The longest two days

I still have two days to burn until I can fly out providing my passport arrives on Saturday morning. I spent Friday lounging around Kyle's place while he was at work and deep dived into reading book three of The Dark Tower by Stephen King which I reckon will be one of the best movies of all time if they ever create it. Kyle calls me and tells me he has to go out for a few happy hour drinks with a print vendor and since no one else could make it he asks if I want to tag along. I mean I worked for Pierce as of two days ago and intend on going back after my LOA so why not?. I still have a stack of business cards anyway.

They show up a little late with their significant others intending on doing nothing but showing us a good time in hopes that we'll continue to use them over Kinko's for all our poster and banner needs. They ordered us a few rounds of appetizers and about 5 rounds of beer and before you know it's nine o'clock and we're talking about this guy’s conception methods with his wife and ordering preseason Sox’s tickets. They take the check and give us a ride home and we continue to hit up a few additional bars.

We end up running into Kyle's roommate who's this 6"6" ex- Long Beach state water polo player at a local dive bar shooting pool. Pretty cool dude but kind of a egotistical douche bag most of the time, especially when he’s drunk. We're walking home from the bar (Mind you, at this point the Patriots are on their bye week on their way to the super bowl at a perfect 18-0) and this guys is going off about "Bele-cheat" this and "shady-Brady" that and ranting about how the Chargers should be in the super bowl HEE HAAW WAh WAH. Me being completely inebriated and forgetting this guy is twice the size of me tell him that Ladainian Tomlinson is a pu$4y for sitting out because he had a little knee problem and so on. His girlfriend chimes in and argues that they almost beat us because they scored 4 field goals. I start laughing and remind her that the last time I checked " field goals are only worth three points and you would have needed 8 of those to beat us". Kyle's roommate soon clenched his fist and lunged at me like he was going to bash my face into the pavement but luckily Kyle broke it off. That's pretty much all I remember about the night. That and we ended up going to Jack in the box. I hate Jack in the Box.

Saturday morning. Judgment day.

I wake up at 9:30 a nervous wreck praying the package containing my passport arrives. I check Fedex.com and my tracking number isn't listed. Not a good sign. 10:30 slowly comes around and still no knock on the door. At this point I'm near tears hating myself realizing everyone I know thinks I’m on another continent and could instead quite possibly be spending the next three weeks couch surfing in SoCAL. I walk outside for a good scream to let off some steam and am greeted by the FedEx lady who hands me my passport package. Awesome! Kyle and I go out for breakfast to a greasy spoon down the street and I give Jim a call to pick me up so Kyle can spend the day moving into his new condo. We go to a UCLA basketball game to kill some time and I have him drop me off three and a half hours before my flight hoping it will somehow help my chances.

I get my stand by ticket and ask the attendant what the odds are on getting on that night and she told me the flight has been oversold by 32 people and all of them are ahead of me in queue. I ask if I don't get on that night whether or not it improves my chances the next day and so on. “No not really” she says.

Not really. 3 and a half hours later it's 10:45 and everyone has boarded the plane. There's a couple next to me waiting on stand-by as well. Their connecting flight was late and were bumped off two days ago and have been waiting ever since. I ask the attendant if there's any way we're getting on and she mentioned there were empty seats but they had exceeded their weight restriction. I feel like I’m going to throw up but I swallow down the In-and-Out burger debris and give poor Kyle a call to come pick me up knowing that he's going to have to give me a ride back to the airport again the next day and the next day. The flight attendant lets the other two people on and I pray.

Please don’t leave me here god damn you. I don't care if I'm sandwiched between two fat old ladies and have to watch Norbit three times on the plane. Three excruciating minutes later my prayers are answered. The attendant calls me over and hands me a ticket. Sure enough I'm wedged between two fats dudes have nothing to look forward to on the movie guide but "The Golden Age" and "gone baby gone" and yet I couldn't be happier. I’m off to OZ baby!

Don't forget your passport!!!

Ok well the eagle has safely landed after a few minor setbacks. Once again I chose to work till the day I left and took off in a frenzy getting to the airport 45 minutes before departure, gotta love PWM. Thanks to my handy dandy check list I’m preeeeety sure I didn’t forget anything. Well I guess I’ll figure that out once I unpack hahaha ,uh…. yeah. Most importantly I have my passport in my pocket and the pertinent documents in my laptop case. God forbid I forget my passport. You’re pretty much SCREWED without that.

Ten or so hours later I arrive in Long Beach where Kyle picks me up. We head to the bars to meet up with Jim and Rids who I haven’t seen in years. We pounded a few drinks, reminisced about old times, took a walk on the most polluted beach in the universe and called it a night. Kyle was at work on Thursday so I spent the day wondering in and out of books stores around the LBC looking at picture books of Australia to put me in the mood for the 15 hour flight. Kyle came home around 6 so we had about an hour to kill before we head to LAX. My only last request was to hit up “In-and-Out burger” one more time for an order of animal style burger and fries.

