I’m sitting in my hostel in Australia and trying to recover
from a bit of jet-lag (just a bit). I meant to post an intro to this blog before
I left, but obviously that didn’t happen, so I’ll just say now that I’m in
Australia on a Work and Holiday Visa, which means that I can work and travel
anywhere around the country for up to 12 months! It’s been pretty bleh so far,
since the travel took a while and now I’m just trying to find a job to fund
more exciting ventures, but more on that later. If you’ve seen my Epic
Ecological Adventures blog (annimalfox.blogspot.com), then you know that I tend
to be long-winded and to basically journal every day and then post it, usually
with some relevant pics. I plan to use this blog a little bit differently. First
of all, I’ll be traveling for a year, and I don’t think even I can keep a
day-by-day for that long, and a lot of if may be kind of dull, depending on the
work I’m doing. Anyway, I hope to post as often as possible, but I’ll be
exploring the beauty of brevity (after this post, naturally) and will probably
be paying for internet a lot so I may not have time to upload a ton of pics,
but I’ll try to post lots when the wifi is good. Onward to a little bit about
my adventure in flying around the world (or, see title).
In my day+ of travel on Saturday, I first got to fly to LA
(watching Hitch along the way) and hang out in the LAX airport, which is always
delightful. At least I didn’t have to walk very far to get to the international
terminal, which was right around the corner. The flight to Fiji was delayed 45
minutes, which meant that we left at about 12:20, instead of 11:40, so
technically I experienced a little bit of Sunday before it was absorbed by the
date line. I have officially confirmed that I always get a middle seat when I’m
not allowed to pick my own seats, which seems peculiar since there is a 3-way
chance of getting either of the seat options, but I always get the middle (I
guess people who buy tickets earlier get to pick their seats, don’t know).
Anyway the flight was fine, although I was right by one of the kitchen areas so
it was noisy. I appreciate them giving us dinner and breakfast, but I would
have much rather slept the whole time instead of having to eat at 1 in the
morning (although it was good tofu and rice in a soy sauce) and then be woken
up 2 hours before the flight landed to have breakfast. Whatever, I watched the
movie during dinner that just popped up on my screen. It was “When you’re
expecting” or something like that, and had several different couples who were
all going to have babies. Almost every actor was familiar (Elizabeth Banks,
Cameron Diaz, even Matthew Morrison and one guy who was on Gossip Girl) and the
movie was entertaining as far as those types of movies go. My favourite part
was the “dudes’ club” which was all the dads bonding and hanging out in the
park on Saturday with their strollers and babies. One of the dads-to-be was
feeling unsure, so they were trying to help him, while occasionally nodding to
this jogger guy who always ran by them at the same time. Anyway, then I mostly
slept, I guess.
I got to see out the window of the girl next to me as we
were coming down. The Fiji islands were gorgeous from above, where we saw the
coastlines and the aqua ocean, including lighter areas with waves breaking on
them that were the reefs. The mountains and tropical humidity were also fun
when we got out of the plane. The line from the plane to the international
flight area was absurdly long, although there was a live Fijian band
entertaining us along the way, with ukuleles. Turns out the reason it was
taking so long is that every person had to put their bag through the single
x-ray, and they didn’t even have a long table to get your stuff ready, so it
was a purely individual process. Inside there were lots of island goods and
food, and I almost got some ice cream, until I realized that it didn’t have any
cool flavours (no tropical fruits or anything) and was really expensive (like
4.50 AUD, which turned out to be normal, ah well). So I just hung out and tried
to pretend like it wasn’t lunchtime in Seattle so I would stop being weirdly
hungry at 7 in the morning in Fiji.
The last flight was fine (ca 5 hours) and I watched most of
Spiderman and ignored my weird tomato bun sandwich that they gave me for my
vegetarian breakfast. No cool views of Sydney coming down, though, since I was
on the aisle (not the middle, for once!). I got on a shuttle bus to the hostel
(free airport transfer), and there ended the saga.
The subsequent shower was glorious!
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