Part 2: Christmas Day

I'm sorry about that last post. I tried my best, but it'd pretty much impossible to recreate the insanity of that night in writing. At least the next day was a little more calm...

Everyone got up late the next morning. It seemed that I was the only one that wasn't nursing a hangover (hahahahaha!) so everyone wanted to take it easy. Dylan's mom Julia had a plan to take me over the Bondi Beach (probably the most famous beach in Australia) and then to Waverly Cemetery. Despite pleas from Myles and his father trying to get her not to take me to the cemetery, I thought it sounded like a fine, relaxing way to spend a Christmas. Julia and I packed up some sandwiches using leftovers from the night before and set out around midday to get to Bondi.

I wasn't really sure what a beach would look like on Christmas day, but when we rounded the corner into town, the beach was absolutely crawling with backpackers, and these damn, creepy street performers dressed up as bugs.













We stood there people-watching for a good long while, talking about life, love and The Pursuit of Happyness, grabbed a cup of coffee at Segafredo and kept walking around, where we ran into an awesome graffiti wall, with hundreds of safe sex paintings, and one very cool hot dog on it. I started to realize how cool it was that Australia does this sort of stuff for their kids. It looks good and it's educational!

























After we were done looking around, we drove up to the cemetery. I guess there's not really much to say except that it was absolutely MASSIVE. We walked past rows and rows of the dead. Julia tells me that as a way to give the starving artists of the city work, either the cemetery or the families of the deceased would ask the artists to carve out statues for the headstones. Some families even had huge tombs for everyone through the generations, vast caverns made of marble, each one still shining in the sun like the day it was erected.

We sat down on a bench and munched on our sandwiches, looking out on the ocean past all the headstones. Some might find it to be a creepy way to spend Christmas, but it thought it was pretty surreal, and I started to think that maybe I'd rather be there amongst the peaceful dead, than amongst the thousands of kids down below at Bondi.