Airlines Don’t Suck So Much

Subtitle: A380’s and Home
So I’m back home now—back in the US of A. Actually I was two days ago, but I slept most of the first day then didn’t feel like writing a blog the second day. This just happens to be my 63rd blog post, which means of the 150 or so days I was in Australia, I managed to write one for every two and a half days which isn’t bad. Now to the blog title:
I can easily say that this trip, as apposed to the trip that brought me to Australia (Airlines Suck) was ten times less stressful and difficult. I have to admit it all looked to be going pear shaped when I left Monday morning and a wheel burst on my luggage about half way to the train/bus station that would take me to the airport then there was a good 40 minute wait to check in and drop off bags, but it got resounded better after that. In fairness the check-in wait was due in majority to the brand spanking new A380 (which I flew on) heading to LAX, and what I could only guess was a 747 headed New Zealand and on to LAX. On, what I estimated to be its 25th passengered voyage across the pacific, the A380 is a monster. It doesn’t look quite so imposing from the outside but from the inside the wings are enormous and the cabin is ridiculously wide (on the bottom level). While at the gate, the wings bow, bending under weight or length. As you take off, your ears pop just but the speed which it has to attain to get off the ground. The wings—which must be made out of the most flexible material ever—straighten, wobble and bounce around in the wind. But when you’re up, clouds that would disturb any other plane are shredded by the enormity of this plane. This led to one fairly smooth flight, and the softest landing I’ve ever experienced (compared to one of the worst—top 3—on the connecting flight). The landing was partly due to the fact that the land was much closer than anticipated because of intense fog in the LA area (the pilot had threatened a missed attempt it was so bad). Surprisingly, this angry bull of a plane came to a stop before the end of the run way and taxied to the gate surrounded by airport police (bizarre?!). Due to the crazy amount of people on the plane LAX used two baggage belts to distribute luggage, which was a pain in the ass for singular travelers like me. Customs was a breeze, and my bags were deposited again (checked through, thanks Qantas!) and with boarding pass in had (thanks Qantas!) I could jump in the insanely long queue for security at Terminal 4 LAX for my connecting flight. 6 hours later I was in JFK (thanks STA! ), picking up my luggage from a near empty luggage belt because everyone took their lives and their kitchen sinks on the plane as carry on (thanks AA baggage fees! ), and in a car bound for Kinnelon, home.
It’s cold here. And there are no leaves on the trees. This bugs me.
Melbourne—‘the most livable city in the world’ (Economist tested, David approved).

AusTour 3: Brisbane Day Dos

After setting out for breakfast with a small group, we soon made up 18 and pulled about 6 tables together to fit everyone. After breakfast we broke up, Barry and I had decided to do the walking tour from the Lonely Planet—a 5 to 6 km walk that takes anything from a couple of hours to a whole day. It took a whole day. Back to Roma Street Station (where we were last night), this time with only certain trains actually stopping at the station (great!). After being persuaded by Barry that I had the map (and my orientation) upside down we set off in the wrong direction. It was a circular tour so it didn’t matter much, but I just want to point that out because I’m sure he’ll blame me for some easily understandable misdirection in Sydney in his blog. As we set off (and as we sat at breakfast) we learned we weren’t the only people walking the city today. In fact it was the Brisbane Romp, so we were joined by a myriad of costumed teams, families and coworkers. Our first stop was Town Hall, including a stop at the misinformation desk (thanks to the Romp), a walk around the great hall in the centre with a MASSIVE organ and up the top of the clock tower for some views of Brisbane. Next we headed across the Victoria Bridge to the museum district. On the way we discovered that it was unbearably hot compared to Melbourne and happily took shelter in the GoMA (gallery of modern art). Here we saw some aboriginal art (coincidentally, a paper I should be writing instead of this blog), a giant doughnut, a seal and a piano, an arch of boxes and 16 audio video synched spectrum of people singing Michael Jackson’s Thriller album. After leaving the GoMA we continued the walk down South Bank through massive arches of pink flowers, past a giant Ferris wheel, a Nepalese Pagoda, Brisbane’s man made beech and the Maritime Museum. Extending the walk slightly to cross the goodwill bridge and cut through the botanical gardens (not as impressive as Melbourne’s) we made our way up to the Queen Street Mall. At this point we were pretty much dead as we finally snakes our way around to St Stephens Cathedral, post office square and the shine of remembrance. We’d probably doubled the walks length in the end. That night we hit up Brisbane’s most famous cocktail bar. It was interesting to say the least, but again made ever more interesting by the friends of Barry. I also saw a couple of friends who I knew from uni melb/rmit village who just happened to be staying at Bunk too.

