When I got back to King’s Cross I decided to check my email again at the local library. This time the little room with the table had some open seats, and I settled myself down in one of them to look over my inbox in relative comfort. Across from me a couple was sitting, a young girl with long straight hair looking at her laptop and next to her, her apparent boyfriend, tall, burly, round-faced, with a bandanna around his head, and a cellphone he couldn’t get to work.

She asked him a murmured question I couldn’t catch.

“Pretentious and in love with money, that’s what’s typical,” he growled in response, still staring down at his phone and working the buttons.

She murmured something else, sounding slightly doubtful.

“That’s what they’re like here. Pretentious and in love with money.”

Again, a murmur of doubt.

“Well you’ve come to the wrong bloody city then,” he said. “That’s what’s typical here. Pretentious and in love with money.” Then he gave up on his phone and went outside to see if he could catch a signal.

Everyone said I had to go. You’ve got to check out Bondi Beach I was told, (not Bondee, remember. BondAI) and so after Michael left for the conference I walked to the train station, purchased my ticket, and rode to where you caught the bus to the beach. A rather long, cluttered bus ride along cluttered streets, and finally to the road along the beach, like many other popular sea-side places, crowded with cars, one side white beach and blue water, the other stores and pedestrians, all of it, brick and flesh, smelling like sand, sea-water, and lotion. I got out and bought a cloth hat and sun block in one of the shops, then walked down to the beach.

It was — a beach. Sun, white sand, blue-green water, swimmers, waders and surfers. If it was different from Manley, it was only in being more high powered, crowded, and upscale. I kicked off my shoes and rolled up my jeans on the broad pavement curving around the beach, listening to the young men in bathing suits on the bench behind me pointing out and criticizing the surfers on the water. As I hopped barefoot down from the steps into the sand, I’m happy to say that I spotted more than one middle-aged, slightly pear-shaped man in a wet suit carrying a board. Another difference with Manley. Not every male surfer had a washboard stomach.

I walked at Bondi Beach. I walked barefoot along the edge of the shockingly cold, wonderful water, occasionally getting splashed up to my knees, and I smelled seaweed and sunblock and ocean and watched kids plashing past me and surfers angling along the waves. And after I did that, I walked back. And then I sat down at a pale, cinderblock, slightly pricey eatery on the beach and had a chicken schnitzel with chips with a delicious, ice-cold mango lassi.

No, I did not walk along the cliffs, and I’m sorry for that, but my feet were already sore and blistered from walking for the past two days. I was just happy to be at the beach. After I ate I walked in the water some more, feeling a little sorry — but not too much — that I hadn’t brought my bathing suit. This was the Pacific — cold and rough, no matter how green and pretty it may look. I’m an Atlantic and Gulf-Coast gal when it comes to swimming in the ocean.