn’t it?) or dreadful fake tan marks around my ankles or elbows.

Anyway, as is like, a must, for women’s magazines at this time of year, I recently came across an article titled ‘A beginner girl’s guide to becoming a bronzed goddess’. It detailed every, well, detail, about the art of fake tanning, from exfoliating to tanning gloves to the vast array of products on the market.

One of the products featured was this great stuff the magazine recommended by Le Tan that saw your bronze-ness develop in just 30 minutes. I snapped a pic of it on my iphone, intrigued, and kept it there for about two weeks to remind myself next time I was at the shops to perhaps pick up a bottle and that this was the bottle to try.

So Sunday morning I’m at Claremont Quarter amongst the wealthy Perth set who must cry over the fact that they can’t do their food shopping at QC’s David Jones because the store doesn’t have a foodhall, when I popped into a chemist to peruse the perfume to see how many I couldn’t afford (spoiler alert: all of them). Determined to spend my hard earned flight attendant dollars on something – anything - I went into the fake tan aisle and had a squiz.

The Le Tan I’d had my heart set on was not there, and when I later saw it in Coles it said it was of the wash off variety, which I didn’t want (no one day wonder tanners ploise!), so I went back to the chemist and because it was 25% off I decided to give JBronze, by Jennifer Hawkins a go. And since it was right next to it, I also picked up a Bondi Sands tanning glove.

Now I’ll be the first to admit I can be terrible sometimes and buy beauty products and then take forever to get around to using them. So when Sunday night passed and I got out of the shower and couldn’t be bothered doing a whole fake tanning routine I thought ‘right, Monday night I am definitely doing this. I paid $26 for this bottle and $10 for this glove and dammit I am going to use them!’

So tonight I got down to business. At the forefront of my mind was an episode from the most recent series of Australia’s Next Top Model when the girls got given a truckload of JBronze out of the kindness of Hawko’s heart and had to lather themselves from top to toe and do a photo shoot on the beach. Of course they looked like bronzed goddesses and applied it expertly and I was like, super jealous of their skill. With this thought in mind, I slipped that glove on and got to work. Since I had bypassed buying the fake tan applicator for your back when I was at the chemist, I decided, so as to not make a mess of an already precarious job, to just tan my legs and see how I went.

So anyway before I go on we should all talk about how you should never buy another tanning glove again – just buy the Bondi Sands one. It is top notch. Considering the only other tanning gloves I’ve had in my life have been ones I’ve gotten for free with magazine subscriptions or as part of a Royal Show showbag, I was quite pleased that when I actually paid physical money for this one it turned out to be worth shelling out for (as opposed to there being a very good reason all those other ones I’d had were free).

So, the facts. I used JBronze by Jennifer Hawkins Tanning Mousse in Medium. I decided to start small and go with the medium rather than the dark. I wanted bronzed goddess, not chocolate Easter egg. I feel this was a smart decision. The bottle is only 150ml, which seems like a lot, but because it’s liquid and comes out as a mousse, I feel like I used a lot, and upon closer inspection of the bottle realised I’ve already used a quarter of the stuff and I only used it on my legs and a little of my mid section. So, since some girls apply their fake tan every few days, or perhaps once a week, this already pricier than all the others fake tan just got pricierer.

Still, on with the show. I know I don’t have a lot of experience at fake tanning, as stated already, but I can easily say I was happy with this one. I chose mousse over spray too, as I can only imagine my Mum’s face if I got some spray tan on the bathroom tiles or her towels. Plus a mousse seemed less scary for the amateur that I am.

It was quite easy to apply, and I felt like I was doing an all right job thanks to that awesome glove I also bought, and this stuff even smelt all right too. Not your typical fake tan smell, just a slight coconutty tropical scent. The bottle states the tan includes green tea, aloe vera and walnut extracts, so perhaps that was why I was floating off to Hawaii a little as I applied/daydreamed.

Since the bottle said to wait at least four hours before showering, I assumed that was how long it took to properly develop. I am now on hour three as I write this and I’m pretty happy so far. No streaks, and no obviously fake look to my legs. The colour is subtle – like just enough for someone to notice and say ‘you look like you’ve caught some sun lately’ in a slightly envious way. It’s not so bronzed that it’s blatantly obvious you have got your brown out of a bottle. I am very interested to see how my legs look when I wake up tomorrow. Hopefully even better! If not, I am considering doing a second application tomorrow night, just to see what affect it has (and because I wear black stockings to work and nobody will be able to see if I make a Hawaiian Tropic mess of it all).

And on that note, let me tell you, I will never be buying the face tanner. Fake tanning my face is just way too scary. One day I’d like to work up the courage and get a spray tan done by a professional, but until then I’ll happily stick my hand up and say Hawko’s was the best at home experience I've had, even now, when it’s not fully developed on my fat legs yet. I guess, at least in this instance, higher price = greater quality! I'll admit, when I first heard about this line of hers I was quite sceptical, thinking 'oh it's just another celebrity putting their name to something' and not really having any input or caring about the quality of the product. But I actually really don't think this is the case with JBronze. It seems like a legit tanning product of high quality. You can't help but feel the supermodel probably has much experience in this field given her 10+ years of modelling and probably wearing fake tan more days than she doesn't, and it shows in this product she has created. Give it shot bronzed wannabe babes!