AusTour 2: Brizzie Day 1

In the Australians ever present penchant for shortening names, they have affectionately renamed Brisbane to Brizzie. It was the first stop on our Aus Tour 08, as I’ve decided to call it, and we flew in Saturday night 2 weeks ago now. A quick note on leaving (and one Barry was considerably distressed about) was that the airport we left from (Avalon) didn’t require a single bit of ID to retrieve a ticket, check baggage, go through security or even board the plane. The plane itself from an airbus a320, which I think is the first time I’ve been on an airbus and distressed me because I was in seat 15D (15 and D is the 4 letter in the alphabet…Lost anyone?...Sawyers seat). Anyway, when we got into BNE I was past the seat I had spent about 4 hours in the last time I was in Brisbane, I was glad I wasn’t staying this long this time. In fact we were out of the plane and out of the airport in 20 minutes on a bus on route to a destination I didn’t exactly know where was. So it was partly my fault that we ended up at Roma street station, a 40 minute walk to our hostel (Google maps said it was closer), but it wasn’t my fault the next bit went wrong. We decided to take a train to Brunswick station, after figuring out a transit system neither of us had seen or taken before we found a train going the right way leaving in four minutes. We were on the platform for at least 30 minutes. 4 trains should have come and gone in that time…great first impression Brisbane! Needless to say we made it eventually to Bunk Backpackers Brisbane (a hostel in the same vein as Gilligans, large 8 person rooms with ensuite bathrooms and showers). One thing that was particularly disturbing (or artistic genius) was the bizarre decoration around the lobby including chandeliers made up of headless Barbies, a giant coastal map complete with decorations and out in the bar bird cages with Barbies inside. Bizarre. Due to the incredible delays by Brisbane city transport, it wasn’t long before some of Barry’s friends from Swinburne showed up on the later flight (16 of them in total). We had planned to meet them in Brisbane, and they definitively made Brisbane a 10 times more exciting city.

AusTour 1: Lonely Planet

This bible of all things travel helped us plan this trip, from advice on attractions to recommendations on hostels. I can’t help but notice its incredible resemblance to The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy from Douglas Adams’ novel of the same name. Replace ‘hitchhikers’ with ‘backpacker’s and ‘galaxy’ with ‘world’ and keep all the bits about towels and stuff and you’ve got exact replicas. The sometimes sarcastic and humorous descriptions hidden inside the countless pages of LP mirror some of the comedy that comes from the electronic system that is The Guide. Take this one for example from Sydney’s Pink House Backpackers (where we actually stayed): “Yep it’s a pink house. The relentless colour attack continues inside though spritely communal areas and across creaky floorboards.” It might be that you don’t see the humor in this until you actually see the pink house, but everything described there is 100% true. They don’t hold anything back either, from Newcastle: “your first stop should be the Queens Wharf Tower…it is 40.3m high, has 180 steps and is otherwise referred to by the locals as the ‘Giant Penis.’”
As the backpacker’s number one resource (at least to us it was), I’m surprised at this point that, like The Guide, it doesn’t boast the bright lettering of ‘Don’t Panic’ on the front.

I’m Back!

13 days later, I’ve gotten back from my (nearly) see everything in Australia tour. Ok, so we didn’t see everything, but there was no way we could fit anything else into this trip. Tourism was the key element to the trip, but we managed to get some holiday time in too. Probably because of this incredible amount of tourism in a short amount of time I’m buggered.

