The afternoon, however, got a little rough. Our next shift was covering the Japan theater doors again. This itself isn’t that bad, if only perhaps a little boring. But I also sat in on this show, which was all about optical illusions, and I ended the day with a bit of a headache. There was a bright spot when Mel and Shorty came to pick me, Beth, and Lilly up and kindly drove us over to the mall. Mel also had stopped by and picked me up a really nice Kingsford Smith School zip up which I’ve also been wanting since we got here. Once at the mall, we had gift shopping to do. For one, we needed to get a thank you gift for Terri. It’s also one of our other girls, Laura, birthday this weekend so we wanted to get something for her as well. Then, I still was trying to find a gift for both my sister and my (future) sister-in-law! Who knew that shopping for two girls would be so difficult? I mean I have a few small things for both of them but I really wanted to get them something that said “(insert various sisters’ names here).” Additionally, I’ve been also looking this whole trip for a small knife for my father-in-law. It’s not weird; he works with his hands a lot. But, it turns out that, unlike a certain other country (*cough cough* America) it’s actually quite difficult to find knives, or pretty lots of weapons, or sale here. Thus, mostly defeated, I met back up with the girls and we headed to the bus station. This is when things really started to go down hill.
Even though we have been here for over a month now, we still aren’t that great at the bus system. We’ve been lucky because almost every route we need for work is the same. Today, however, we were in a different part of the city. So we got to the station and started reading the different routes and Beth headed down to the other end while Lillian and I kept searching. Then we hear Beth say, “Lillian, it’s down here” so we turned and another bus pulled up. Here’s where some alternate universe stuff starts happening. I look up and see Beth’s blonde ponytail turn around. I look down for about 10 seconds to grab my bus pass from my bag. I look back up and she’s gone. So I follow Lillian onto the bus and start trying to look past all the people in front of us. By the time we are sitting down and the door closes, it hits me that Beth is not on the bus. This is also the time where Lillian says the same thing. As we’re pulling away, I scan the bus station but still see no Beth. And within a minute, we are cruising down the street, one girl short. And, as luck would have it, our phones expired yesterday so there was no communication to be had. The worst part was we had gotten on a bus that went basically the opposite of where we needed to go. So instead of going west over to the edge of the city, we went Northeast outside the city itself into the suburbs. In the end we asked some men on the bus and, after shaking their heads at us for how far away we were from our actual destination, they pointed us in the right direction. So we hopped off and got on a new bus and soon we were seeing familiar sites. We did one more bus switch at the UC and were finally home. Only an hour and a half later. I wouldn’t have been bothered at all had it not been for the fact that we had plans to go with Terri to the Telstra Tower and had now missed it. But it was an adventure to say the least. Eventually Terri returned (with Beth who had realized after a few minutes that we must’ve gotten on the wrong bus without her and instead got on the correct bus and had arrived home in 20 minutes) and said we could have another chance tomorrow so really all’s well that ends well. I spent the rest of the night packing and cleaning, doing my best to pretend that tomorrow wouldn’t be my last day of this program.
