4 hours.

I only have 4 hrs til I must be awake.
That is when the thrilling Chile vs Brazil match will begin.
Unfortunately, these are both my teams. And this means I lose a team, either way, and this means I'm screwed if next round the other team gets out.
I will be the laughing stock of my family. Although I will be able to mock them if Chile gets out first. "HA! Patriotism gets you very little in life!" That'll be the only comeback I have, because my family, being proud Chileans and even prouder Australians, chose those two teams.
I, being slightly patriotic but not the point of idiocy, chose Chile and Brazil. Cause Chile had a far higher chance than Australia.

So, yes. 1 day left of the Great Vegetarian Challenge which I was forced to embark upon (blame this one on Kathryn), and I will then be cooking a valiant roast dinner. Tomorrow - or today, rather - a trip down to my casa, a lovely coastal town that is really, decidedly inland. But it has a pretty cool beach nearby.

I sort of miss it down there. It's an entirely different pace. You have life down there, passing gently by with very little thought to time. "It'll take half an hour to get somewhere - wow, that's certainly quick!" Moving to Brisbane, I've become tainted. "Half an hour? You must be kidding me. Not doing that. Ever." Down there, smiling is common. Up here, you practically spasm your way through shopping centres and streets, trying to avoid knocking into people and hurriedly muttering a completely insincere apology. I'm trying to keep my homestyle ways, but you get strange looks from people when you smile at them.

And in the city, I want to smile a lot. It has a certain charm, a beauty that is completely different to the one I had experienced down there. I was walking down Ann Street a while back, and it was stunning - the cathedral there, sheer beauty. It's the sense that people have been treading these same paths as you for years and years, that perhaps there was someone at the same time, same place, staring at those cathedral spires that reach into the sky, awed at the contrast between God's blue sky and man's bricked home for him. Or that someone else, rushing along Edward Street, was also fleeing rain, and was also rueing the lack of covers along the road. Someone else admired the Naval building, but in its shiny newness, rather than its charming old-style frontier now housing florists and upmarket services. With my iPod in ears, I always smile when I walk through the city. The thudding of people around me, the sense that in this space, I experience humanity - well, it's amazing, really. I'm the sort of person who loves the busy aura of the city. It's what I loved about Melbourne - yet it had a culture Brisbane couldn't handle. Brisbane's coming into its own, though.

Down home, I'm still enthralled. Even in destruction, there's beauty. There were paddocks which were a luscious green, demolished for a new bypass. As they tore back the grass, ripping at it with diggers' teeth, a stunning red was revealed. A red which I took for granted, but in Brisbane, there's only brown dirt. We have volcanic soil down home, and it's absolutely irritating if you love white clothes, but I still adore it profusely. Down there, you drive along stretches of road where you'll see nothing but a cemetery and paddocks, and suddenly, you drive over the crest of a hill to be greeted with a blue-blue fusion, of sky and sea, with a subtle difference you know is there but you just can't pick out. When you wind around the road, searching for the topaz waters, it greets you almost in a cliche - slashes of yellow sand, dancing across the view, with rocks and shells littered around your feet. The water comes up, and tickles - a tingling cold - but it flees again, a hide and seek game, can you find me now? Then it returns, gotcha!, and you're chasing it in further, til it crashes against you in almost a bear-hug.

I doubt I'll see a beach up close tomorrow, but I will be going out near my school. The most fantastic location for an everyday drive, past pine trees on one side and a perfectly blue ocean on the other. Even in the storms, the ocean was perfection. It would become the temptress - come to me, my pretty - and even with the rain careening down in loud splashes, I'd want to run to it, and spend my days there, pretending the beach was home.

I don't know how this turned into near poetic prose, but I'm in a poetic mood I suppose. And I get to see this tomorrow, and return to my new home on Wednesday.

All in all, I'm living a pretty blessed life.