Bula Bula Fiji!

Coming over on the plane to Fiji, I sat next to a woman who was coming because a family member was sick. On the second plane, the person sitting next to me wife’s father was dying. And when I arrived, there had been a poor older woman with a cane who had a lot of trouble walking and a man with her as well, both broke down sobbing when greeted by some family at the airport. Fiji is suppose to be a happy place, not a place full of sad people! When I arrived at the first airport, I had already filled out my customs card and I noticed on it that it said no one was allowed to conduct research in the country without the approval of the immigration department, or something of that. I got a bit worried. I prefer to say I’m coming for business because I don’t like to lie, but sometimes it’s just better to. The lady sitting next to me told me that I would be fine, so I trusted her and kept it. Luckily it turned out fine, I altered my real story a little bit and basically said that I was meeting with a client and helping them with rental budgets. The immigration guy thought I was an agent, so I said sure, something like that. And that got me the stamp. Phew!

I was greeted at the hotel by a man wearing a skirt. I later realized that most of the men here wear skirts. It’s fascinating to see these people, many of whom have ancestors that are indigenous Fijians. They look just like they came off a South Pacific postcard; except they’re not totally in costume. And, they are much larger people than I expected. On the way to the airport, my taxi driver filled me in that Fijians ate people until the late 1920’s/30’s. The idea was that once you captured your enemy, you would eat them. Fascinating, and disgusting at the same time.

Something I need everywhere: A waitress out to save my life

I went to ask for prices at a café in the mall today, and after being approached while staring at the menu, there was a man with a massive curly cue mustache staring up at me. I had to look away quickly in order to prevent myself from laughing out loud. The funniest part of it was that he was so “proper” in the way that he spoke. It was so difficult not to burst out laughing!

I’m pretty proud of myself; I went out 3 times in Sydney, with 2 different guys. Though, I was actually asked out 4 times because the guy from the ferry who invited me out counts, I think! Good odds, 3 out of 6 evenings! I did end up going out with Shawn again (the strange accent guy). I warned him that I couldn’t be out late because I had an early morning meeting. We ate at a Thai restaurant and the waitress was very concerned about my allergies. I told her no nuts, and no fenugreek. When she didn’t know what fenugreek was, I wrote SPICE next to it. I think she then became nervous I was allergic to all spices and limited what I could order. When we wanted to get the chicken wings, she told me that I couldn’t have them. Just like that, straight out. No, you can’t. Almost like my free will was taken from me. She said spring rolls only, so that’s what we had for an app. I loved her sternness, I have never had a waitress so insistent on what I could and could not eat! Shawn wanted me to ask him to hang out in my room, but it wasn’t going to happen. He actually said to me, invite me up to your room. I was like, what? What’s wrong with you guy, who actually says that to a girl? He asked me a couple times before finally giving up. Ya that’s right, go back home. The next day, I realized that he had left me with the $40 parking fee charged to my room to pay on my own. I’m sure he didn’t realize until he got to his car, and by that time he was probably thinking, oh well – f that I didn’t get laid, she can pay for something!

In hindsight, I like it here in Sydney, and would definitely like to at least visit once again sometime. Hopefully with some friends next time.
Coffee culture in Australia is amazing. There is a café on every corner, and people go out for numerous cups of joe everyday. As a realtor put it, each person in the office goes to a different café of their preference, and have it made by the barrister of their choice. Coffee in Australia is like wine in France, I do believe. I had quite a few good cups of it myself while I was there!

Shawn mentioned to me that if you look around, you’ll find laid-back men with sneakers, a wifebeater, shorts, tattoos everywhere (they are very popular in Australia) and a supermodel girlfriend, dressed to the nines. Goes to show you how laid back Australia is. I saw one who looked like she could be one myself when I was leaving Manly beach. Big sunglasses, perfectly toned calves, short mini skirt and a fur coat toting around a supercute toddler.

What were you doing with your legs in the air anyways?

Today was a beautiful day, I took a million pictures of the opera house and the beautiful bridge behind it, and I went out to Manly Beach (which was actually named for having lots of manly men, seriously) via ferry. I lounged on the beach… a luxury I hadn’t done much this trip and I wanted to make sure to take advantage of this since the weather was going in the opposite direction back home. I watched the surfers, I went on a very nice walk to check out the little town, and then had a delicious lunch before taking the short 15 minute ferry back to Sydney proper. Meanwhile, funny story for the ferry ride back.

