Friday the 6th – Arrival in Sydney

It is kinda strange when you start dancing across the Internation Dateline.  I was in San Francisco on Sunday night after barely making it out of Austin, Texas.  I had been in crunch mode for the better part of two months trying to get things in New Orleans and things in Austin organized. In New Orleans I have the place in the quarter on the market for sale, although it still needs some work. For the Austin place, I had to get as much of my stuff out of there and in storage, plus make repairs before the family renting the place moves in.

 

So back on topic again…International Dateline…I stayed with my sister Ki in San Mateo from Sunday the 1st until Wednesday 4th and then she dropped my off at SFO and I caught the 10:30pm QF74 flight to Sydney.  The flight was delayed on the tarmac for about an hour because the crew found wet carpet in the plane and thought they might have a water leak in the back galley. In the end, they decided someone had spilled a bunch of water and they could take off.  It is kind of troublesome thinking that Quantas spent a bunch of time/money because someone from the ground crew or air crew spilled a bunch of water and didn’t tell anyone.  Of course there may have been a leak and they decided not to tell us. We really are in someone else’s hands when we fly.  That is most likely why they wish to control information while you are on the plane.

 

So… International Dateline…I left SFO on Wednesday night the 4th and arrived in Sydney, Australia on Friday the 6th around 9am.  I chose to go through quarantine and declare that I was packing two cans of Protein powder and a bag of Swampfire seafood boil in my luggage.  I had remembered 15 years ago, when I was last in Sydney, that they take quarantine very seriously (justly so).  The powder was a non-issue, but they really wanted to check the ingredients  in the Swampfire seafood boil to make sure it didn’t contain cloves. It didn’t, so I got in.  Lisa was there to pickme up on her BMW Cooper Mini S and all my luggage fit with no problem.  She is making use of the Tom-Tom GPS device I got her for Christmas. Alas, she had been waiting an hour for the arrival.  We jetting to our place on the pier and she headed to work for meetings.

 

I hung out at the pad until some movers showed so that they could reassmble a bed that didn’t fair well in shipping. I think Lisa wrote in her blog (http://faiadownunder.spaces.live.com/default.aspx) about the trials and tribulations of shipping/moving international.  Anyways, one of the movers had, how to say it, ‘profound’ body odor. After the movers left, I had to stuff an air freshener device under the bed and spray the remains of a can of freshner to combat the mark.  It reminded me of the Jerry Seinfeld episode with the bad body odor in the car. Alas, the scent was slayed.

 

I then headed up the stairs of ‘death’ (or more likely ‘stairs of life’) that lead from Hickson road to the Rocks and went looking for a GSM SIM card and a bite to eat.  I wondered up St George street for a good stretch until I found a Vodafone shop and bought a card.  They told me that I got an extra 350 minutes of Vodafone to Vodafone number time and that made me seem like a smart shopper until later when Lisa got her and I re-found out that she is on Telstera – Doh!  So I guess when my minutes run out, I’ll pick up a new SIM.

 

Got back to the apartment and relaxed on the balcony a bit and took this Friday afternoon snap:

 

When Lisa got home, we had a glass of wine on the balcony and then changed clothes and headed to a nearby resturant called, Living Room on the Pier.  It served Indonesian food.  The chicken Satay was not very good –  lacked flavor and warmth, the fried rice with minced chicken and vegetables and an egg on top was very good; the fried checken leg made Lisa laugh. We split a bottle of wine and headed back to the apartment to get reacquainted. And then I crashed. 

Reacquainted