Take that, Rewind it back (Part 1)
I was so busy when I had first moved to Australia that I didn’t have time to write about my adventures of when I first arrived here (I know you are on the edge of your seat wondering what happened). This is my attempt to right what once was wrong (kind of like a crappy version of Quantum Leap) and fill you in on the details of my arrival and first few weeks in Sydney. I am going to write about it a little differently though, it will be less bloggy and more like a personal narrative broken up into a few parts. Then at the end I will combine the parts and put it into the short story section of the blog. So without further ado:
I am a professional sleeper. I can sleep anywhere at any time, just give me a 15 minute heads-up and I could pass out in the middle of a noisy bar or the night before an important meeting. My mind can be cleared and my senses dulled at a moment’s notice to accommodate a long trip or the need to get away from life and just cease to exist in my brain for a while.
That is why after climbing aboard, taxiing, lifting off and flying for an hour I was perplexed. I was awake. I don’t think I have ever been awake at this point in a flight. This was not just any flight for me though. This was a flight to Australia for which I had no return ticket. I was leaving Southern California and not planning to come back for a long time. I sat there with my eyes closed trying to force myself to sleep thinking of the last few weeks before I left the country. The goodbye drinks, the farewell dinners, the moving preparations and all of the friends and family that I was leaving on another continent. My thoughts shifted from the things I was leaving behind to the new world that I was entering. I was nervous and there was no chance I would ever get to sleep. Why would I leave a place that I know so well and risk an easy, laid back lifestyle just to move to another country? That was my last thought until I woke up 13 hours later for breakfast. I may not be a professional sleeper but I am definitely a top seeded amateur.
Airline food during a 15 hour flight is a necessary evil. I had a long day ahead of me and if I waited until I landed to eat I would most likely crumble in a heap in the customs line. My choice was runny eggs or mealy pancakes. Runny eggs won and I started to deconstruct the plastic tomb in which my food was encased. Not only are these meals disgusting, they also have to be the most anti-environmental way to eat anything. Each morsel of food is packaged in its own non-biodegradable home. They should just go all the way and put every square of toilet paper in its own shrink-wrap or hand out water in little capsules that you pop open, drink and discard on the floor like futuristic peanut shells.
After the plastic carcass of my meal was hauled away by the stewardess I was left to stare at the virtual map which showed my plane moving impossibly slowly across the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean to my final destination: Sydney, Australia. That tiny little dot on the map held all of the things that I was stressing about. North Sydney was the location of my new office and the Harborside Hotel was where my luggage and I would be living for the next few months until the crate with the rest of my belongings would arrive. It was also home to the 1 person on the entire continent that I knew outside of work, and I met her a few months before randomly, on vacation in Hawaii. It was where I had decided that I wanted to live just two months before. All of that was within the little spot that the video plane was pivoting towards.
Landing is my least favorite part of flying. I am never outwardly nervous but a part of me always looks out the window and wonders how there are not more crashes. The pilots take a gigantic hunk of metal moving at a few hundred miles an hour and drop it perfectly on a slim strip of concrete a few thousand times a day, every day, with no incident. Every other task that someone does in the course of my day is fucked up constantly. How has something that is so difficult been done to almost flawless perfection for so often for so long? Everyone is nervous during the landing because at some level they know humans are not meant to do this. A tenth of a percent of me is amazed every time I don’t touch down in a cartwheeling fireball of my own demise. After we hit the tarmac in Sydney everyone took a deep breath, stopped thinking about their potential death and started wondering where they wedged their laptop case 14 ½ hours ago.
I always think that I am going to get busted when I go through customs. I had no drugs up my ass, no Mexicans in my suitcase or any flora or fauna that could possibly hump a wallaby and completely destroy the Australian ecosystem yet I felt every customs agent’s eyes drilling into me. I would usually be tentative about being in the customs line but the flight had dulled my senses and the people watching was too fantastic to miss. It is like a slide show that kept repeating as I wound around the queue. First there was stinky Indian business man, and then the nerdy couple in sleep pants holding stuffed animals, and then the chick with fake tits that looked like she showered and did her makeup on the plane somehow , and then the sweet looking old couple and then the confused Asian family who were looking at their own passports like they were in a different language. Each pass gave me a new perspective to observe the weirdness of the humanity around me. If airports are a hurricane of people watching activity then the customs line is the eye of the storm. The quiet calm before the assorted foreigners are spat out upon the baggage claim.
To be continued…
This post just didn’t do it for me…….nothin
where’s part 2 slacker?
@Dman – It happens to everyone, Champ. You’ll get ‘em next time…
@KC – Working on it – thanks for the kick in the ass though!
I am confident that part two should give me a raging hard-on.