Australia’s Next Top Model, here I come!

Your bronzed goddess,

Jorgs

For more info, and to see the full range, head to www.jbronze.com.au/products/medium-tanning-mousse

*This blog was not a paid endorsement

Leisel Jones: Body Lengths – A Review

Late September, 2000. Sydney Aquatic Centre, Homebush. A 15 year old Queenslander wins an Olympic silver medal in the breaststroke and suddenly everyone in Australia – perhaps the world - knows that girl Leisel Jones.

I remember with striking detail this victory of Leisel’s. Mostly because I could scarcely believe someone just a year older than myself at the time was swimming at the Olympics and had just become enormously famous because she’d won a medal.

If you’ve read my past entries you’ll know I’m a bit of an Olympic nut, and that too is part of the reason I remember Leisel winning that day. I can recall most of the Australian medal winners and their events from those Games actually. I can even recall some of the lines spoken by Bruce McAvaney and Dennis Cometti in their commentary of these wins (“Jumping Jai it’s time to fly!” anybody?). If that doesn’t tell you I’m a passionate Aussie who loves getting into the Olympics then I don’t know what does.

Fifteen years later and during a layover at Brisbane airport after a fun five days in Cairns with a girlfriend of mine, I headed eagerly to the closest WH Smith, because I knew Leisel Jones’ book had just come out. A sporting biography of a great Australian? You didn’t have to ask me twice to read it.

 

 

And now, three months after I bought the book and devoured it over the course of less than two weeks, I am sitting on a plane, blessed to be seated in business class, but raucously tired after just having crewed a 16 hour flight from Dallas. I am on my way home to Perth, gratefully, and when I stepped on board and saw the lie flat beds in business I felt instant happiness (even more happiness than I already feel at the end of a Dallas to Sydney sector I’ve just worked) and couldn’t wait to lie my head down and have a snooze all the way home.

But alas, my neighbour seated next to me had the same plans, and just as I nodded off so did he, and his loud snoring way too close to my ear began. And the thought came to my mind that if I couldn’t be sleeping right now (which I definitely cannot with that racket!) I only wished to be caught up in a book like Body Lengths, by Leisel Jones.

Straight off the blocks (ha ha get it?) Body Lengths is bloody good. Let that be all the recommendation you need to go out and get yourself a copy this Christmas. It would be the perfect companion for lazy late December and early January days in the sun by the pool as you slowly digest your Christmas lunch and all that champers.

A friend of mine read Body Lengths before me, finishing it in just a few days, and she warned me that Leisel names names in this book and that the fact she did that made it even more awesome. I kind of shrugged it off, remembering my Dad telling me about how a few Christmases ago he was given Molly Meldrum’s biography and spent the whole time trying to guess who Molly was referring to in each chapter, because Molly annoyingly (although perhaps couldn’t legally) did not name and shame all the characters that had made up his life and its stories. I too experienced this when reading all of Roxy Jacenko’s books – though they were ‘fiction’ they so obviously contained characters that were 100% real people in Roxy’s real life that she had dealt with, just with their names changed (and sometimes not even changed that much – example: pretty sure the character of Belle Single, a bikini model from the Shire was definitely Lara Bingle). They were so closely based on people I knew I knew, that the whole time their real life names were on the tip of my tongue, but frustratingly, I could never quite pin point them for sure. I had what I am pretty sure were very good, close guesses of who they were, but I just wanted Roxy (or perhaps some speculation on an internet forum from other frustrated and intrigued readers) to tell me if that character actually was Lara Bingle or Ros Reines or Shane Watson. I know my Dad felt the same about Molly’s tome.

Anyway, I expected much the same from Leisel Jones. Surely one would have some fun telling her readers all the horrible or ridiculous or crazy times she had with teammates and celebs throughout her life but would never actually print their names.

Oh but Leisel does. Instant brownie points from me for that babe! This book just got whole lot more interesting. I am still shocked to the extent with which she named names actually, even now after having finished the book – Leisel doesn’t hold back, and I do wonder if those explicitly written about have now stopped talking to her or no longer consider her a friend because they were publicly shamed within the pages of Body Lengths.

But damn, it makes for great reading. Who would’ve thought you’d ever read about how Kieran Perkins, a swimmer with surely as nationally a recognisable name as Dawn Fraser, had barked at and  ferociously denied kid swimmer Leisel when she shyly asked for him to autograph her swimming cap at a comp?

Who would’ve thought Stephanie Rice could be written about so beautifully by Leisel, describing how welcoming the fellow Queensland swimmer was when Leisel joined her swimming club and then flipped completely over and written about so damningly, making you only sympathise with Leisel, when Rice began spreading rumours and bad mouthing an out of form, struggling Jones.