We load everything in the car and I pat my jacket in the zipper pocket where my passport had been during the flight and…nothing. “Hmm I must have put it in my luggage”? After 45 minutes of checking every crevice of every bag and article of clothing I owned it was nowhere to be found. F########Ck! This isn’t happening right now!

THINK FAST!

It’s around 6:30 pm at this point and I don’t depart until 10:45 so there’s still hope. Kyle and I divide and conquere. He calls Jet Blue where I took my flight to Long Beach and I call my third party travel agent to see what would happen if I can’t make it on the flight.

Turns out Jet Blue has my passport but it’s in New York. Kyle tries to finagle them to fly my passport on the next flight but they’re not too keen on that idea. Kyle does manage to have Jet Blue send me my passport via Fedex but since pick up already happened, the soonest they could get it there is Saturday.

Meanwhile, my travel agent’s office was closed so I had to phone United. I explained my situation to two separate United agents who tell me two completely different scenarios. The first tells me if I call ahead and tell them I’m going to miss my flight there is still nothing I can do since I booked through a third party. Therefore the outgoing ticket and the return ticket would be nulled and I would be out $1,700. She also told me they’re sold out through February 8^th and flights after that cost over $2,000. Not good. The second person told me if I called ahead I could still have a credit for my flight but they were still sold out till February 8^th. Three weeks is a long time to couch surf.

I figure the best way to get answers I want to hear would be to call back again and ask for the manager and then the manager’s manager. This guy tells me they can credit my flight but the best way to handle this situation would be to go to the airport and talk to customer service. Stand-By is not allowed on international flights in most cases but there is a chance they can make an exception. So Kyle drives me to LAX and I put on a great show. They told me it was my fault I lost my passport and there is really no reason to make an exception. At this point I pretend to cry and tell her the reason I lost my passport was because I gave up my window seat for an old lady who had never flown before and left it in the seat pocket and if I can’t get to Australia in the next few days that I was going to lose my job.

Stand by granted.

Bondi Junction whats your function?

I felt a little depressed yesterday after realizing how little time I left to experience this immense country and that I've been kind of that I've been kind of slacking off on the touristy travels and just been hanging around Bondi Junction and Manly...not that there's anything wrong with that.
While sitting on the hour long ferry from Manly Beach back to Circular Quay, soaking wet from the thunderstorm and down pour that hit us 2 minutes before I was about to leave, I began to reminisce about my quintessential Aussie weekend and how much I'm going to miss this place.
Friday night started with a Manly summer league, end of the year party in which our team, Beer O'clock received our championship trophies. At the bar they had a game called "beat the bar" (there really aren't any more creative names to call it), where after each order placed you are entitled to flip a coin. If you win all the drinks you ordered are free and Manly summer league takes the bill, if you lose you simply pay the amount owed. I was a perfect 5 for 5 on pints for the evening which soon lead to debauchery and me passing out cold on the ferry and getting woke up by the ferry officer an hour later telling me to get the hell off the boat before I end up back in Manly.
On Saturday we fired up the barbie Australia style with 20 lbs of assorted meats to celebrate my roommates birthday. We drank quite heavily until 11 o'clock and I was persuaded to head out downtown with a bunch of my friends. The 5 jager bombs (jagermister and red bull) allowed us to keep roaring until the clubs closed down at 4am where I hitch a ride home and consumed nearly all our left overs.
Sunday was a bit of a struggle for most of the morning. The Jagerbombs from the previous night didn't sit too well in the stomach, or the kidneys for that matter. After about an hour and a half of drinking coffee and channel surfing through our 4 channels I sucked it up and headed to the Ferry en route to Manly Beach for some beach ultimate. After all it was 85 degrees. God I love this country.
I feel slightly embarrassed in the fact that I've been playing this sport for seven years and have never once played an organized game on the beach. I would argue it was one of the best beach memories in my life. There where about 30 people there playing 6 on 6 games in soft hot sand laying out for everything. At 5:30 after two hours of playing everyone ran in for a swim in the luke warm ocean water and enjoyed 4 foot waves and an unbelievable sunset.
Next week I head of to Melbourne for the ANZAC (Australia new Zealand army corps) weekend for Nationals with the Manly Ultimate team. After that I have only two weeks of work and I'm getting my arse out of Sydney ready to take on Gold and Sunshine coast. Stay tuned more entries to come in a few days. I know I've been slacking.

