The whole country has gone mad this last week for Oprah... and I really don't get it. I've never really been a fan and I don't think people here are either, but its just the novelty of it. I did get to work on the Sunday that Oprah and her 300 American audience members came to do BridgeClimb which was pretty crazy. We prepped 2 groups at a time, every 5 minutes and went through 19 groups of 14 people in about an hour! To put that in perspective, on a really busy day at work, we prep 1 group of 14 about every 10 minutes. Since I'm American, I got the honor of prepping "Group O", which was composed of the 8 superfans that were hand chosen to do the climb with Oprah and Gail. I don't think they knew at the time that they were in a special group but I can see why they were chosen because they were so excited.... screaming, jumping and taking pictures of everything. Some fans got some really unflattering shots of me, I'm sure. Everyone wanted to know where I was from and they said they didn't think there was an Arkansan in the group.... so I told them to tell Oprah that I would be happy to be the Arkansan representative for the rest of the trip haha. We did get a glimpse of the Big O thru the window when the entourage came back from the climb.... they were like a well oiled machine exiting and entering the Audis so it was very brief. But as I suspected, Oprah was a big ole DIVA!! Not sure it was worth waking up at 3:30am for a 5:45am start of work but it was sure an experience!
Living on the beach is ab-fab. Every day that I have off of work I spend lying around in the sand, soaking up the rays (and slathering on sunscreen since there is no ozone here). A bunch of the girls from IEP met us at our beach on Saturday which was great fun.... except that I apparently didn't turn over often enough because I was burnt on the front side, and casper on the back. On Tuesday we went shopping and I finally found my perfect beach hat after weeks of searching. The hats here are wonderful... my dad is going to have a field day!! After we were done shopping we headed up to Maroubra Beach to do a little surfing. I was really excited to go surfing again.... since I had been pretty decent at it in Taiwan, I was more worried about how cold the water would be than not being able to stand up. Turns out the water wasn't that cold at all.... but attempting to surf on a short board was a disaster!! On the long board, finding my balance was really easy and I stood up on like the third try.... the short board is about 100x harder so its going to take a bit of time to get the hang of it. I couldn't find my balance to save my life since the board was literally my height, so I didn't feel stable enough to really even attempt much.... I'm used to using my feet to aid in balance, and they were about 18" off the board so that wasn't going to happen. Also the waves are larger and come more often than the ones in Kenting did. Also didn't help that we didn't really have much instruction either. Dave (one of the people we met our first week here at pub trivia in Glebe) took us out, but really only provided good company and surfboards, not instruction, which was still awesome. Oh well it was good fun, and I'm sure with a bit more practice I will get the hang of it. Also thinking about going to a weekend long surf camp later on this summer which would be a blast!