But written about it all is, plus so much more. Leisel’s spray at the alpha males of the Australian swim team – James Magnussen and Eamon Sullivan to name just a few – is epic and lengthy. But rightly so when these guys practically bought the proud Dolphins squad to their embarrassed knees, not a single gold medal won by the men in London 2012 and stuck so deep in a bullying culture within the team that it has taken years of work since London and the help of a new leader in John Bertrand of Australia II fame, to bring the team back to its former glory that Australia can once again get behind and feel so proud of.

Every coach she has ever swum under also gets a no holds barred description in Body Lengths – a fascinating insight really into the way elite sporting coaches work and how extraordinarily different they can be from local, small time coaches, such as Leisel’s first, who coached his little team in a backyard pool and rewarded them with Mars Bars and fun Friday night competitions where the whole family and a barbeque was always part of the deal.

But perhaps what a lot of readers of Body Lengths will be eager to read about when they first open up this page turner, is if Leisel writes anything about the drug culture entrenched in the Dolphins post 2008. You won’t be disappointed. She does. And it’s not an outsider looking in review of the ugly situation – oh no, Leisel makes no attempts to hide the fact that she too took Stilnox, that she too felt crazy on it, that it too lead her to devastating lows and serious mental health issues. You cannot put this book down.

A few weeks before Body Lengths was released I read an excerpt in The Australian – a small part of a chapter, but probably the most powerful in the entire book. A scene taking you into one of the swimmer’s lowest points, where she had formulated a plan to steal a knife from the hotel kitchen where she was staying for a training camp, and knew exactly where and how deep she would draw it across her wrists and thighs to ensure she died that day in the en suite bathroom in her hotel room. Her descriptions were so vivid – even in that excerpt, where I had read nothing else of her book, where I knew no back story apart from what I had read in the media and seen on TV ever since that day in 2000 at Homebush (which, let’s face it, until you read someone’s autobiography you don’t really realise how little you knew about them) – and so hauntingly sad that I felt like I was sitting on the edge of the bathtub beside her, yet invisible to her in her sadness, unable to stop her from ending her life.

When I got to that chapter in the actual book it was frightening – frightening to read everything that lead up to that moment, caused that moment, made her want to get a knife in that moment.

I suppose many might read Body Lengths and just shake their heads and feel their previous feelings only reinforced that Leisel Jones is just a bit of a typical selfish, only child, high achieving swimmer who is a stubborn perfectionist to the bitter end. And certainly I had flickers of that when reading the book. But they are overcome quite easily when you read everything else you didn’t know about Leisel Jones, the former teenage wonder kid. How she was paying the mortgage for her and her mother with the money she got from winning swim meets. How she fought so hard against the all too common crushing come down when elite athletes retire from their sport. How she fell in love with a sport and a team that she will remain immensely proud to have been a part of for the rest of her life.

Read Body Lengths because it isn’t some sugar coated, 99% ghost written account of a one hit wonder athlete. It’s a gritty, ugly, fascinating, no holding back account of life from backyard swimmer in suburban Brisbane to four time Olympian – something no other Australian Olympic swimmer can claim as their title.

Hats off to you Leisel Jones, for telling it like it is.

Your sporting biography lover,

Jorgs

 

 

That time I went to...Seattle, Washington

“But it rains nine months of the year in Seattle” – Sleepless in Seattle

This line from one of my favourite movies was the first thing that popped into my head when I touched down at Seattle-Tacoma Airport in Seattle, Washington just a few weeks ago. It was early November – by no means fun and frivolous summer time anymore – but I had not expected it to be so foggy and cloudy that I couldn’t see the other planes on the tarmac. My heart sunk. Was Seattle going to live up to its usual reputation as spoken by the characters in Sleepless in Seattle? Would I be rained and fogged out of seeing any attractions?

I have wanted to go to Seattle since…forever. Well, since I first saw Sleepless in Seattle on television and developed a bit of a love for romantic comedies and Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. And then when I became a flight attendant five years ago and learnt that Boeing planes are made in Seattle – I knew I needed to visit one day.

Finally that time came during another of my Dallas trips for work. My ever faithful Southwest delivered me to Washington from Texas on an almost empty plane and I salivated over the epic views of the Colorado mountains as we flew. Then I salivated even more when I got what could not be a more birds eye view of Mount Rainier as we flew into Washington. I could not believe what I was seeing – it was spectacular. So spectacular I wasn’t quite sure what I was seeing was real. Just check out this picture I took!

 

 

Regular readers of my blog know that a city has won my heart before I’ve even left the airport grounds if it has a train station connected to it. And bingo – Seattle does! Just a couple of bucks and thirty minutes later I was getting off the train in downtown Seattle. It could not have been simpler! And as I walked out onto the street from the station I was greeted with blue sky and sunshine…the fogginess was gone! Thank goodness.

A relatively simple grid system of streets downtown makes it easy to find your way around Seattle, and if you still have trouble finding your way around, just pop into a Starbucks and use the free wifi to fire up your iphone google maps. A Starbucks will not be hard to find, believe me – Seattle is the birthplace of Starbucks and I am not joking when I tell you they are on practically every corner. Sometimes there are two on one block! They are coffee loving people these Washingtonians! I took advantage of this coffee culture and did not feel bad about having two or three pumpkin spice lattes a day whilst I was there!