Oz-idies: The peculiarities that make OZ,OZ

Well I've been here for about a month now and it hardly feels like I'm that far away after all, well except for the fact that I half way across the planet from my friends and family. But besides that,for the most part, Australia is not that unlike back home. The landscape, scenery and architecture reminds me of a cleaner, dryer and friendlier version of California. They all watch the same shows (and a bunch of other ones that got the boot after the first couple episodes), gawk at the same celebrities, make fun of GW etc. Both countries are a melting pot of nationalities and both countries drove off the original inhabitants with big guns, small pox, herpes and horses. Well not herpes but it affects 1 and 5 Australians as well. All in all though, walking down the street it feels allot like a cleaner, dryer California with a tinge of European influence.
Australians do have a pretty cool thing going on. So for your enjoyment I've complied a list of the little subtleties that make this place a world in it's own.

1.) As you may or may not have heard. practically everything north of New South Whales is poisonous. The snakes, spiders, jelly fish, snails, rat poison etc. Originally when I can here I was freaking out because of the Bill Bryson book: Sunburnt country . In this he goes into great detail about all the things that will kill you if your not careful. turns out he's a bit of a wanker and I should have known from his wussyboy antics in a walk in the woods but I had to make sure so I asked all the locals and they basically told me to check my shoes before I put them on and not to stick my hands in piles of woods etc. It didn't stop me from freaking out when I ran into a 4 ft spider web in the Royal Botanical Gardens. After all someone did die in Sydney unearthing a funnelweb spider while gardening.

2.) When they tell you not to swim in the water,or better yet, don't tell you to swim in the water, you probably shouldn't. The currents in the Pacific ocean are ridiculously strong and like we noted earlier, the Jelly fish are lethal. So out of the thousands of miles of sandy beaches around the coast, the only place you should swim is between the designated yellow flags. Those stories about the people getting ripped apart by crocodiles, stung and killed by jellyfish and people who are carried out hundreds of miles into the sea are the ones who pulled over along side the road and said "that seems to be a nice remote, lush, peachy beach, let's just dip our feet in" are the ones you hear about in the news the next morning.

3.) The attitude here is more laid back than any place I've ever been, yet for some reason every one feels the need to save 1-2 seconds per sentence by abbreviating everything. They usually just take the suffix out and add "e" to it. For example Woolworths is called "wallies". Bad example, that one actually doesn't save anyone any time. Telephone is called Tele, instead of saying "don't get all aggravated man" they say "don't get all agro" and instead of saying "Would you like to have a glass of that invigorating caffeinated beverage that I can brew hot or cold here in this pot and pour for you into a cup and put in sugar, cream or milk or whatever combination you prefer and drink it". They just say: Would you like a cuppa?"

4.) There is no Australian Hollywood. When I got off the plane I expected to see their version of People magazine which I assumed would have been called "Mates" or something like that and would talk about all the celebrity gossip about their stars drug habits and infidelity but no. Just more talk about Britney Spears getting fat and crazy, Nicole Riche's anorexia and Kyle Monogue.

5.) Kyle Monogue is the biggest celebrity in Australia and has been for the last 15 years. She appears in the front page of every weekend edition newspaper.

6.) Since there is no Hollywood, there are zero, zinch, nunda original TV shows. All the syndicates here just buy out, old, has been shows that you would see on UPN and they also recreate successful shows in the U.S rename them. For example you have Australian Idol, who wants to be an Australian Millionaire, so you think you can dance (Australia), the Biggest loser (Australia-) and so on.

To be continued..........

Great Ocean Road Photos

Check out my latest photos from my trip along "The Great Ocean Road" with my Aussie friends!

Welcome to OZ and the 14 hour flight

My god what a ridiculously long flight. For some reason I assumed international flights afford 2-4 additional inches of extra foot room, you know because your in the air for an extended period of time, turns out I was wrong...dead wrong(dun dun daaaan). I was sandwiched between two very large(but sweet) old ladies but just before lift off I convinced them to give me the window since I wouldn't get up much to use the bathroom(he he he).
Note to self: never fly united air ever again. I think they used our plane in the movie airport back in 75. no foot room, no TV's in front of the seat and horrible food.

Decrepit ins't the right word, but it's the first word that comes to mind.

Shortly before our microwaved dinner was served the captain announced that because of overwhelming demand we may run out of the chicken and mushroom dinner and therefore have to eat the roast beef and turd sauce. He then communicated that it really didn't make a difference because after all "they all taste the same." ZIIINNNG!!!!

All in all I managed to pound a few VB's (Victorian Bitter, aka Aussie Budweiser) and stay up for four hours talking about the roaring twenties, swinging sixties and Ford Flivers with Gertrude and Dorothy before I fell asleep(for 8 hours) watching the opening scene to "The Queen".

Before landing I caught a glimpse of the most beautiful coastline I've ever seen. 50 ft cliffs looking over looking sandy beaches and the royal blue pacific and then of course Sydney Harbour. After landing I was amazed on how popular Ulimate frisbee was here. There where 50 ft action photos of chest high layouts and other candids of famous Aussie players. Alright the last part was a bit of a lie but they do love their Aussie rules footie here.

Alright I'm off Melbourne!!!