Nevertheless we saw some great sights, went to some great places (, got a great tan) and had a great time (that’s a lot of great!). Now thinking about exactly how I’m going to document it here I think ill do a post on a place by place basis. This will mean that chronograph will go in reverse in blog history (one downfall to the blog-system), but ill try and mark them. So we start, well, at the start with Brizzie (Brisbane)…but first:

Outta Here

Its Spring Break…again! So I’m getting out of Melbourne with Barry from Hartford. We’re flying up to Brisbane tonight, to begin a trip down the coast towards and into Sydney. I’m lazy, so I stole Barry's map of the key stops on the trip.
I should ignore the part about being eaten by a shark. Not because it wont happen, but because I wont be posting a blog anytime in the next 13 days. I also have an extra part tagged on to the end of this trip, down to Adelaide in South Australia being as i have two weeks off for break and Barry only has one.

Transportation

A post I’ve been meaning to get to for a while now, but like the rest of this blog suffers from extreme lethargy.I’ve talked a number of times about either the transportation system of Melbourne in general or actually using it; in sum the system is made up of trams, trains and (to a lesser extent) busses. The trams run above ground, all over Melbourne—from the outer suburbs into the city centre. They are definitively not the fastest way to get around, as they follow the roads for the most part (even though they run on rails) and therefore have to obey the traffic lights and make lots of stops. They are however incredibly useful for hop-on-hop-off errands or getting to a specific place. The trains on the other hand run underground in the city and then over ground out into the suburbs. They’re much faster than the trams (not having traffic helps), fit more people and stop less often. They’re an incredibly efficient way to get into or out of the city to anywhere. It all runs on one ticket—met cards—which come in different amounts: 2 hours, daily’s, weeks, months etc. When you combine trains and trams in any combination, it is an easy way to get around all of Melbourne for a cheap price.

Over So Quickly

4am, Friday Morning. Yes, 4am. 2 of the people in our room not-so-secretary snuck out to catch their plane to their final destination. I should take a step back and describe where we were staying. Now I don’t know if you’ve seen hostel the movie, but that’s generally what I was expecting it to look like on the inside. Needless to say it was not. After all this was Australia and not Amsterdam (close but no cigar). So instead of being a small and shady hostel tucked away behind in a small allay I was greeted by a glowing neon sign in the middle of a pretty loud and alive city street--Gilligans.In fact it was described by lonely planet as “the Ritz of all hostels.” I wouldn’t have called in the Ritz, but it wasn’t shabby either. With about 4 floors and countless rooms, a kitchen for each floor and balconies all round it was easy to see why AustraLearn would prefer this place. The rooms were of 8; mine filled with the 5 guys for Melbourne Uni (including myself), 1 from somewhere else and the 2 that left at 4am for their flight to Brisbane/Gold Coast. it was good to have all the guys for Melbourne in one place as it allowed us to get to know each other better before being thrust into the City of Melbourne. Each room had a toilet and shower room and plety of space for backpacks and luggage, and entry onto on of the many shared balconies. I should also mention that the shower was SO nice after 56-odd hours of traveling. So yea, back to 4am…after falling back asleep, 4 hours later it was our turn to leave. The Backpacker (and I know this whole post seems like an advertisement for Gilligans) has a nice breakfast situation too with lots of selection to eat. Surprisingly (especially for myself) we had no problems with this flight, it left 5 minuites late and there was minor panic when all of austral earns luggage came of DEAD last (pretty much everyone’s luggage who arrived normally (aka not me) was lost on the trip from LA to Cairns). We left the warm costal city in the north and flew down to Melbourne where it was…well, FREEZING. We dug through our luggage to retrieve the warmest clothes we had before bracing the cold night on our way to our accommodation, RMIT Village Old Melbourne, 5 -17 Flemington Road, North Melbourne VIC 3051.