 

 

 

 

 

If you can get in the door for all the
tourists keen for a look, this is the
original Starbucks!

 

My first port of call on my little Pacific Northwest adventure was Pike Place Market. This 100+ year old public farmers market is set over many blocks right on Elliot Bay and is an explosion to the senses as you wander through it. Turn your head one way and there’s fish being thrown around by fishmongers, turn it the other and local artisans are selling leather goods and paintings. You can also buy fresh flowers, more than enough types of food, souvenirs and of course, coffee. I didn’t buy anything, just because I wasn’t in a shopping mood, but that was ok – it was a treat enough just to wonder through the market and just take it all in.

A brisk 20 minute walk away from the market was the Seattle Space Needle. The needle is a beacon of the Seattle skyline and something many people recognise as a landmark of the city even if they haven’t been there. Kind of like how everyone knows the Eiffel Tower is in Paris.

 

 

As I walked up to the ticket window and only had to wait for one person to be served in front of me, I silently congratulated myself for visiting in the low season when crowds were minimal because of the chilly weather. Adult admission into the needle costs $22 (seniors $19, kids $13), which includes access to the observation deck for as long as you like. A quick elevator ride will shoot you right up to the deck and the views are pretty spectacular, even on a not very sunny day, like the one I went on. You can have your picture taken up there, look through the binoculars outside on the viewing deck, sit and have a coffee and look at the amazing view, even make use of the interactive exhibit which allows you to digitally write where you are visiting the needle from.

 

 

The views from the observation deck are nothing short of spectacular. The cityscape rolls out before you on one side, the water of Elliot Bay on the other. Spectacular Mt Rainier looms in the distance, impressively massive and snow covered. Any way you turn, the view from the top of the Space Needle is worthy of taking a picture, trust me!

Next day, the aviation geek in me knew I couldn’t leave Seattle without visiting the birthplace of Boeing aircraft. So I hopped in an Uber and drove out to Everett, about 30-40 minutes from downtown Seattle, where the Boeing factory resides. Here the Future of Flight museum is within the grounds too, so I was pretty much in aeroplane heaven.

I arrived just in time to do the Boeing Factory tour ($18 entry, 1.5 hours long), which takes you inside the factory where many different types of Boeings are assembled. The sheer size of the place is impressive enough as it is, but then you get inside and see the squillions of parts that all go into assembling an aeroplane. Even for a person who really has no interest in aviation it’s pretty cool. Your guide will enthral you with many facts about Boeing, what it does every day to pump out at minimum five aeroplanes a week and more than a few cheeky jokes about how apparently Boeing is better than Airbus.

Side note: you can’t take any cameras or phones or bags or wallets or anything loose on the tour just in case it drops down from the viewing platforms and onto the factory floor. Apparently once someone dropped their phone and it hit a wing and it cost three million dollars to repair it. So…lockers are available so you can stash your stuff and ensure you don’t get a million dollar bill in the mail from Boeing.

Attached to the Boeing hoopla is the Future of Flight museum mentioned earlier. Stand beside a 747 engine and feel dwarfed by its size. Explore galleys and cockpits and passenger seats used in yesteryear or simply just marvel at the many aircrafts hanging from the ceiling.

 

 

 

After getting my av geek on all morning it was then time for me to head back to Dallas unfortunately. I wish I could’ve stayed longer and explored more of the cities attractions – there are so many more – and definitely headed into some of the natural areas of the city to perhaps do some walks or hikes and get amongst the beautiful evergreen forests of Washington state. That is one of the lasting impressions I have of Seattle that will never fade – because of those nine months worth of rain a year Washington is SO GREEN. I have never, ever seen a place so green! It was stunning. Of course it probably helped that it was fall when I was there, so the leaves were just starting to change colour, which made it even more spectacular, but even if it hadn’t been I would still have been floored by the beauty of the flora in this great American state.

Visit Seattle to mix it up on your travels from the usual triangle of New York – Los Angeles – Las Vegas cliché. Trust me, it’ll be worth the visit. Just take your gloves and scarf if you’re going after September! I was the luckiest person ever to not experience any rain during my day and a half in Seattle, but I am sure that was just a fluke, so pack your poncho and umbrella if you ever visit too!

Until the next adventure…

Jorgs

 

 

Crazy Travel Tale #2

Time for more stupid stories from my adventures! Today’s tale was born in the glorious eastern states of the USA.

So once, I was in NYC for almost two weeks, and since it was not my first time there (hence I didn’t need to run around like a mad woman the whole time and cram in as many first time sees of all the attractions as I could) I decided what a terrific time it was to go up to Boston and visit my friend Emma, who at the time, lived there.

 

 

She was all yeah! Come up! We’ll eat cannoli! So I started looking at Amtrak fares and prices, as that was the only way I had ever travelled between New York and Boston before, and plus, we’ve all heard the Greyhound horror stories, so I wasn’t too keen to try that out. But then Emma was like ‘Get on the Megabus!’.

