a weekend in newcastle

I have a few minutes (ie 2hours of patients cancelling and not turning up to my clinic) so thought I would update and catch up on the last week.

So I finished my challenge last week and amazingly did reach my target of $400 thanks to a last-minute donation from an old housemate! Far out, it is insanely challenging to stick to $2 a day. Not because there wasn't enough food. I had leftover ingredients at the end of the week. It was hard because it was so BORING eating the same thing every day. I found I was craving flavour, taste and variety all the time. It doesn't make it any easier when you have people at work offering you food all the time as well.. However I did it and survived! I have been savouring tasty food ever since!!

On the weekend I managed to head over to Newcastle for a couch-surfing event I heard about the previous weekend. For those of you who haven't heard of couchsurfing before, it is an organisation/website where you can either stay with people or host people on a spare bed/couch/floor space. Alternatively if you can't do either at the moment you can just meet up with people for drinks, to explore, show people around. Its a great way to meet people and see places as the locals see it. On the weekend we had lots of different activities including a 5 hour "monopoly" through the city through bouts of rain/sunshine. We had to take photo's and video of our group doing particular things in particular areas. Highlights included asking a random stranger for their interview as you are their number one fan (we found a guy dressed up as a smurf and used him). Our group won a prize for the best video complaining to a cinema employee that there weren't enough Bollywood films being shown.... the guy we spoke to called the manager even though we were all laughing and saying we weren't serious - she got a bit stressed and it took a bit of proving for her to believe that it was for a scavenger hunt dare!

Newcastle itself is a pretty cool town, with some very interesting characters living there. Walking around the streets in the day and night you saw some ahh interesting outfits! There are many many MANY stag/hens nights going on so naturally there is alot of interesting-looking dressed people. I saw a group of 50 guys dressed in kilts, a guy dressed up as superman, a girl dressed up as a lion and a whole group of guys/girls dressed up as cavemen and cavewomen.

Work itself is going well and I have been making friends with Emma (new grad dietitian) and Jamie-Lee our receptionist as they are both my age. Outside of work I have started running again - there is a really cool running group in St Bees that I found out about through Emma. Last thursday we had a 1.5hr training session that involved running up the cliffs from the beach at St Bees (probably at least 1km long to get to the top) and then once at the top we were in a field full of sheep over looking the coast and the mountains doing relays and sprints with this incredible view! They have a real character as a trainer and it's a very good social group with an age range of probably 20-60years. Tonight I'm going to join them for swimming in the lakes. I haven't been swimming for a while and definitly not in the lakes -will be cold! Luckily one of them has a spare wetsuit which I am going to borrow.