Good skills!

On our way to Surfer's Paradise we visited Australia Zoo - nothing much to report from here apart from the amazingly slow shuttle service that runs between the different animal enclosures...it is actually quicker to walk to your destination backwards.

When we got to Surfers beer and food was the order of the day - we headed to the main street, ate, drank, listened to live music and watched the schoolies go by.

Schoolies by definition are all the young bunnies who have just or are about to graduate high school. They migrate to Surfers, fake i.d's in hand and try to get into any bar or club that will have them! For everyone else it means there is the potential to be i.d'd if you even think about alcohol no matter how old you look (unless you look at old as Madtin!) - we all contemplated shaving in some temporary bald spatches to see if that helped any! Since some of the schoolies can't get into any bars, they get drunk in their apartments and take to the streets being loud and screaming at each other.

The band we saw was most amusing - almost like they had picked the first four people in the job centre queue and plonked them into a band, including a drummer with an annoying incessant out of time cymbal beat going on. And the guitarist was Napoleon Dynamite with slightly less hair and some skills thankfully, he was hilarious. Amy was the beer mat flipping/catching champion of the world ever. On one side of us we had all the old cronies in the bar getting drunk and trying to dance and on the other side were all the schoolies screaming for no apparent reason - very surreal. We saw Amy's 21st birthday in that night - Happy Birthday Belle.

We spent the day on the beach doing Su Doku challenges - now renamed Schnoo Doku since we realised Schnoo was the Schnoo Doku King...whoever came 2nd (Madtin), 3rd and 4th really isn't that relevant...! Surprisingly there isn't too many surfers in Surfers Paradise, in fact I think we saw none! We exchanged the windy beach for the hostel pool in the afternoon and the jacuzzi, it also had a sauna in the shape of our room! Luckily it was all you can eat pizza night :) After stuffing our pieholes we hung out with the Swedish contingent, learning tricks, and singing Happy Birthday to Amy in swedish which Madtin somehow managed to join in with?!

We went back to the old mans pub in the evening (because it was preferable to hanging out with the 16-18 year olds). We played some games and listened to the band until everything got a bit blurry then headed to the club called Bedroom and danced the night away- this is Madtin's dream club since it had beds all around the edge of the room :)

The next day we headed to the beach again because secretly we love been wind beaten by all the sand! It was a very chilled out last evening at an Irish bar (that's the only kind of bar there is in Australia)