Christmas Eve, Bells Will Ring

Well I’ve been quite lazy about writing anything, but I’ll do my best to get back on track, even though I may be posting these even later than I’m writing them since I’m doing some WOOFing as I travel south to Tasmania.

I had heard that the special inbound call job at the call centre was going to end after Christmas, so I snuck in a few hours in the morning on Christmas Eve before I was stuck going back to charity calling. I packed my swim gear for the afternoon and headed off to Coogee once again to hit the beach since it was quite hot, although a storm was brewing so the waves were intense. I kept looking down for a second to clean my mask and then getting bowled upside down by the water or slammed into the sand (no lasting injuries, but I did have a slight bruise on my cheek for a while). I got out when I got cold and wanted to go back in once I’d warmed up, but the clouds kept building and the temperature was dropping surprisingly quickly. As I headed for the bus again it started raining, go figure.

I cleaned myself up and went to the St Andrews Cathedral for a Christmas Eve celebration, just to see what it would be like and to hopefully sing some Christmas carols that hadn’t been converted into insurance advertisements, lol. It was quite chilled out, there were lots of fold-out chairs and hi-tech screens with the lyrics (a lot of the lyrics were odd, and I wasn’t sure if they were Australian, or just that church trying to mix things up). The musicians were good and there was a men and boys choir, which was exciting since I’d never seen one of those before live. I knew there were boy sopranos doing some of the solos (Once in Royal David’s City was especially nice) but it took a while for me to realize that all the high notes were boys as well. They gave everyone a piece of gingerbread on the way out the door, but I lingered for a bit to listen to a big brass Sleigh Ride, which is always fun to hear.

As I walked back to the apartment it started to torrentially pour, so I sheltered in Darling Harbour for a bit (witnessing the extremely tacky neon Christmas tree) before realizing that it wasn’t going to stop raining any time soon and I wasn’t going to get any drier waiting. When I got back Daniel (Taiwanese guy) brought out some seaweed, sweetened dried tofu, sweet red beans, and some sort of Taiwanese drink thing and all the roommates had a bit of a party. They told me they had made a rule that if someone spoke Chinese they would have to pay $10, which I think was to include me in the conversation since most of the time I had no clue what was going on. This was hard for a lot of them, who don’t speak English very well, but if they broke the rule to get a translation no one gave anyone else any grief. Then they tried to sing some Christmas carols and I helped them and played some on my computer. So that was definitely an unusual Christmas Eve all around. Along the way I got invited by Daniel (an Aussie I had met from my study abroad when we were on Heron Island and had only just managed to meet up with a few days before) to Christmas at his house the next day, so I looked forward to that.