Got into Sydney today, I caught a glimpse of the opera house when I was in the cab and my heart dropped a little bit. I’m really here! That city that you see pictures of everywhere. One of the top tourist destinations in the world. My hotel is nicer than the other ones I have stayed in so far this trip. Upon conversations with other people, I figured out that the big cities like Sydney and Melbourne are actually less expensive than the other cities because there is less competition in the other cities because they are smaller. Especially when it comes to restaurants and even moreso with hotels.
So, I was a bit surprised to see that my hotel only has one real restaurant. It has a buffet but also serves a la carte. I mentioned to the lady at the front desk that I had a nut allergy and she offered to have the chef personally take me around to explain what was nut-free and what was not. This worked out perfectly! The chef was so friendly, and mentioned to me that I should stay away from the cheeses because the person who handled the nuts (which were on the same plate) handled the cheeses, but offered that if I wanted anything in particular he could arrange it to make sure there were no nuts on it. So, I mentioned to him that I would LOVE some cheese. That was that, I went back to the buffet to check out my nut free options and sat down. 10 minutes went by, and I was wondering where my cheese was, but didn’t want to (obviously) make an issue out of it and ask about it, so I just kept eating what I had on my plate. Another 10 minutes, Chef Ricardo comes back out with a few nicely sliced pieces of brie with some “absolutely nut-free” as he claimed toast and some caramelized figs. Yum! It was the perfect snack to finish off my glass of red wine. I was very impressed by the service, there’s nothing like being in a state-of-the-art city where I don’t have to guess if I’m putting something that’s going to cause me an issue into my mouth.
Today I flew on Jetstar, Australia’s discount airline (and had to pay an extra $75 for my baggage for being over 20 kilos; probably would have ended up a lot cheaper on Qantas anyways because of this!) Jetstar is similar to Jetblue, but there was absolutely no entertainment for 4.5 hours, neither were there any snacks, only breakfast that you had to pay for yourself. I refuse to buy breakfast from an airline. Puhhhh leeeease, I can wait for MUCH better! At least the water was free. Though, I could barely keep my eyes open long enough to ask for some. Actually, I couldn’t. I ended up getting off the airplane real thirsty because I spent the whole flight sleeping, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Went by real fast! Anyways, Qantas announced late this afternoon that it was indefinitely grounding the flights of all of its’ aircraft due to the labor unions and their ridiculous claims. I don’t know… if the CEO wasn’t just given a 71% salary increase then I might have agreed with the union’s ridiculousness. Pretty sure that just exacerbated the problem much, much more. So glad that I’m not scheduled to fly with them for another 2-3 weeks. Sure hope they’ve resolved their issues by then, or I’ll be pretty screwed, and they will be absolutely royally screwed. Meaning… the company, many passengers, and tourism revenue for the country as a whole.
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