Day 1 – Sunday, July 06, 2008

We arrived at 6:06AM local time. This is the equivalent of 3:03PM back home…yesterday. The flight from LA was a hair over 14 hours. We did over 600MPH at 35000 feet for the most of it on a very large plane, a 747-400. The outside temperatures were worse than 40 below at the worst part. (Yikes!) We had been on a plane for about 21 out of the last 24 hours. About 18 of those hours were spent in pitch black darkness as we traveled on the dark side of the planet (and somehow lost a day on the way). I managed to sleep 3 or 4 times, usually 20-30 minutes (estimating by the songs I missed on my iPod) although the last nap was quite possibly over an hour.

We left the plane and I made my first mistake in Australia. I was planning on shopping at the duty free shop in the airport (basically you can only get in if you’re on an international flight, stuff isn’t taxed and it’s pretty cheap) but I didn’t have any Australian money yet, I wasn’t sure where to go, I was very tired and all I saw when glancing that way was alcohol, and that was the least of my worries at the time, so we skipped it. The mistake was this…apparently there was a cell phone store there. Sam likes to do this thing where she walks in front of me and talks to me quietly while looking away from me and being short. As a direct result, I say “what?!” a lot, or just plain don’t hear her. Oh well, I missed the cell phone shop, we’ll find one later.

We grab our bags and make it through customs without a problem. They are going to stop Sam at quarantine to check the candy in her bag but they let me through without a hitch. They find out we are together and they let her go as well. We plan on testing this again on the way out with something more serious. (Think fuzzy, cute, and alive).

We exchange our money. I give them whatever’s in my wallet (something like $33 and a handful of change which the lady refused) and Samantha hands over a well-thought out stack of $20’s. We are paid $.999AUD for each one of our American dollars. The less you transfer, the higher percentage you pay on it, we end up paying $9 for transferring $430 over. We leave the airport.

There’s a neat little roundabout outside where taxis drive through constantly and they are hailed by a person with a vest and a radio for you. Our taxi driver was young and nice, but he must have been new. He got lost 3 times over the short 2 mile trip…and the worst part is, the first time he got lost was in this little roundabout….the person with the vest was chasing him down and waving him over to the other side where we stood waiting with our mountain of bags. Hahaha. He pulls up in a Ford Falcon wagon (pretty sharp).

After loading our bags into the back, I make an idiot out of myself for the first time. I’ve been in Australia for about an hour, I wasn’t sure I’d make it that long. Sam gets into the backseat, and I walk around to get into the front. Surprise, moron, these cars are right hand drive! The cabbie says something to the effect of “You plan on driving, mate?”.

We go north instead of south. The cabbie has never heard of our hotel. We turn around and find it. It’s closed. Nobody home. Awesome. He takes us back to a hotel by the airport. $45 cab ride for a 15 minute walk. At least he was helpful.

We check in and take the only room they have. It’s a family smoking room. There is a queen sized bed and two bunk beds. The room is tiny and lacks things that come even in the most basic hotel rooms in America, such as a phone, a hairdryer, cable TV, brochures/pamphlets, an ice bucket, etc. Needless to say there was also no fridge or microwave, and the bathroom was really more of a shower with a toilet and sink in it. (My first thoughts involved whether it was possible to make use of the toilet and the shower at the same time. I believe it is, although this is unproven…for now).

We walk next door to a Krispy Kreme. Good news everyone, the donuts taste the same! The bad news is that it’s going to take us a long time to be able to order what we want! I ordered “Two glased donuts and a coffee, please.” He responded with “What maasfdnd kind masndfhasdf madfh, haoshns, woomwowl, latte? I said “Just black coffee is fine.” Instead of coffee, I am presented with a pitch black liquid with a mysterious brown film on top that tastes absolutely brutal. Sam informs me this is probably expresso. Straight. In the size of a small coffee cup. I dump enough sugar in to kill a small animal and the coffee rejects it. The sugar forms into a pile on the top of my coffee, smirking at me. I poke it until it disappears. I paid for this and I WILL make it drinkable. It still tastes like the piss of Satan but it doesn’t make me gag at every sip anymore and that’s good enough for me. Sam orders a combo of two donuts and a ice cream coffee thing. She doesn’t get to pick the donuts (she thought she did) and gets chocolate milk instead of coffee. Oh well.

After making sure our luggage was intact, we try to sleep for a bit, as it’s 9AM now. Well, it’s 6PM last night and although we’re beat from the plane ride, we are unable to sleep. I’m sure the double quadruple used diaper I consumed had some part of this as well. I change my shirt from the “HEY, I’M AMERICAN!” tshirt with writing I have on to a much less conspicuous striped polo. Aussies love their horizontal stripes. We leave the hotel with a list of things to do.

-Find an ATM so I can get more than $23 in Australian money.