Megabus? What? I had visions of some huge bigger than a London double decker type thing traversing the entire east coast. But alas, my friend was onto something. Cheap tickets galore were available on the Megabus between NYC and many other New England cities. So $10 and one day later I was on my way, unable to pass up such a good deal. I could handle 6 hours on a bus right? Especially for that price! I had done 3 weeks in Europe, twice, on a bus with Contiki – I could definitely do NYC to Boston for 6 hours.

What I hadn’t counted on was why the fare was so cheap. For a start, this bus didn’t leave from any old terminal. It was no Penn Station or Grand Central. Nope, it was a random street corner right at the bottom of Manhattan island. I caught the subway to the nearest station to the bus meeting point and when I emerged from the underground station at 4am (because cheap buses only leave at the crack of dawn of course) I found myself in what looked like a very sketchy neighbourhood. I also didn’t know if I should go left or right when I came out of the station. Luckily, I somehow picked the right direction and a few blocks of walking later I found the bus pick up point. It was a street corner by a construction site with several metal barrels set up on the sidewalk, each with a flag sticking out the top that had a destination on it. I made a beeline for the one that said Boston.

Surprisingly the sidewalk was teeming with people, all after a cheap way to get out of NYC. Megabus works in that some fares are as cheap as $1, so I could understand why there were so many people there, eager to avoid trains, cars and planes as their mode of transport.

The bus ride was uneventful, and a lot better than what I imagined Greyhound would’ve been. The only scary moment was the gripping fear I had whilst using the toilet at a rest stop that the bus might leave without me and I’d be stuck in some rural Connecticut town by myself. Luckily, that didn’t happen (I still sprinted back onto the bus though, just in case) and I was actually treated to some stunning views of the states of New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts as we made our journey.

The bus ride ended in one of the less desirable bus stations of Boston, but I was just happy to see Emma. We spent the day eating our body weight in the famous cannoli Boston is known for and walking around Boston Common and the North End. Sadly just one day later I was back at that dodgy station, boarding a bus bound for New York again, and this time was lucky enough to have an Asian woman in her thirties fall asleep on my shoulder repeatedly the entire 6 hours back to Manhattan. When we finally got there it was almost midnight, and I caught the subway back uptown to the hostel I was staying at on 103^rd St, reminding myself never to tell my Mum I caught the New York City subway at midnight by myself.

 

 

 

 

For ten dollars each way though, this was totally worth it. Good friends are worth a crazy trip.

Your Megabus expert,

Jorgs

Yes, I'm an Olympic nut

Hello wanderlusters!

Today I’ve decided to blog about a different kind of wanderlust. Time travelling wanderlust! Sounds weird right? I guess it is, but it’s something I think about occasionally. No I’m not a Back to the Future movie lover, I’m just a really nostalgic person by nature, and while I’ve had an amazing adult life, I had an even better childhood, and often think to myself that if given the opportunity, I would happily go back and do my childhood alllllll over again. Why? Because it was the most simple, idyllic, happiest time of my life. I had a kick ass childhood, and I would be the luckiest person out if I could go back and do it over.

Anyways, but that’s not what I’m going to write about today. As much as I would like to regale you with stories of my childhood (nahhhh I wouldn’t do that to you….much) I wanted to find out from my readers what time periods they would like I go back to. Would you like to go back to just a day last week that was awesome? Would you go back to your high school or university days? Your travelling days? Is there a particular event in time you would like to go back to and relive, or be a part of (because you weren’t actually alive or old enough when it actually happened to enjoy it and be part of it)? Is there a place or a day or a group of people you’d like to be standing amongst again?

I have a couple, one of which I reckon I’ll tell you about today. As an Olympic Games tragic, I would love to go back and be old enough (perhaps 22 or 23 years old) to be in Sydney during the 2000 Olympics. I was only 14 when these Olympics were on, but I distinctly remember the build up all year to that September day when they began. I remember racing home from school to watch the Opening Ceremony. I remember my Dad shaking me awake the morning after the opening and saying ‘We’ve won our first medal! We’ve won our first medal!’. I remember holding my breath as I watched Cathy Freeman run in the rain for her gold medal in the 400m. I watched so much sport during those two weeks that it was scary, and let me tell you, my addiction had begun.

 

 

Now I’m not even a hugely sporty person. In school I played quite a few sports, but as an adult I only occasionally get out my tennis racket for a hit on my lonesome against a wall down at the local courts. But something about Sydney – maybe it wasn’t even really the sport at all – just hooked me in. I loved the excitement that seemed to be radiating all over the city during that time. I loved how many new people came to Sydney for the first time, and discovered my home country with wide eyes. I loved how god damn Aussie proud we all felt during the Olympics. I loved the whole nation getting behind Thorpey and Cathy. I loved how Sydney put on the greatest show on earth from opening to closing ceremony. Heck, I even loved the excited commentary voices of Bruce McAvaney and Sandy Roberts (still do, actually).

