the times of kryptoniteglows

So I’ve been in Sydney for one week, sort of…  I left last Friday and spent most of Friday waiting in the airport since we left super early for the airport, but there ended up being no traffic and the check-in along with security were with practically no wait.  Also, not a good idea to watch Dexter in the airport since some scenes it looks like you are watching porn…

Anyway, plane comes and we can finally board it.  I get an upgrade  to Economy Plus since it’s a full plane and some folks wanted to sit together in Economy.  I figure we would be able to leave on time since everything else has been going well, but nope .  Something is broken with the axle of the plane and they spend an hour banging around under the plane (while the captain kept reporting just another 15 minutes..).  Finally we take off, several hours later we end up at LAX.  That place seems huge, even though my connecting flight to Sydney was in the same terminal, it took a good long walk to actually get to the gate.  I nearly missed the international flight again!  Well at least this time I wasn’t the last one, had 3 minutes before they close the door.

So I flew on one of the newer  United 747-400s, the first class section had the new VOD screens and weird seating. The rest of the plane, had new monitors, but was otherwise the same basically. Though the plane and the actual seating was weird…  I booked 58B, which should be a window seat where the plane tapers according to seatguru.com, looking at the plane chart on the United website, it’s a middle seat which I couldn’t possibly deal with on a 14 hour flight.  I changed to 61J, a window seat in the last row of the plane.  Supposely anyhow, my ticket ends up being printed for 59J and there is no 61J at all.  There is a row 61, but it only has seats in the middle of the plane. Weird…

So here is a summary of my first week.
12/28 – Arrive, my uncle picks me up from the airport. Took a little while for us to find each other, probably because I kept walking around and there are so many Asians in Australia. Despite all the Citi ATMs being listed on the website, I couldn’t find a Citi ATM. I had to use AMZ instead… Funny thing how the money looked different and was plastic, but it smelled the same as American money…

We went out for some Dim Sum at one of the local clubs, weirdos asked how old I was and made me fill out some gambling slip thing since I was over 18, even though I was just there to eat.

12/29 – Went to Cabramatta, which I guess is like a town over or whatever. It’s where the local Vietnamese people are concentrated, we had some Ph? (Vietnamese noodles). While existing the shopping center place, they had random breath tests! It was the middle of the day, on a Monday!

12/30 – We took a day trip tour thing to Port Stephens. It was through one of those Chinatown tour places, so it was a total ripoff! They charged for the so called tour, which was was just busfare apparently. They then charged separate admission for during the actual places we visited.

We went to the Australian Reptile Park, it was kinda of lacking, but we also may not explored everything they had. The highlight was getting to feed the kangaroos.

Next we stopped at a winery, it was a tiny little place so the tour was lame. Honestly I could have done without wasting my time at this stop. Plus they charged $5 for the wine tasting, I didn’t even drink any wine!

Following the winery, we went on a ship for dolphin watching and for lunch. We paid for the the so called “seafood lunch”, which was basically overpriced fish and chips which was fried frozen foods that was barely warm. Took a while, but we did eventually see some dolphins. Apparently there are all sorts of rules about approaching them, like we aren’t allowed to, lol. SD550 was not anywhere near fast enough to capture the dolphins, but my S5 got some shots.

The last stop was the beach, there was an option to pay extra to do some 4×4 sand dune thing, but we opted out. Ended up sitting at the cafe, saw some people riding camels on the beach! My cousins apparently hate the beach, so we only took a brief walk on the sand before going back to sitting at the cafe.

12/31 I don’t really remember this day much, we had a BBQ and I had one West Coast and kinda passed out even before the fireworks.. Opps.

Only from economy to economy plus, but that is $54. After waiting hours at the airport because I left way early and traffic was super clear, the waiting on the airplane begins… They said something about a broken axle..

6:29 some dude has been fiddling around the bottom of the plane for a while…we were suppose to take off at 5:49… Another very tight connection :/

6:44 the plane is finally moving!

10:24/1:24am est barely made it to LAX on time, had 3 minutes before the doors were closing, the screens had actually said they were closed. Landed at gate 66 and the Sydney plane was at 77, didn’t think it would be very far since both were in the same terminal. I was wrong…