-Find a cellphone store and get pre-paid phones

-Find some lunch

-Find a pawn shop and look around for items we did not have room to pack.

-Find the police station so that Sam can trade patches.

-Walk around, get ourselves completely lost, and hail a cab back.

It takes us nearly an hour to find our way out of the airport on foot in a direction that doesn’t involve us walking in the grass, on the road, or across a 6 lane freeway. We walk for a very long time, taking a few random corners here and there, trying to find something that looks promising.

Something I simply never thought of until this moment. Everyone drives on the left over here…therefore, everyone walks on the left on the sidewalks. Back home, everyone walks on the right. After playing chicken with a woman and her dog, we adjust fairly well.

We walk past something that looks like a Home Depot and then something that looks like an Office Max. We go into the Office Max. They have cellphones, but not very many. We leave the “office max”. SOMEHOW we end up back on the street where our first hotel was. We find the police station. The officers there have never heard of trading patches (which is apparently pretty common back home) but they love the idea and agree to do it anyways. They seem to be fascinated with the United States and the one officer tells us that he’s never been off the island except for the one time he flew to the northern part of the island and the plane went over water for a bit. He plans on going to the states someday. “It’s me dream!”. Back home, if I walked into a police station and asked for a patch, or something else they’d never heard of, I’d probably be told “No, sorry, get out.” I was very surprised at how friendly everyone is so far.

Upon leaving the police station, I am nearly flattened by an very old man on a motorized wheelchair. “Sorry, excuse me!” I said. “Nearly got ya…” he muttered. This man is my hero.

We continue walking down this road, which is sort of a strip mall. There are not that many types of stores.

-Turkish Pizza and Kebab

-Chinese/Indian/Indonesian/Portuguese food

-Discount clothing stores.

-Casinos (well, not really, just really dark shops full of slot machines and video poker, but it was still pretty surprising)

-Café/Car washes. (interesting! You go inside and have a coffee or a sandwich while your car is washed. Some of these also have garages.)

Every restaurant in this strip proclaims “Take away food!” or some are “Take away or eat in!” (I suppose “take away” makes MUCH more sense than “take out.”) Also, 7 out of 8 of these stores are closed on Sunday, making lunch difficult. We stop at a convenience store. I buy a Gatorade and she buys a Sunkist. Neither taste the same, or come in a familiar size.

We end up walking back to the hotel I originally had reservations at, as they have a restaurant and a bar and I need food, beer, and to straighten that mess out.

My steak sandwich is large and delicious. My beer is apparently “schooner” sized…about a pint. I have no idea what the other sizes are. According to a lunch special sign, one special comes with a “middie” of house beer. Will do much more research on this later.

We walk around a liquor store and marvel at the prices. $40 for a cheap case. $4/bottle for beer, $24 for a six pack of ANYTHING. Booze is roughly twice what it is back home. We purchase a 1.125L of Smirnoff Rum for $40 and two 1.125L bottles of Coca Cola for about $4 total. The total is $46.50. Sam gives the guy a $50 and I lay down 50 cents. He asks if Sam has another dollar so he can give us a 5 back. She asks what a dollar coin looks like. So much for trying to fit in! The clerk laughed and showed us the difference between a one and two dollar coin. The two dollar coin is smaller, which the clerk explained, and doesn’t make any noise when you drop it. The dollar coin makes a nice ringing sound (which he demonstrated) and the two dollar coin just makes a quiet thud, which “gives you the ability to lose more”.

He also notices we are much tanner than the surrounding population!

Whatever I had in my pocket...no pennies here! From left to right, 5, 10, 20, 50 cent pieces, a 1 dollar coin and a 2 dollar coin.

We end up walking back to our hotel for two reasons. 1. Sam knows where we’re going. 2. Everytime I see a free cab, it is on another street or going in the opposite direction. We would move to the other side of the street or to the different street and then the cabs were going where we just came from. Absolutely terrible luck! It wasn’t a bad walk back, maybe 40 minutes to an hour.

If there’s one thing I’m getting good at, it’s using a greeting that I run through a vocal blender so that I fit in. Getting in the elevator, a man greeted me with “ey gang”. “ello” I mumbled. Dude didn’t know what hit him!

I slept from 6pm to 6AM here. That’s about 3AM – 3PM back home, which is not all that uncommon…haha.

I think that’s just about everything I could have told you about my first day in Sydney. It was a success. Today we are going to check out of this hotel and move to the other hotel (which is cheaper, not in the middle of the airport, and has a bar and restaurant).

I will leave you with an awesome story!

We are sitting in O’Hare airport in Chicago waiting for our flight. I remark to Samantha “That guy looks just like William Hung!”

“Haha, no way”. 15 minutes later. “Hung, party of two?” rings by over the standby speaker and they stand up. I get a picture with him, although I am not the first person in the terminal to recognize him.

Solid.