Ce Weekend

Well it has been an eventful weekend!
On Friday we had steak.
Saturday was humid as sh*t. I was going to get up early to do laundry and some errands, but since it was overcast and rain was a possible threat I ended up sitting around and not leaving the house until noon. I checked out a few warehouse/outlet type stores in the arts and industrial estate, which is basically our neighborhood. There was a store with running shoes for a decent price so if my Hawaiian ankle injury ever heals enough to allow me to run again I may just buy a pair. I also finally went to the Byron Bay Cookie Co. store and got a few bags of bakehouse seconds. Have yet to try them. Later that day Kate and I went to The Pass for a fellow Canadian's birthday BBQ, Heather, whom we met through Diva (they worked together for a short time here). Unfortunately we were unfashionably late as we arrived in the middle of the singing of Happy Birthday. Whoops. haha. We still had cake... and chicken kebabs. The cake was really good, glutten free but tasted REAL. However, she didn't open the bag of cookies we gave her. We though she was highly likely to share them with all.
After capturing some beautiful pics of the sunset, we biked back into town, downed our last 2 Stella's and then headed over to Kate's work- the Aquarius backpacker (aka hostel. She works in its cafe. It also has a bar.) for some sweet staff discount drinks. We had a few drinks there and met up with Kate's friend Laurie from Toronto, who was with a few of her friends from Canada and we all went down to Main Beach to drink some more gin. We ended up talking to a few schoolies. Cute little 17 year old boys, who told us they were taught in school that Toronto is the capital of Canada. tsk tsk Aussie educators. Then three guys came by asking if they could have one of our plastic cups. They ended up joining us, well Kate anyway, as they were from Chile, Columbia, and Switzerland, and Kate got to speak to them in 4 languages. She was very! excited about it. She didn't get any of their contact info though because the po-po showed up to bust people drinking in public aka almost everyone out on the beach (there were atleast 100). So Kate's foreign trio fled with their booze and the cop eventually came over but our gin was empty so we were fine. But one of Laurie's friends had to "tip out" his beer and the cop wanted this other guy to tip out half a mickey of JD that he had in his bag! Somehow that tragedy was avoided and it was time to go home. Kate was still pretty pumped about her multi-lingual experience on the drunk and helmetted bike ride home... so excited that when we got home and Koral- our housemate, who lives in the garage with her son, and who is an exotic dancer- was still up with her boyfriend and brother drinking, she had a few too many glasses of red wine and ended up on the vomit train. Just a short trip. We learned a lot about Koral though. The life story basically. She's a very sweet girl though and I feel bad about divulging in the details she revealed to us last night on such a public forum. So if you'd like to know more I will happily tell you in a more private manner :)

Today was the first Sunday of the month and that means the Byron Bay Market was on. The market is in a different town in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales every Sunday and Byron gets the 1st one. It rained for most of the morning so I didn't get to the market until probably 2 or 3pm. I regretted not going earlier almost as soon as I got there. It was so cool. So Byron Bay. From a few blocks away you could hear the beating of drums. There was a small drum circle with dancers in the middle, huddled under some trees near the entrance. I guess that this drum circle is usually larger and in the middle of the market field and sometimes has other entertainers like fire breathers, but the rain prevented that from happening today. Anyway, the first thing you see when you enter the market field is a row of food vendors and the smells are amazing and it all looks so good! I was mad with myself for having eaten before leaving the house and therefore not hungry. There was all kinds of other stalls set up- produce, jewelery, clothing, soap and bath products, bedding, massage, tarot reading, healing vibrations, etc etc. A truely Byron experience! I am already looking forward to it when it comes back in January! But I will hopefully go to one of the other towns next weekend.
After the market I walked back from town along the beach for the first time and two interesting things happened. 1. I saw a naked man walking along the beach. I was unware (but was told later) that the section of beach I was on allowed nudity. and 2. I almost stepped on a stingray.