I make my way up to the top of the ferry for the view and sit all the way in the back. When the boat pulls away from the shore, it’s going so fast and the wind was so strong I could barely catch my breath, so I turned around so that I could. When I did this, my shoe flew off my foot and luckily landed against the ropes on the back, and fell flat down to the bottom of the boat. Thank goodness it got caught on the ropes, otherwise that shoe would have flown straight out to sea! This prompted a conversation with a guy who was sitting close by. He was a nice English guy who invited me to meet up with him and his friends at some bar that night. I said maybe, but never exchanged information with him anyhow. As I was getting off the boat, I asked about my shoe and the shipmates said “we have your shoe, Cinderella”. “Thanks guys, my shoe flew off my foot!” To which they replied…. “what were you doing with your legs up in the air anyways?” Ummm… what do I say to that question? The guys were looking at both me and this bloke that I had a brief conversation with on the boat. I just blushed, quite a bit and laughed it off. I hadn’t been that embarrassed in white a long time!

That night, I was walking around the opera house taking lots of pictures when a guy approached me and asked if I would like him to take my picture for me. Sure, why not? Then we got to talking, which I was hoping not to do, but he was nice to talk to and I needed a little bit of company anyways. One thing led to another and he asked me if I wanted to go for a drink. Why not. He was in the financial industry and was really cute but he had the strangest accent which I swore was South American but he said that he was originally from Vancouver. There were certain words that he said very strangely which I found oddly very unattractive. Is it weird that I’m not interested in a guy because he says “really” very strangely? Sounds like rulllly….. Or am I the one who is odd? He did tell me an interesting story about having cookaburras that he feeds at breakfast daily, so they basically wake him up in the morning. That must be really cool! I couldn’t imagine sleeping through that crazy “laugh” they have anyways. I told him that maybe I would go out to dinner with him again, though I don’t really want to… but it doesn’t hurt having company. I could tell he was just trying to get laid though. Oh well, I don’t mind having a few fruity drinks for free ;)

Simon from Darwin

Simon, the guy I met in Darwin wrote to me today and asked if I wanted to meet up for a drink. Hell why not? I think I will.

I ended up having a great time with Simon. He seems to be a really interesting person. He’s a part-time pilot and has some sort of a voice-over business, I have no idea what that means. He was a radio show host in London. And, I only know all this because I stalked him online before I met up with him. A girl’s gotta know what kind of guy she’s meeting up with, right? It’s justified. We met at a hotel bar around 6 which was a bit further than I expected, in which case I ended up being 15 minutes late. I asked a guy who was sitting there who only slightly resembled him if he was Simon, but that only ended in embarrassment. Oh man, did he think I wasn’t coming? Is he upstairs in the restaurant? Finally I called him, he had never received my email back apparently, about the time we were meeting up. Phew, he didn’t think that I stood him up. So he came right over to the hotel after that incident. We chatted about this and that which almost always reverted back to travel. Took a real great picture at the end. He was heading off to London for a couple weeks or so, otherwise he said he would have loved to show me around. It’s almost OK that he was leaving, I don’t like feeling obligated with sticking with someone. But it was really nice to have a sit down chat with him, for sure. Later he sent me the picture he took of us and some pretty detailed instructions on how to get to my appointment on Friday. What a sincerely nice, sweet guy. Now, he’s someone I hope I keep in touch with.

Today was the Melbourne cup and I was really bummed that I didn’t sit down and watch the races. The only time I caught glimpse of them was in a department store, ha. How sad is that. Women were dressed to the nines and mostly looked lovely, while others looked skanky, but they pretty much all sported some pretty interested hats/decorative hairpieces. I should have stole one ;) My brain at times switched to wonder if they were dressed up for Halloween, since it was right around that time! Surprisingly, I didn’t see a whole lot of costumes. I thought I would have in Australia.

I paid $70 to catch a cab to get gas prices at one gas station today. How sad is that? And I went out to eat at a pizza place for dinner and spent $50 on a soda water, margharita pizza and a small salad. How’s that for putting it into perspective. Australia is not cheap!!

Sydney! Finding words of wisdom along the way

Today was a bit of a lazy day, especially since I went to bed so late last night. I loved waking up with the big bay window shining the sunlight from the harbor over me. The maid came in and I tried to explain to her that I was switching rooms and maybe she should wait until my room was switched (um, that makes total sense right?) but she wanted to do it while I was there. But then, she changed her mind for some reason. My room was switched from the first floor, two single beds to the 9th floor, with a beautiful view, a sitting area and a queen-sized bed. Ahhh much better. I did some resistance exercising then headed out on the city to do some research and get some food.

