Are We There, Yet?

Wow. Another weekend has passed! This one went by pretty fast. I am still not quite sure how it is Sunday night already. The weekend was absolutely beautiful for most of the weekend. It got up to 25 yesterday, which is around 77 degrees. I didn’t realize it was so warm until I went outside. So I was a bit toasty in my jeans, but there were some insane people still walking around in sweatshirts. Holy crap, I don’t know how they were doing it. But I came back to the apartment in the afternoon, and the weather was so nice that I opened up the window and took a nap on the couch with the warm breeze blowing in. It was kind of like being at the beach, which felt awesome. Although it was starting to get cool, and I eventually had to close the window and get back to the “real world.” Today was a decent day, although he rain came in a couple of times throughout the day. However, it was nice enough that I finally got to wear shorts over here! Woo hoo! I was one of few people, but it was so nice to be able to experience spring after the long wait!
So tomorrow morning, I will meet the audit team in the office, and then head to North Sydney (my side of the Bridge) to work on my final audit client here for the Sydney office. It sounds like a pretty easy job. In fact, it is going to be so easy, I don’t think it is going to take the entire week to finish it. So I guess there is a chance that I might end up rolling on to another job to help out for a few of days to close out my secondment. But right now, it looks like I’ll get to spend the last couple of days in the office, wrapping up my position here.
I have to say – I have some mixed feelings. On the one hand, over the course of three months, I have made some pretty good friends here. It is a little sad to leave them behind, knowing that there is a good chance I might not see them again. And there are things here I really like and enjoy, and it will be hard to break away from those things that I have grown used to here. On the other hand, it is absolutely incredible to type that I am wrapping up here. There is a big part of me that is ready to be back home in my own house doing the things I am a little more accustomed to. I am excited about getting to see everyone back in the US, as you all know that the hardest thing over here has been that I am too far away to spend time with anyone from back home, aside from a phone call for a few minutes. And, as silly as it may sound, I am also ready to get home to the cats, JJ and Hobbes. (Sally tells me JJ has pawed at my picture, but I think she’s just trying to make me feel better.) So it really is quite thrilling to think that I will be headed home soon. At the same time, it is a little overwhelming to think that I only have a week and a half left to work here before Sally and I spend some time traveling around the hemisphere.
Speaking of travel, I pretty much spent the weekend planning my holiday. So I apologize that I don’t have any big adventures to share with you guys from the weekend. No pictures or anything. Sorry about that. But I promise that I will spend a little time next weekend, getting some final pictures from some area of town where I haven’t taken you guys, yet. So if anyone has any final requests for next weekend’s adventure, please let me know. Next weekend will be the final weekend that “we” will be going out together before I sign off of the blog for my vacation trip. So I want to make sure that I have done everything you guys want me to do!
Now, speaking of vacation plans, I have had a lot of you ask me what Sally and I will be doing once she gets over here. I booked all of the plane tickets yesterday, and I booked all of the tour packages today. So everything is pretty much planned. Sally arrives on Thursday morning, and we will spend a couple of days here in the City, so that I can show off Mosman and parts of Sydney. From what I have heard, we will probably go out to dinner with my friends on Thursday night (the Supper Club), and these guys were talking about taking me out Friday night for kind of a send-off party.
I will move out of my apartment on Friday afternoon, and we are going to head over to an airport hotel for the night. We have to be up quite early Saturday morning to catch a plane to Christchurch, New Zealand. We will hire a car and drive around a little bit. Sally is in charge of planning the NZ trip, but we will spend most of our time in Queenstown, which is both the tourist and extreme sport capital of NZ. Sweet! So I don’t know for sure what we will be doing, but I know it will be awesome.
On Tuesday night, we will fly back to Sydney and jump on a connecting plane to Melbourne to arrive late Tuesday night. On Wednesday, we will take some time in the morning to tour around and see some parts of the city. Mid-day, I found a brewery tour that we are going to go do. Those of you who know me well know that I have been on most of the major brewery tours in the US. So when I found a tour here in Australia, I had to jump on it! And, for those of you who have to know, yes, it is a Foster’s brewery. But they don’t brew Foster’s there. They brew other brands that people here actually drink. (“Foster’s… Australian for crap.”) On Wednesday night, I have a surprise tour for Sally, so I don’t want to post here what we will be doing since she reads my blog posts. Plus she told me she wants me to keep it a surprise. But I’m pretty excited about it; it is an awesome thing I found to do. So if you want to know what it is, drop me and email, and I’ll let you know. Thursday morning we will get up bright and early to do a tour of the city. We’ll grab a quick lunch, and then we will head over to the Rod Laver Arena to do an official tour of the tennis centre there. Since Sally and I have already see Wimbledon, and have gone to the US Open a couple of years with Amy and Hughlene, it will be really cool to see where they host the Australia Open. Cool.
