Empty Apartment

I hated living in the dorms so my 2nd year in Australia I decided I would find a place to rent. I went and saw about 15 different places, and yeah, I was pickier then than I am today, but I did put in quite a few applications and just didn’t hear back on any of them. S’s parents were nice enough to let me live with them for about a month. I finally ended up living in what we think was probably a converted garden shed or green house. I was too picky in the beginning and ended up with the crappiest place I had ever seen. It was a “studio” apartment and it was pretty miserable going. At this point I was getting serious about school (which by the way confuses people here as school is ONLY grade school and high school and college has to be called uni for anyone to know what you are talking about). S, the Red Head, and I went camping again and S and I went to lots of shows together. It was nice to have a real bed to sleep in with S, rather than the single bed that is universal to all dorm rooms. I went home on the winter break to a beautiful Californian summer. Mom, Dad, Nae and I went to Yosemite for 5 days or so and it was good fun. I hadn’t been to Yosemite in probably 10 years, then I went twice in a year, but it is such a wonderful place that I could go twice every year. Dad drove back home and Mom, Nae and I went to Santa Cruz. But first we did an overnight trip to Berkeley so that Nae could see Radiohead and we could visit our Mexican sister, BCova. I got to go to a baseball game with my Dad (Go Angels!) and that was fun. I love the Angels and I love that it is something that my Dad and I bond over. I headed back to Australia and to face the rest of the winter. I hated where I lived, it was tiny, falling apart, there was cockroaches (just a fact of life in most homes in Australia, no matter how clean), and I had noisy neighbors who were just study abroad students who lived like 10 to a house and were constantly rotating in and out. The one redeeming factor was that I had a really cool young couple living right across from me and they had a cat Chloe who became as much their pet as mine for the time I was there.