Talk about an interesting past few days, Sydney keeps getting more and more interesting. So I’ll take you back a few days. On Tuesday night myself and two other guys, James and Albert, went downtown at night to explore and find the lowest price TimTams we could. For those of you who don’t know, a TimTam is one of the most addicting chocolate biscuits, and I go through quite a few packs quite frequently. 11 TimTams are enough to power a car 1 mile, yeah theyre pretty awesome. Anyway, so we were wandering around and managed to stumble across the entrance to the Sydney Harbor Bridge, so naturally we walked across it. The weather here hasn’t been the greatest so it was raining out but the rain made the bridge look even more spectacular. It was about 10:30 at night so the water droplets reflected the light shining on the bridge. It was amazing but unfortunately I didn’t have my camera with me. Around 11:30 we started to head back to our dorms which involved catching two buses. We got on the first bus and took it back into the heart of the city, from there we walked to the next bus stop and that’s when things began getting interesting. Odd coincidence, but the bust stop we were at was located on Hyde Park, which happens to be the street my house back home is on. As we walked up, there was one guy sitting on a bench with two other guys standing in front of him. Little did we realize that those two guys were mugging the guy sitting down. Well as soon as we stopped at the bus stop we became involved. The two drunken muggers came up to us and immediately let us know that they wanted money from us, although all they were asking for was $5. Now although you are typically taught to always just give over the money, the three of us wouldn’t budge. We quickly found out that these guys weren’t messing around. Now quickly I need to describe the two thieves. The first guy, the taller of the two, was the ring leader and the one that we talked with mostly. In his hand he had a bag of wine and his other hand was concealed in a gym bag. The second guy was smaller and had long blonde hair. He essentially just hopped up and down with really big eyes the entire time. He looked almost identical to Shaggy from Scooby-Doo. As they approached us, James and I began to talk to them and Albert said on the bench and avoided them the entire time. James then made the comment, which he later regretted, that he liked their bag, speaking about the bag of wine. The mugger’s response was “oh, you like my bag huh, well you want to find out what’s in it (referring to the gym bag)? Do you know what it feels like to have a gun to your head and a bullet through your skull?” Well by this point our heart’s started to beat a little faster. By this point the conversation began to get a little more extreme. We continued to try to just talk with them and calm them down until our bus came. Usually a bus comes every 5 minutes but we were at the stop for at least 10-15 minutes, although it felt like a couple hours. However, through all of this, James and I refused to hand over money. We started to talk to them about where they were from. Unfortunately we made the mistake of telling them we were students, they of course then realized that we didn’t know the area very well because it’s pretty easy to tell that we aren’t exactly Australian. The gunman told us “so you don’t know what the real Sydney is then, do you?” By this point we were digging ourselves in a hole and were trying to recover as fast as we could. We made up some story of how we’ve been here for months and knew it quite well, I’m pretty sure they didn’t buy it. Eventually the ring leader shoved the gym bag at James’ stomach. James claimed that he only felt a fist and no gun but it was still not worth risking anything. James happens to be a third degree black belt and I had the feeling that something was about to go down, and there I would have been in the middle of Sydney taking down a drunk guy with a gun. Luckily our bus came shortly after and we quickly made our way to the bus. On our way over I gave Shaggy 20 cents, trying to distract them as we made our break for it. Well that didn’t work as planned because the drunks followed us onto the bus yelling that we were cheap and 20 cents was nothing. Again, the heart began to beat faster. The bus driver immediately flipped on the recording for the cameras on the bus. The guy with the gun stood at the front of the bus with his gym bag and stared the whole bus down. The driver then asked him where he was going and he responded “Sydney”, which took a lot from me to hold in my laughter. Eventually the guys got off the bus and we were home free. That story proved to be quite the entertainment around the dorms the next day, but to our amazement was outdone by another situation that took place this afternoon.

So today we stuck to our typical day, eat breakfast from 8:15-8:45, class from 9:00-1:00, and then fooling around for the rest of the day. However, class today proved to be a little more exciting than normal. Since four hours is incredibly long for one class, we always have a short break halfway through for coffee and biscuits. Personally I just stick to the biscuits but the break is always well needed for everyone. So today around 10:00 we all got up and went to get our goodies. The coffee was in the front of the room so a line quickly formed in front of it. As we were all moving around, a large man, probably around 280 lbs walked into the room on his cell phone and walked to the back of the room. I noticed him walk in but assumed he was going to talk about our field trip the next day or possibly was fixing a light or something. A few minutes later, the man walked back out of the room still on his cell phone. It really didn’t seem too out of the ordinary. However, a minute later one of the girls in our program realized that her cell phone was missing, sure enough she had her stuff sitting in the back of the room right were the strange man had walked in. Immediately pieces started to come together and it appeared that this man had walked into the middle of our classroom, with all 25 of us standing there, rummaged through a girl’s purse and stole a cell phone. Pretty impressive. Taking any excuse to get out of class, immediately a group of guys jumped at the situation and sprinted out of the room. Now by this point the man was probably 2-3 minutes out of the room. Once again, a brief description needs to be given of our thief. The man was most likely from Figi, weighed about 280-300lbs, and had both a mustache and a pony tail. That pretty much sums up the description of someone you don’t want to mess with. Five of the guys from the group had sprinted out the door, meanwhile the rest of us huddled by the window the watch the chase play out. Essentially this is what happened. As the guys ran out of the building, they saw the man standing in the middle of the walkway. They quickly ran up to him and told him they had called the cops and to give the cell phone back. He denied having anything and started walking away. As he walked away, he turned a corner and then started sprinting down the sidewalk. The chase crew quickly followed and after 50 meters the man had already run out of breath. I guess he didn’t quite have the stamina he thought he had. The guys again started questioning him for the phone but he denied having it. Along the way, the man had actually ditched the cell phone into a trash can. Luckily a maintenance guy saw him throw it and flagged down one of the guys who had run to the security office. He got the phone and brought it back to the classroom, yet meanwhile the other four guys continued chasing the thief, not yet knowing that the man didn’t actually have the phone. From what they described, they said the chase quickly turned from a short 50 meter sprint to a leisurely jog while they questioned the man. Soon the chase crew found out that he didn’t actually have the phone so they came back to the room to be congratulated by the professor. A security officer came by a few minutes later and wrote up the theft report. Needless to say, we got out of about 30 minutes worth of class and were all quite awake for the rest of the day. We didn’t need the coffee after all.

So I think it’s fair to say that Sydney has proved to be quite exciting, especially the past few days. I still think being held up by a drunk man and Shaggy at gun point beats the cell phone story, but either way, I got a good story out of them. Anyway, Ill post a picture of the Sydney Harbor Bridge from the next day when we went back to get pictures. That time we made sure to avoid the Hyde Park bus stop.

Sydney Harbor Bridge