Thursday night we fly back to Sydney. We will probably stay the night with my friends Ollie and Louise, who are also nice enough to let me park a couple of my bags at their flat while I travel around. Friday morning, if Sally wants to, we might to the Bridge Climb. Other than that, we don’t have much planned for the day.
Friday night, we are going to fly up to Cairns, which is in the tropic north, for a trip to the Great Barrier Reef. We get in late Friday night, then get up early Saturday morning for an excursion to the Reef. The tour I booked looks pretty cool. Right now, we will both snorkel in a couple of reef locations. Although there is the option of doing a dive, and you don’t have to be certified. So I’m not planning on it, but you never know – I might decide to try out scuba diving while I’m here. We’ll get back, enjoy a nice dinner out in Cairns, and probably go to bed early, because we have to get up early again on Sunday to head out to do a tour to the rain forest. For those of you who don’t know, Cairns is popular for two things: The Reef and the Rain forest. So we have managed to book trips to both. After the Rain forest tour, we get back just in time to grab our bags and head to the airport to fly back to Sydney on Sunday afternoon, in time to pick up our bags from my friends and head over to a hotel near Hyde Park for a couple of nights. Whew! Although I will say that the best part about these trips is that Sally and I managed to come up with enough points between my Hilton points and both of our American Express card points that we will be staying in hotels for free every night while we are out of town. You all know me – I don’t go anywhere big unless I have something for free. So this trip has my name all over it!
But wait, we’re not done. On Monday morning, we will get up kind of early yet again for a trip out to the Blue Mountains. This trip is one I have been wanting to do, but have been waiting for Sally to get here. The Blue Mountains is awesome, and has lots of cool stuff. Hiking, waterfalls, rain forest, you name it. On the way back, we will stop at Featherdale Wildlife Park where you get to go in and pet koalas. Yeah, yeah, koala. But I am more excited about feeding the kangaroos and wallabies! These things are like little dogs, and you get to get up close and personal with them. Sweet! The trip closes out with a cruise around the Harbour.
By the way, if I don’t make it home, it’s because I tried to smuggle a little kangaroo home. (The ones in the park are the small little wallabies. They’re quite cute!) I’m sure Hobbes and JJ would be super excited about that one! I leave for four months and come back with a little roo. Yeah, I have a good feeling that the cat pee on my personal stuff would never end if I try that one.
Tuesday morning I will probably be on the mad scramble to get last-minute souvenirs. And then, after lunch, Sally and I jump on a plane to come back home to the US! Something tells me that we will have absolutely no trouble sleeping on the flight home…
Okay, now that I have made everyone jealous, I guess you all understand why I didn’t get to do much else aside from planning these trips. Although I did go out last night to my local pub to watch the last Wallabies-New Zealand All Blacks rugby match. (If the Wallabies won the match, they could win the Bledisloe Cup this year, which is a big deal to beat NZ for the Cup.) I walked in wearing my Wallabies jersey, and had a guy come over to me, all excited, showing off his scarf, saying our guys were going to win it tonight. (Yes, scarf. They all have them over here, and will wear them even though is it not cold.)
Then the guy standing next to me then leaned over and said, “So which team are you backing tonight?” I laughed and said, “Oh, you can’t tell?” He laughed and then said, “Wait, do I hear an accent?” I told him I was from the US, and he pointed at the TV and said, “So do you understand this game?” I told him I had most of the rules after three months of watching, and we started talking. His name was Lawrence, and he was a really nice guy, offering to answer any questions I had about rugby. I had a couple, one of which almost stumped him, so I felt pretty good about that one. An older couple sitting at the table we were standing behind got up towards the end of the first half and left. So we sat down and hung out the rest of the night, watching rugby together. It was a great way to kind of wrap up my social nights out on my own. Although I have talked to some nice people here, it was good to have someone show up and really be social, spending time talking during the rugby match. So it was a good night, and I headed home for bed so that I could get up the next morning for church.
