Surfing Trip - Report (+ summary)

(Da es schon "Beschwerden" gab, konzentriere ich mich hier mal auf's Englische. Der Surftrip war insgesamt ein Erlebnis und hat Lust auf mehr gemacht - wahrscheinlich werde ich mal wochentags mit ein paar Leuten nach Torquay fahren, wenn es nicht so voll ist. Das war definitiv das Hauptproblem... die Sache an sich macht enorm Spaß. :D
Bei Detailfragen einfach kommentieren. ;) Photos gibt's unter dem englischen Text.)

Due to popular demand (and I'm so not looking at you, Chels!) I'll try to focus a bit more on English in this post and in the future. Poor neglected non-Germans... ;)

To give you the whole "Last month on 'Mattness in Oz'" rundown:
I think it's safe to say that I've settled in now. While my general sense of direction isn't great, to say the least, I'm managing to not get lost all the time and have even been able to point the one or other tourist into the right direction before. (At least I hope it was the right one...otherwise... oops?)

Uni is full of awesome [sic]. As a matter of fact, I'm not sure how I'll cope with being back in Berlin and having hierarchical structures and boring subjects. Why, oh why are there no creative writing classes in Germany - those really are the seminares/workshops I'm enjoying the most and I know I'll miss them dearly, but then again, only one month has passed so there's still plenty of time to go and I might have gotten sick of everything come December anyway.

One thing though? Raise.Your.Hands. What's with the just starting to talk when a question is asked? I'm not exactly a shy person but I can imagine that timid people will never get to say anything because there'll be someone else just blabbling over them. That's one thing I prefer about German universities at least.

And YAY, I got a job! It's only 4 hours/week starting at the end of April, but that's actually not a bad thing since all I really need is some extra money on the side. I'll be a German TA at Scotch College, which is a prestigious all-boys high school that has MONEY written all over it (in either Garamond or Edwardian Script, no doubt). Check it out.

Right, since I'm not entirely sure how to sum things up: if you have any specific questions, please just ask in the comments? It may take a bit but I'll answer everything, promised. ;) It's just that currently I'm preparing for my first wave of graded assignments (read: AAAAAH!!!) and may take a bit longer than usual.

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Anyway, the university's surf club that I joined went to camp at beautiful Torquay foreshore
last weekend. My sources say it's one of the best areas for surfing in the whole of Australia (which obviously makes it one of the best in the world, Oz being the motherland of surfing and all) - it's definitely a very popular one.

We were carpooling to get there and my driver wanted to go Friday noon which suited me just fine (I've got Fridays off). There wasn't a lot happening that day other than exploring the area and grabbing a board to randomly paddle around on/in the ocean for a while. One of the guys - who had just heard the basics from someone - tried to explain what we were supposed to be doing but it didn't really work out. The fact that there were hardly any waves didn't help of course.

For those interested there was a trip to a local pub scheduled that night but I and several others couldn't be bothered and rather went to the beach. Campfire moment! We even had a guitar... it could have been cheesy, but I've actually quite enjoyed it. (No living plants were harmed during the production of this motion picture.)

While many of the pub-goers returned at 2am or later, I decided to go to bed (or rather sleeping-bag-on-mattress-in-tent) around midnight for they had announced we'd be woken at 7am latest. L'horror!

Feeling particularly brave, I set my alarm to 6:45am which was painful but at the same time strangely... hmm... wonderful? I'm not an early riser (AT ALL) but since I had had an ok amount of sleep and there was the option of grabbing some breakfasty stuff I had bought at the local supermarket the day before and going to the beach, it certainly had something cool about it. So I ended up having a ham/cheese sandwich at the shore, sort of watching sunrise (except that the beach faces south and there are hills in the east and west, so all I could really see was things going from almost night to daylight).

We - more or less awake - headed over to where the surfing instructors were waiting, greeting us in the perky, slightly gloating manner of all sporty people facing a crowd of sleepy/freezing/clueless students. We got our wetsuits (strange things, I felt like straight out of a fetish movie to be honest, but it helped that I wasn't the only one) and carried our boards down to the beach.

Warming up, instructions, out into the water------- waiting. Actually I'm pretty sure that waiting was what we spent most of the lesson on, because the surf (i.e. the waves, admire da lingo!) was quite bad that day. To be honest though, I suppose that was a good thing in the end as we had enough time to practice the basics.

I stood for 2 seconds and was proud.
There were others who stood much longer.
They shall be shunned.

BBQ in the evening was looked forward to by everyone but - as was a theme with the whole trip - the lack of organisation meant that some people had their second serving while others hadn't even had their first. Unfortunately I was one of the latter, but it was ok anyway. There are worse things than not having had Brit-style sausages. :P

Another potential pub outing followed which I skipped again as the amount of beer some people had already had was enough to tell me that I didn't really want to see them get REALLY pissed (quite literally in the case of one... oh Zach, I have no idea who you are, but boy was your name mentioned often the following day!). I ended up having a religious debate at the beach with a Canuck, which was entertaining but also full of "facepalm"-moments. Incidentally, the nightshot in the past post is from that evening.

Sunday saw another surfing lesson and a turbulent ocean. Strong winds, a bit chilly and PACKED waters - not a good combination. I ended up spending most of my time walking west to get between the flags of "safe waters" (i.e. without that strong undercurrent that would drag you out into the open sea), wading further out to a point where the waves hadn't already broken OR attempting to catch a wave with either 10 people in front of me (so I couldn't ride it and/or had to dodge them which meant I couldn't try standing up) or 10 pros behind me that either didn't want to or couldn't (because of the sheer number of people) dodge me.

I gave up about 45 mins before the session would have been over (we had 2 hours) and decided to grab some mates and return with them another time on a weekday when we had more space and time to do our thing. I definitely liked it though and the, albeit very short, moments of actual surfing were incredible. Even lying on the board and pushing up or sitting on the board with a wave underneath were great so I'll really have to go for the real thing soon. :)

Questions? :D

(Remember to click on photos to see the original size. /

Denkt dran, auf die Photos zu klicken um sie in Originalgröße zu sehen.)


Einer der zahlreichen Strände in der Gegend entlang einer Uferpromenade ("unser" Strand war abgeschottet(er)).

One of the numerous beaches in the area along an esplanade ("our" beach was not as easily accessible from the street).


Nein, das sind keine Tauben. Schaut mal genau hin...

Nope, those aren't pidgeons. Have a closer look...


Das Ortszentrum, in dem wir uns mit Essen eingedeckten.

The town centre where we went shopping for groceries.


Und noch eins der Nachtbilder. Ich liebe Langzeitbelichtungsaufnahmen!

Another night shot. I love long exposure shots!