Back in Sydney again. I decided to stay in a serviced apartment again this time (as I did the week before xmas), however it’s a pleasure to discover that these Meriton apartments are much nicer, more conveniently located, yet roughly the same price as the Medina Executive Apartments I stayed in last time. It’s only a studio apartment but it’s twice the size of the one I stayed in at the Medina.

It was a bit of a nightmare getting here though. It started when I did the web check-in before I flew. I didn’t realize until I got to the airport but the boarding pass that I printed off had bumped me to a slightly later flight. And then when I reached the airport, I couldn’t find the flight on the departure boards. The Virgin Blue desk then informed me that the flight that I’d been bumped to had been cancelled, so I was bumped again to a later flight. Finally when I was in the air, the flight itself suffered from a lot of turbulence. At one point it seemed to drop out of the air for 3 seconds, which briefly left my stomach in my throat, and the landing was one of the heaviest I’ve ever experienced. We bounced so hard I thought we were going to bounce completely off the runway! To top it off, when we arrived at the arrival gate, somehow, the air bridge connecting the terminal gate to the airplane became stuck to the aircraft in the wrong position and it took 20 minutes for them to disengage and realign it properly before we could disembark. What a nightmare.

Sydney is having the same weather has Brisbane by the looks of it. Warm but very wet. It amazes me to see the amount of people walking about in flip-flops, or ‘thongs’ as they call them over here, even though it’s been raining pretty much non-stop for the last week. Aren’t they worried about trench foot?

One consequence of all this rain we’re having is that it seems to result in a lot of insects trying to take shelter in our house. Last week the largest spider I have ever seen in my life outside of a zoo scuttled across our living room floor and frightened the life out of us. Honestly, I didn’t think I had a phobia of spiders until I saw that thing. I quickly went to get a glass to put it out before realising that we didn’t possess a glass big enough. I then tried a Tupperware box but I couldn’t catch it, it was too fast for me. I suggested to Rach that we just splatter it but she was having none of it. Not because she didn’t want to harm it. She was worried about the mess it would make, which was fair enough because it would have been a large splatter! In the end I ended up using the hoover attachment to suck it up. How the hell do they get in that’s what I want to know. We’re supposed to have full mesh screening on all windows and doors to stop even the smallest mosquito. They’re sneaky little critters!