This morning I went to the Scots Presbyterian Kirk (Scottish for “church”) here in Mosman. It was a nice service, and there were a ton of people there. A couple had their baby baptized, and a bunch of their friends came along. But the church was nice, and the message was good. Although the funniest part of the service was that there was a guy with the baptism group who I kept calling “Ace, your Ship’s Photographer.” In my head, of course. Although I debated saying it out loud a couple of times. The guy looked a little like Jeff Goldblum, so he was totally giving off the “I spend all of my money at the electronics section” vibe, and probably walks around with a fanny pack full of electronic equipment on his vacations. (Yeah, you all have a perfect picture of this guy in your head now, don’t you?)
Anyway, the guy had both a digital camera and a video camera. So before the service, he was taking a ton of pictures. Then came the time for the baptism, and the guy was all over it. Literally. He turned on the video camera, stood at the top of the aisle, right near where the baptism was happening, and started filming the service. That part wasn’t the strange part. When the minister took the baby to put the water on his head, the guy walked up the steps behind the couple and the minister, and started video taping, right there in the front of the church. You know, he had to get the “perfect shot” of the minister at the baptismal font. It was a bit odd, only because I got the feeling that this guy wasn’t one who went to church often, and he saw it more as a social event where he was in charge. If you can picture it at all, hopefully it was make you laugh a little. I was trying hard not to laugh at Ace.
After the service, I walked out and spoke to the minister. He said hello and I said, “Good morning.” He immediately asked, “Now where are you from?” Wow, I think those two words just might be a record to spur that question... When I told him the US, he started chatting with me a little bit, even though there was a line of his congregants behind me. But he was telling me that he had watched “the Memorial Service” one night last week. It took me a minute to figure it out, but he eventually said something about September 11th, so I figured it out. (I didn’t know it was on TV here, to tell you the truth!) But he was very complementary of the service and the speeches that everyone made. So now I’m sorry I missed seeing it! But, as I said in an earlier post, his comments were the first that I heard anything about 9/11 over here. It was nice of him to say something, though, and he told me to come back to the church any time, that I was always welcome there. Nice guy.
Okay, I am going to wind this post up now. I hope everyone had a great weekend. I know you are all excited to be back at work today. Hopefully the mX updates from last Friday will help give you a little boost to get through your Monday... So I'll leave you with the best of what I could find.
TEXT VENTS:
These are less funny than usual, but I thought it was interesting to point out some of the finer qualities of the people here in Sydney, rather than just bashing on some of the stupidity.
"On Wednesday afternoon I saw a female CityRail employee at Hornsby down on the tracks on her knees looking for a passenger's lost jewellery. And she found it. Well done." - T, Waltara. (This one takes guts, folks. You can get fried if you touch the electric rail when a train is approaching. Nevermind the fact that a train could approach, and there is no way it is stopping in time for anyone to get out of the tracks in time to survive. Man, I hope it was some nice diamonds she was looking for...)
"Sometimes there are decent, good-hearted people in this world. Pat on the back for the man who saved a man tumbling down Wynyard escalators despite everyone else watching. He dropped his lunch and jumped for the man. Pleased he only got few cuts and scratches." - Glenn, Castle Hill. (I have to say, I have often wondered what would happen if someone fell, because I have seen several people trip or stumble. Glad to hear someone out there is watching out.)
And, just to prove that the old hostility is still there:
"Bloody commuters. I miss the people from World Youth Day. You were all complaining about them, but I want them back." - Gilbert, Glebe. (Glad to see it's not all sappy stuff this week. At last, someone in true Sydney form shows up for our entertainment!)
STORY OF THE DAY:
There is a pub just wet of London called Windsor Castle Pub. It is clearly named for the area, approximate 8 km from Windsor Castle. So a delivery guy with 12 barrels of beer (it would pour about 2,000 pints) tried to deliver them to the Queen at Windsor Castle instead of Windsor Castle Pub, just ahead of England's World Cup soccer qualifying match against Croatia. I have to say, I think this story is great, but only because the delivery guy truly has to be the dumbest person around. I mean, I realize that the Queen has probably had to turn to booze to deal with her family. (Look how well Charles turned out.) But unless her grandsons are in town for a killer keg party, I really doubt Her Highness would be able to down 2,000 pints on her own.