 

And ever since those Olympics I have wished that I could’ve lived in Sydney during that time. I wish I could’ve been in my twenties and maybe just doing some waitressing or bar job, but just BEING THERE during the Olympics. To be able to have felt personally swept up in the excitement of the world’s greatest sporting event right in my backyard. To have said hello and given directions on the street to foreign visitors in Sydney for the Games. To have sat at a vantage point in the city and watched the Opening Ceremony on a live screen and then stared in awe at the fireworks spewing out everywhere all over the harbour. To have gotten a cheap ticket to an event – any event – and witnessed the greatest sports men and women in the world battling it out in the greatest moment of their lives.

Yes that's me geeking out during a Stadium
Australia tour on the actual medal
dias used during 2000

I just wish I could’ve been there, in Sydney, for that whole month of September, so that I could’ve been happily swept up in it all. Swept up in all the excitement of this once in a lifetime event. Because dare I say it, it’s going to be a very long time before the Olympics are held in Australia again. I may not even be alive for it.

I recently had my VHS tapes of the Opening Ceremony converted onto DVD. Yes that’s right, fifteen years after the event, I did it. And it cost me $250. But it was worth it to have that glorious beginning moment of our golden era of sport and life – a wonderful, simpler time before September 11, before global financial meltdowns, before SARS and swine flu and wars on terror – on a DVD to be able to watch forever and one day show my own children. Maybe that’s cheesy and lame, but I don’t care. My friends have always said I’m the most patriotic person they’ve ever met, and this proves it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Sydney Olympics also made me fall in love with the city of Sydney itself, and played a huge part in my wanting to visit it on holiday for the first time in 2007, then countless times after until I finally moved there in 2013. The first time I ever caught the train to Olympic Park, hired a bike and cycled around the vast area all day long was the closest I’ve ever felt to being at an Olympics. I stopped at an intersection right outside the main stadium on my bike and closed my eyes for a moment, trying to picture what it would’ve been like in 2000. Tried to imagine the sounds of thousands of people milling around from every corner of the globe. Tried to imagine the smell of food for sale and the feeling of a brilliant Sydney spring day on my shoulders and face. Tried to imagine the sight of flags waving in the breeze, sports fanatics dressed up in their finest green and gold, pin traders doing deals with each other, exhilarated faces of fans emerging from venues at the end of gripping matches or races. Tried to imagine the energetic vibe that would’ve been pulsating through the entire area during those seventeen days in September. I wish I could’ve been part of it.

 

Photo cred: Australian Olympic Team Facebook page

 

This Tuesday will be fifteen years since the Sydney games began - and less than one year to go until Rio. This time I'm not going to miss out...I'll be in Rio, waving that green and gold proudly. Details to come!

In the meantime, check out this nostalgic article that is fluffy as hell but made me well up with pride... http://corporate.olympics.com.au/news/sydney-2000-the-time-of-our-lives-15-years-ago

What era do you wish you could go back to? Leave me a comment and let me know! I’d love to hear from you!

Your Olympic nut,

Jorgs

P.S I wrote this entry whilst sitting at a corner desk on the second floor of the City of Sydney Library in Haymarket, and the entire time I typed, I could hear a busker down on the street below playing Waltzing Matilda. Coincidence? I think not.

 

The Boxing Kangaroo is my spirit animal, of course!
 

Which Bunk? Sydney Central YHA, Sydney, Australia

It’s been a while between drinks with my hostel reviews hasn’t it? Well no more. I’m back with another Sydney hostel review for you my travelling friends! Sorry they’ve all been Sydney hostels so far – I promise I am going to do reviews on other hostels in other cities too – it’s just that Sydney is the city I visit the most and there are A LOT of backpackers hostels in the emerald city!

Today I’m reviewing Sydney Central YHA. I stayed at this hostel at least ten times now, and while it’s not as good as Sydney Harbour YHA in The Rocks, it’s still got plenty of good things to list about it!

This little hostel gem baby is located a stone’s throw from Central station in the Sydney CBD. As you may recall from my previous review of Railway Square YHA, which is also located a stone’s throw from Central Station but difficult to find and with many stairs to tramp up when you eventually do find it, Sydney Central is a much easier walk and much easier to find I’m pleased to report!

The walk from train station platform to front desk of the hostel will take no more than 10 minutes, if that, and gratefully, there are no stairs and no hills. Rejoice! The hostel is right next to a convenience store and a café, and the endless eating possibilities of Chinatown are just a few more minutes walk away. The Capitol Theatre, recently showing Les Mis, is also nearby. If you really wanted some exercise you could walk from the hostel all the way down busy George Street to the iconic Sydney Harbour in about 20-30 minutes, depending on your pace. And of course, being the convenient cater for everybody city that Sydney is, you are flush with all things you could possibly need during your stay at the YHA – ATM’s, medical centres, gyms, pubs, clubs, supermarkets, parks, shops, cinemas, buses, trains and language schools just to name a few - as they are all only seconds from your grasp when you’re staying at Sydney Central.

