Hahndorf

Since my last post, the weather has improved, and it turned out that that bike ride was just the first of several days spent in the sun. In the last 5 days I have gone to the beach for three, and went to Hahndorf for the last.

Each time I went to the beach, I stayed to only tan a bit. On the day I didn’t get some sun, I had some other business to attend to. Ernest left for Malaysia (his home) on Friday morning, so Thursday we went to the movies (got to see Where The Wild Things Are… A good movie, but definitely not a kids movie: too violent, and the characters have emotional issues that may be a bit hard to deal with.) then after dinner went out for one final drink together at the Strathmore.

Then on Saturday, I went to Hahndorf. Hahndorf is a little village about a 40 minute bus ride from the city. When we first got here, we read about it, and I was under impression that it was a settlement of people of German descent and the village was built in a German style as well. That isn’t the full truth. If I am not mistaken, the descent is correct, but the style of the architecture isn’t very German as I had assumed it to be. It was still a nice way to spend a few hours.

For those of you in the Philly area, Hahndorf was a mixture of New Hope and Peddler’s Village. It’s geography was more similar to New Hope: Hahndorf the attraction is almost exclusively made of little shops along one stretch of the main street. However, the style of the village was more like Peddler’s Village: most of the shops (souvenir oriented) was folksy like Peddler’s Village, but it did have a little New Age feel like New Hope to some of it. But in my… patriotic?...opinion, Hahndorf wasn’t as pretty as either.

This was my last weekend in Australia. I’ve already explained how I’ve celebrated it. It’s been good to keep active, but not too much is going on here. If this is the bachelor life, living on my own is not for me. I can see how some guys might like the idea of living this independently, in an apartment on his own, in a party town. But that’s exactly it: the only social life I could have if I lived here on my own would be with friends from work/school, and likely involve pubbing or clubbing each time we got together. I don’t like pubbing (and even less clubbing) like that, and I’m not outgoing enough to really make many other friends. Nope, the bachelor life is not for me.

By the way, I have decided that I’ll likely update this blog a few more times even after I arrive back in the States. For my own future benefit if I choose to read what I have kept here, I would like to have some conclusion. So, my current plan is to keep the blog updated until I am into the class routine back at Clemson. I tell you this, so that any of you who might actually be interested, you now know that I may not be finished even once I get back home.

Cheers!