As the end of the semester is approaching, my students started sending in their bachelor theses, on which they had been working for months. All at the same time. So I had to read four bachelor theses over the weekend. Thanks to the weather I could at least do that at the beach, taking breaks to swim in the ocean. That’s good motivation for work, even on Sundays! :)
I took the picture with my (rather old) mobile phone, which explains the poor quality…
We had great weather the last days, so I was always working in the morning and going to the beach in the afternoon. I went to Coogee beach on Thursday, which is a bit further south of Bondi beach (see Google maps screenshot below). It’s not as impressive as Bondi beach, but only a 30 minutes bus ride from where I live. And the bus leaves just across the street. Very convenient. It’s so great to live in a city at the sea!
In the map above, you can see Newtown (green; where I live), the University of Sydney (red; where I work), Sydney’s landmark the Opera House (yellow) and the two beaches I’ve visited so far: Bondi and Coogee (blue).
Finally, I could enjoy a sunny summer day at the beach today. After a short and stressful participation in boxing day shopping (in short: all the big stores have most of their stocks on sale for up to 50% for 1-3 days), it finally was beach-time! We (myself, my ex-flatmate and my current flatmate) took a train/bus-connection to the world famous Bondi beach and it took us about 40 to 50 minutes to get there. Not too bad, compared to the minimum travel time it takes to reach a beach from Vienna :)
When we arrived, I was struck by the view on the ocean, the bright blue sky, the sandy beach… The water was great, a bit cold maybe after so many days of recurring rain, but great! The waves were not too bad either, luckily for the surfing crowd. Maybe I should start surfing myself, it’s really tempting… It might however be a matter of time. And of course there are the sharks: you only hear rumours and snippets of stories about shark attacks in Europe, but the issue actually seems to be covered on a quite regular basis by local press (at least these days). In fact it’s pretty save, especially at crowded beaches, like Bondi beach, where the last shark attack happened 70 years ago. A recent alleged attack that made headlines around the world turned out to be a fake: the guy actually hurt himself while breaking a window and now has to appear in court for theft. Sharks further only rarely get close to the beach and lifeguards do a pretty good job in taking care of the swimming and surfing crowd. Therefore, even though I was warned by some people before I came to Australia, I don’t think it’s actually a big matter.
