I think we're IN a cloud!

First I'd like to say thank you to the fam for calling me! That was so sweet and I apologize for only being semi-coherent. It's pretty awesome you thought I would be out partying when really I was curled up in a bunk bed snoring. Figures. Anyways, I miss you all very very much and would it kill you to write? Ha.

So now I'm writing to you from a hostel in Katoomba, a small city about 2 hours west of Sydney. Yesterday we went to the Taronga Zoo in Sydney before leaving and got pretty close to some wallabies, including one with a baby in its pouch. Wallabies are pretty much like mini-kangaroos. The zoo is on the northern shores so one takes a ferry to get there, it's very beautiful. After we got back from the zoo, something funny happened. We were cooking dinner in the hostel before going to the train station and there was a guy from LA in the kitchen. We were excited to speak to him, but he didn't seem so into us. Then, just as we were leaving, he says slyly, "So, I hear you thought our room smelled like an Istanbul toilet?" My first thought was, "Hey, how'd you know we went to Istanbul?" Actually what he meant was that word got around that we were blabbing about how filthy the 10 person dorm was! So then I realized that for like the week that we stayed there, we were known as those girls who kept talking about how gross the room was! I felt momentarily bad that we had been talking about them, and that they had found out.....but seriously, they should be ashamed of themselves. That room was FILTHY. And we got our Manchester buddies to swear they would take our side if there was a rumble....

Okay anyways, then we left and came to Katoomba, which is the largest town in the Blue Mountains region. They're called the Blue Mountains because oil from eucalyptus trees in the air makes a kind of blueish haze. Its beautiful here. The hostel we're at is really adorable, it's like staying at someone's house. Someone's house with velvet wallpaper in the dining room. I love it. It's much cooler here (mountains, duh). Anyways, the things you do here are pretty much admiring the beauty. There's trails all over the place; after it finally stopped raining today we walked down to Echo Point which overlooks a valley and the mountains, and you can see the Three Sisters, three huge jutting rocks that aboriginal legend says were sisters turned into rock....and something else. I don't know, I can't remember. We stayed to watch the sunset and like a minute after the sun disappeared the whole area was enveloped in fog. It was crazy, one minute I was looking into this beautiful valley and then there was just white. Lauren kept insisting "We're IN the clouds!" Pretty amazing. So that's all for now, sorry if that was rambly. Lauren said it was rambly. I said it was detailed. Thoughts?

PS. you can leave comments if you use Gmail...just saying