The Shangri-La and the Four Seasons were a couple of my stops along the way. The service didn’t seem to be as precisely perfect as I remember it being in Boston. No one really stopped me to ask if I needed any help, and neither was I greeted by anyone. Not that I wanted to be, it’s a bit difficult to be inconspicuous when you have people noticing you anyways! I got dinner at a bar. I was a bit disappointed, but it was one of my stops for survey so I had to go there anyway. It made the “hey, can you tell me the price of a beer and an espresso?” a little less awkward. Sydney is a beautiful city, and I’m staying right in the middle of it all. Modern, apparently great food (though I’ll have to work on finding it), and a beautiful skyline, of which I have a great view. Watching the sun going down tonight was pretty amazing. Thank goodness I have a camera that is good at capturing sunset colors. It’s a little chilly here at night. The daytime was perfect. (Better than dealing with a snowstorm at home, that’s for sure.) I hope it stays that way!

Tonight I had an inspirational talk with my Italian waiter, after a very filling, yet delicious meal of vegetarian house-made tagliatelli pasta and delicious bruschetta. (My hotel is in such a great location right smack dab in the downtown on the water in “Darling Harbour”. What a nice name). Anyways, well, it was more like he was talking at me, for quite a long time, but it’s ok because he got his point across. This also ties in with my thoughts about Qantas. People are SO greedy. We forget what’s really important. Was it so ridiculous that Qantas’ CEO had a salary increase from 3.4 to 5 MILLION dollars amongst a huge controversy about lack of pay increases from employees? Are the labor unions being ridiculously greedy in their requests? Did the CEO put nothing but power and greed into his thought to halt the airline for the weekend holding up hundreds of thousands of passengers? Yep, yep to everything, and especially the ridiculousness of the CEO’s salary. WHY is that necessary, especially amongst what’s happening. You have unhappy employees, and you’re rubbing exactly what they want and more into their faces. You can’t run a good business if you can’t keep your employees happy, nevermind even get along with them in the first place.

Our world has become a place of greed where money is the ultimate importance, moreso than family, friends, love, gratitude, kindness, time, and genuine character. I doubt we will ever get this back again, and how sad that is. Our innocence as a society and the underlying need for basic necessity has become so inflated and now we “need” things that we don’t, like an addiction, and we’ll do anything to fulfill that need.

Qantas strikes back

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.

Out of season snowstorm at home, 90 degrees + here!

I’ve heard the crazy news that it’s snowing back at home! Well, it’s a lovely 90+ degrees here! Take that, haha. MAN these days are hot. Not that I’m complaining, I love love love the heat. Today I walked around just observing, I was hoping to find a crocodile somewhere since Darwin is full of them but no luck there. I did, however; find “green ants”. They are ants with little green bums. I tried to get a good picture of them but it wasn’t working out for me. Walking around, I ran into a guy from Sydney who was asking me about the sunsets in Darwin. Of course I didn’t know, and it sounded like nothing much but a pretty bad pickup line to me, but we just had a nice conversation. He gave me his number if I wanted to contact him for a drink while in Sydney to get away from the loneliness, but I didn’t sense at all that he was trying to pick me up. I kept walking until I saw the sun starting to go down. Beautiful yellows, pinks, and especially bright oranges lined the horizon. I snapped a bunch of pictures of it, including some pictures of some strange looking seagulls that look like they had a yellow mask over their face. Bizarre.

After having a snack of wine (complimentary from the hotel!), oranges, strawberries, tomatoes and broccoli, I headed out for some protein. There was a restaurant down the street that I had heard was good so I went to check it out. It’s called Char, and it just happens to be owned by the same management as a restaurant that I actually went to in Brisbane a few weeks ago called Jellyfish. I asked for recommendations, as I normally do, and I was told that the whole barramundi was a good option. So hey, why not… I went with it. I was in awe when it came out. This thing was HUGE and it overlapped the plate that it was on. It was a whole fried fish brushed with a soy sauce base and it had shredded ginger on top. Come to find out, it was just boasting a ridiculously large appearance, once I removed the fish from the bones it wasn’t nearly as much as I thought it would be. But it sure was tasty!