When it comes to laying your head down for the night everything from male or female only dorms are available, in four, six and eight bunk set ups. You can also book private and family rooms (though these are often the same price as a 2 or 3 star hotel nearby, and at least with a hotel you would have your own bathroom and tv…just an FYI). Still, that being said, in a hotel you likely wouldn’t have at your disposal two enormous communal kitchens kitted out with everything you could need to cook a five course meal – you don’t even need to bring your own cutlery. It’s all here. So too are walls upon walls of shelves to store your food (complete with a label with your name and check out date to differentiate your cornflakes from someone else’s cornflakes). There’s even a free food fridge – one of my favourite things a hostel can offer a budget traveller, and a genius idea to boot. The eating area also has plenty of comfy booths as well as long communal tables that would make Jamie Oliver bubble over in glee at the shared experience of it all. Vending machines by the kitchen pump out everything from tea and coffee to icecream and drinks.

 



The dorms on offer at Sydney Central are ample and spacious – unlike some other hostels where 2 bunk beds are often cramped into the tiniest shoebox of a room. Lockers in the room are large enough to fit three decent sized bags, but you need to bring your own lock. Sheets are provided and although the doonas, mattress protectors and pillows have seen better days the only way you’re going to get a bad night’s sleep is if someone in your dorm room snores (always a dreaded possibility!). That being said though, the hostel can be noisy at times – every door in the place closes with a loud bang no matter how delicately you try to close it, the walls are kind of thin and if your room is close to the lifts you’ll hear every ding announcing its arrival on your floor, or to the bathrooms you’ll definitely hear when someone uses the hand dryer at 2am. Still, I’ve stayed at worse, louder hostels.

The bunk situation - some
travellers are not the tidiest!

 

Now, if you’ve stayed at Sydney Harbour YHA over in The Rocks like I have and loved to pieces the way every bed has a power point next to the light, you’ll be disappointed that this is not the case at Sydney Central. Still, there are enough power points in other parts of the room to please everyone. Select dorms have lockers which actually have power points inside them, which means you can handily charge your laptop or mobile and lock it away so there is no threat of it being stolen as it charges.

The shared bathrooms on every floor seem small – some with just three showers and three toilets each, but I have never come across them full, and never had to wait to use a shower. Perhaps during peak times there might be a line, but truly, I don’t think there is a peak time in a backpacker’s hostel – the people staying there are on holidays. They’re not living to normal time frames! The bathrooms will be no more packed at 7am than they would be at 10am.

 

 

LOLZ

 

The all important free wifi is available on the ground and first floor only, but you can purchase a package if you want premium wifi throughout all the floors during your stay. Good deals are advertised on many a wall throughout the hostel and in the lifts - $112 for three night’s accommodation with premium wifi being an example I saw in August 2015 that would be hard to pass up if you’re a person who cannot live without being connected.

 

 

Sydney Central also offers an array of other activities and amenities for travellers – everything from a conference room to a cinema to lockers for hire (with power points inside! Yay!) to walking tours and pizza nights. The staff are friendly and you truly feel like you’re in the thick of the big exciting world of backpacking when you are standing in the lobby of this nine story hostel, your sheets tucked under your arm and your room key in your pocket.

 

 

This hostel also radiates with the distinct feeling of being a melting pot of gap year travellers and groups from schools, universities and organisations. There is a lot of emphasis on and information provided about travelling on to other parts of Australia, getting jobs in Sydney, learning English, setting up bank accounts and help with tax – there is even a large noticeboard covered in ads for cars, campervans and tents for sale from people who have finished their gap years and are heading back home, eager to offload the rusty old kombi they bought at the beginning of their stay and toured Oz in. I was even approached in person during one stay by a guy asking every person in the room individually if they were looking for a job. His in person approach was a step up from the array of job ads posted on the noticeboard next to the one displaying the car ads. Such extensive noticeboards and information aren’t found at, say, Sydney Harbour YHA, which is much more of a tourist frequented hostel, whereas Sydney Central is for the true travellers and gappies – those off on an adventure not just for a week or two, but a few months or a year, who want to be close to transport and all the things they’ll need to make a living in Sydney for such a long length of time.

Sydney Central might not be as close to all the famous Sydney icons as Sydney Harbour YHA is, and it’s also definitely not as new and modern, but the prices reflect this, so it’s still a good deal and a great place to base yourself during your trip to Sydney. Of all of YHA’s Sydney hostels I’m pretty sure this one is the easiest to get to via public transport and on foot, and I know in my book, that makes it a place I’ll be coming back to!

Jorgs rates Sydney Central YHA 4 stars out of 5! Check out their website at www.yha.com.au ! And while you’re there, follow me on twitter @Brindabella24 and on Instagram @brindabella24 J

 

Enjoy the fun and the sun in Sydney -
this city never disappoints!

