8th-9th Surfing and Bondi

I'd been doing my bit for Anglo-French relations and been socialising with the French hostellers, their comprehension we discovered was dramatically improved by the addition of a French accent to problem words! No joke!
Next day I had a surf lesson planned - my first one and I was rather nervous. The surf had been big enough in the last few days for the beach to be closed to swimmers. And to paraphrase some famous person: It's far easier to eat handfuls of sand and mouthfuls of sea water than learn to surf! Our instructor was energetic and a bit mad and soon had us doing dry runs of jumping up on the board. We only went out about 15 metres to catch small waves, by the end of 2 hours I'd managed to catch a few waves, then mostly fall off but on a few occasions get to my feet, balance and make it to the beach for the final few metres. Woo!
Then that was me pretty much finished off for the day. I'd not been ready to leave the water but on a final fall, I was left sitting in the shallows with the waves washing over me and realised I was pretty tired!

Next day stiff and sore from surfing,  I headed over to Bondi beach to see what the fuss was about. Still not sure, it's meant to be the epitomee of Australian beach culture. Nice enough beach, clearly popular but just a beach. I walked several kilometres down the coast to Coogee which was nice and swam in an ocean pool to cool off.