Beautiful beach holiday

Chris and Chris and I went to Boracay for the CNY holiday - a tiny, beautiful tropical island in the Philippines.  It did take quite a while to get there though - 29 hours from when I left school to when I got to the island!  That included an overnight stop in Manila, a delayed flight, and a redirected flight.  It also included 3 taxi rides, a train, 2 planes, a bus, a rickety little boat, and a tuk tuk!

But SO worth it... check out these photos!

Our place was just a few metres from here.

We had a good giggle taking this photo, but the next day a coconut branch nearly fell on my head!

We hired this little boat to take us up to the other end of the island... great fun!

And this is the tiny beach the boat took us to.  It was so little, and yet had this little hidden bar on it!

 

Lion Dance

We had the traditional Lion Dance on the last day of school before the Chinese New Year holidays.  It is pretty spectacular to watch! 

Singapore and CNY

School started straight after New Year, and after 2 weeks of it, it was already time for the first trip of the year.  6 of us went to Singapore for the weekend to see Wicked the musical.  We had such a great weekend!

We had time for relaxing and swimming at the hotel, and also shopping on the famous Orchard Road.

Singapore has some amazing buildings.  We all really liked looking around and imagining what it would be like to live there.  This one is in Chinatown.

Kimberley's brother took us to a couple of great bars after the show...

This one was on the 33rd floor with the most amazing views!!

And we are now up to Chinese New Year.  Everyone has gone mad with decorating and getting ready for the Year of the Dragon.  Hong Kong has gone nuts!  It is so busy.  This is the fountain near my building that often has really nice displays, and the photo below is of my foyer, just to show that besides red and gold themes, pink blossoms and manderine bushes, many places also have big pots of flowers around.  Our school is full of them too.

I am now up to date!  I will soon have some stunning beach photos though, as I am off to Boracay tomorrow with Chris and Chris.  Yay!

Photos from Christmas

I arrived home for Christmas 2 days earlier than expected, for my Nanna's funeral.  The only good thing about that was seeing Matthew before he was whisked away for Christmas.   

The weather was beautiful!  It was so nice to have dry, sunny days with blue sky. Mum and Dad's garden was looking so pretty after all the rain.



And we had a different Christmas to what we normally have.  We missed Nanna, and Elizabeth, Mark and Matthew weren't home, so Mum and Dad and I had Christmas at the coast.  David joined us a day later.  Different, but still great.  Roast... mmmmm

The coast was relaxing.  I love it down there.  I even went fishing with Dad and David.  Well, I didn't actually fish, it was just a great place to read my book.

Then it was back to Canberra for New Year, and to squeeze in as many cuddles as I could with Matthew.  Look how well he fits in my suitcase :-)

Photos from before Christmas

I saw massive traffic jams outside my place one night, and after a couple of hours my curiousity got the better of me and I wandered down the street to see what was going on. A building was on fire! And it looked like the social event of the year, as it looked like the entire population of Sheung Wan was there to watch.

I took these photos as I walked home from school.  I know I've put up photos of the bamboo buildings before, but I am still always amazed by them.  Look at how huge the cover is that they've put around the bamboo!

Causeway Bay is the busiest shopping area in Hong Kong I think, and I braved the crowds during the Christmas rush. It was fun at first to be in amongst the sixty billion shoppers, and then I got sick of it. They had some amazing displays around - not all completely Christmassy, as you can see from the photos!

Wicked weekend ahead!

I was reminded today that it has been quite a while since my last post - nearly two months! I just got kind of busy before Christmas and forgot about blogging for a while. But I'm back, and will do a couple of posts next week with November and December photos. I'm about to kick-start 2012 with a trip to Singapore - I'm about to leave right now, actually! A group of us from school have tickets to see Wicked, the musical, tomorrow night. Can't wait! The weather has been a bit crappy here, so I'm also looking forward to nice hot weather and lying by the pool with a good book tomorrow. That's all for now, I'm sure there will be a great group shot to add next week.