 

Until next time,

Jorgs

Crazy travel tale #1

Hi friends! I just got home from Dubai yesterday and as you know, going to Dubai isn’t my fave, so I usually spend most of the time I am there in my hotel room, where there is a suitably large bed and a very wide screen tv (I know I know, I shouldn’t be complaining right?) and abusing the free Wi-Fi offered to crew. Anyways, on this occasion, as I spent much of the day in my pjs, I got to thinking of all the memorable and crazy situations I’ve found myself in and crazy experiences I’ve had whilst in foreign countries and I thought they would be great to share on my blog with you all.

Now when I say crazy situations I don’t necessarily mean crazy scary or crazy dangerous. Sometimes an experience has been downright unbelievable or really, really lucky or stupidly, ridiculously funny. The sort of stories I won’t even wait to tell when I get home after my trip…I’ll be telling them in the car on the way home from the airport.

One such story happened in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania a few years back. I was travelling solo in the City of Brotherly Love and had been to all the must do’s already – the Liberty Bell, the US Mint, UPenn, the LOVE sign and even Amish country. But I knew there was one more must do on my list – the Rocky statue and steps at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Now I have never seen a Rocky movie in my life, I’m not a fan of Sylvester Stallone at all and I had zero interest in boxing OR modern art. But I still felt like I had to see it as part of my time in Philly so I wanted to tick it off my list.

So on my rainy last day in Philly before I headed to NYC, I caught the bus to the museum and proceeded to walk around for at least an hour trying to find this bloody statue with no luck. I was getting frustrated that the grounds were so large and I couldn’t seem to find what should surely be an attraction swarming with tourists just like myself. Eventually I went inside the museum and asked a staff member for directions. She looked me up and down with a disgusted look on her face (obviously thinking I was such a philistine) and gruffly gave me directions before walking off in a huff to the real appreciators of art. Awks. So outside into the gloom and doom of that wet June day I went again. As I was nearing the statue (although I had no idea still that I was close to it) a guy and a girl were approaching me on the same footpath from the other direction. They were laughing their heads off and scoffing at something that seemed like the biggest joke in the world. I went to smile as we passed each other but then they stopped. “Oh my god! When you get to the statue you have to say ‘I want to go to Fairfax, Virginia this summer’ to those people over there!” they exclaimed, pointing at a group of three people standing about 30 metres away from us.

“Why?” I asked, cautiously laughing myself, but not really sure these people were the full quid.

“Trust us, just do it!” and then they ran off.

I really had little intention of doing it, but when I got closer to them I could see they were standing near the Rocky statue, and since I had tried for hours to find this thing, in the rain, and my sneakers were pretty much soaked through and my bag was getting heavy, I was damned if I wasn’t going to get my photo with this landmark before I returned to Australia, so I thought I would ask them if they would take my photo for me.

They happily obliged and afterwards as I said thankyou I remembered what the guy and the girl five minutes earlier had said, and decided what the hell?

“Thanks for taking my photo,” I said with a grin. “By the way, I really want to go to Fairfax, Virginia this summer.”

Well they just Lost. Their. Shit. “YES!” they yelled and pointed over my shoulder at a man standing behind me dressed up as George Washington. “You’re the last one to win!”

And with that George handed me an envelope and a bundle of brochures from the tourist bureau of Fairfax. You can imagine the look on my face, but I played along, thinking, who are these nutjobs and what have I won? They explained that the promotion they were running was going to award $100 to the first three people to go up to them and say ‘I want to go to Fairfax, Virginia this summer’, and apparently I was number three (I guess the guy and girl I’d seen earlier who had given me the hint were numbers one and two)!

The volunteers took my picture with the George Washington impersonator and then cheerily wished me a great day and said they hoped to see me in Fairfax one day soon. All my thoughts of why I had originally wanted to come to the museum that day were completely washed away by then, as you can imagine. I smiled and thanked them and walked back off in the direction I came as they packed up their pamphlets and left, no more prizes to give out.

I waited until I was a safe distance away from them before opening the envelope they’d given me. I didn’t really believe they’d given me $100. For free? Just for saying some cheesy line? No way. But lo and behold, when I ripped open the envelope I looked inside to discover $100 in one dollar bills staring back at me. That’s right – one hundred one dollar bills. Because George Washington is the president who features on the one dollar bill. Duh (and I guess he was also from Fairfax, Virginia?).

I was shocked and then started laughing not dissimilar to how the guy and girl earlier had been laughing. Did I just get a hundred bucks for free? What? This was too good to be true! The rest of the day I spent marvelling at my good luck, and the irony of how I hadn’t even seen the Rocky movies, how I had had so much trouble finding the statue and the iconic steps from the film, how the woman inside the museum had looked at me with such a disgusted look on her face when I had asked for directions, how I hadn’t even been super keen to leave the hostel at all that morning because it had been such miserable weather. And yet I had gone, and this had happened.

Totally worth it.

 

 

That moment and the Amish food I tried whilst in Pennsylvania remain my strongest memories of my time there.

What crazy things have happened to you whilst travelling? Have you ever had a stroke of luck like this? Leave me a comment and tell me all about it. I’d love to hear from you! And while you’re there don’t forget to follow me on Instagram @brindabella24 !

Until next time…

Jorgs and George Dubbya