Gold Coast Take Two, St. Patrick's Day

Sorry I haven't written in a while! I'll do my best to catch everyone up. We headed to the gold coast again to soak up some more sun and surf. We went down on thursday afternoon and stayed the night. There was a group of six of us, so we all rented out an apartment for the night in a building right by the beach! It was a very nice apartment and there was the most beautiful view of the ocean right from our room and you could see the rest of the city too. We had a lot of fun just hanging out as a big group and checking out the city. The only downfall was that it rained quite a bit at night. We stayed out pretty late and Mike and Brittney even decided to stay up to see the sun rise over the ocean! I managed to get up in time to see the sunrise but it wasn't very good, there was a lot of clouds which blocked the sun. But it was still a great night, and in the morning we headed to the beach. It was sunny and nice out but it was really windy and so the sand on the beach blew everywhere and stung when it hit you. Still, we enjoyed the ocean water for a little while before deciding to call it a day and head home. There was a party in our apartment that night so my roommates and I decided to check it out so we could meet people in our apartment building. Turns out, it was an "ABC Party", which means you wear "Anything But Clothes". There were some interesting outfits, mostly people wrapped in newspaper or trash bags or towels. But we got to meet a few people from the building so that was nice. Saturday morning was a St Patrick's Day parade downtown, so we got really excited for it and went to watch. Unfortunately the parade didn't last very long at all and wasn't that exciting. There was only a few people wearing green and it basically looked like a normal day downtown. We decided to go to a local irish restaurant/pub for a while, which was really relaxing and fun. There was a band playing authentic Irish music, so that was really entertaining and cool to watch. We walked around the city for the rest of the afternoon. Today was another rugby game at the stadium. It was still fun to watch but it wasn't as exciting as our first game because our team crushed the other team and so it wasn't a very close and intense game. However, we still had fun and enjoyed the night out. Now it's back to classes for the week again!