Currently I am sitting in an apartment on the seventy-fifth floor of this building. There are large windows to my right which open up to a breath-taking panorama of the city. In a mixture of good and bad luck these windows face west; good because the sunsets are amazing (corollary: if I'm awake to see them. With this much of a time change after about 5 pm local time the body starts to shut down.), bad because the harbour, bridge and opera house are all east of our location. The current local time is 2:20 AM, which probably begs the question of what am I doing awake? Because I'm a good student who isn't going to let traveling to Australia and New Zealand interfere with attending classes that's why. :-P I now have about an hour until my next class.
There's something I've noticed about traveling, especially via air. It is that no matter what, no matter how careful you are to have all the right boxes ticked off, no matter how meticulously things are packed, no matter how careful you are to follow all the right signs to get to the right place at the right time, something will go wrong.
Take, for example, our dance in and out of customs in Toronto. When we checked our bags in Bermuda, they were labeled with a bright, unmistakably neon pink tag in order to indicate that they were to go straight through to Sydney, thus making it unnecessary for us to collect them at Toronto, only to drop them off again 100 yards later (as we always have to do on our way to Montreal). My mother, having worked for Air Canada in the past and thus is invaluable on trips (she knows how airlines work from the inside), was a little dubious about this, but as the check-in clerk went to a lot of trouble to tag these bags (it wasn't until half were sent along the conveyor belt that she realized she could tag them with these tags) we figured she knew what she was talking about. We arrive in Toronto, and after a brief deliberation on whether or not to walk all the way to the end of the baggage collection hall to see if our bags were not there we decided that waiting around to confirm the absence of our baggage was probably a waste of our time. That is, until 100 yards later when we walk through the "connections" area and my mother explains why a family of seven headed to Australia has no baggage. The lady explained that no, our bags would not be routed straight through to Sydney, neon pink tag or no neon pink tag, and that we would have to collect them here in Toronto anyways, to which my mom commented that it made sense. As we had already passed customs we could not simply walk into the baggage hall and grab our bags off the carousel, and as, due to some very questionable airport planning (do not get me started on this), we were now outside of security, we had to leave all our carry-on with these people while we were given an escort back into the baggage hall to collect our luggage. All seven of us are sent back, but when we get to the check before re-entering the baggage hall, we find out that only three of us will be allowed in, so my dad, brother, and I head in. We get to the belt where our luggage is supposed to be, but aside from a few lonely and old-looking pieces there was nothing there. We quickly scan the lost luggage areas for bright neon pink tags, but there's nothing. Our guide goes over to the main lost luggage desk and radios down to the people who handle bags, explaining what we were looking for and had they seen them and if they had could they possibly send them up on carousel 13. A minute later a row of six black bags with unmistakably neon pink tags show up on carousel 13. The bags had indeed been routed ahead to Australia.
Airports are pitifully inefficient.
At any rate, we all arrived in Australia together, bags included. A family friend is staying with us kids while my parents are staying in a hotel about a 20 minute walk away, as my dad has business which will be taking place around the hotel. We went for a walk just around Sydney for a bit, getting dinner and some fruit on the way back. I decided to experiment a bit with pictures of other people, so here are the results.
This is the view from our apartment. It's quite a long ways down.
city pictures = breathtaking. good job :)
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