dhiren.za.net

Whoa, I've been doing a lot of travelling this year. I only got my passport just over a year ago, but this is the third time I've made use of it in like 6 months!

My new company sent me to Sydney to their head office for handover and training, as my team is going to start supporting and working on their codebase from Jhb. So we're here for just over a month to have the whole system explained to us so we don't make too much of a mess of it.

We left Jhb around 6pm on Friday evening. The Australian customs guy at the airport gave me a bit of a hard time over my passport - I don't look much like my photo there, and it doesn't help that my ID photo is about 12 years old either. He spent a good few minutes literally inspecting my visa with a magnifying glass before he eventually let me get on the plane. Then began what was supposed to be a 12 hour flight. Things didn't get off to a good start when they told me they didn't have a vegetarian meal for me, even though I confirmed that when I was checking in... lucky they found a spare somewhere. And the entertainment system was giving trouble, so they had to reboot it twice, with each reboot taking half an hour. Add to that the fact that I'm pretty tall and it's almost impossible to find a comfortable position to sleep in an airplane seat for me, and you arrive at the conclusion that the flight pretty much sucked. Not only that, but when we were about 15 mins from Sydney, we had to turn around and go back to Melbourne to refuel, because there were strong winds at Sydney and we didn't have enough fuel to circle until it calmed down. So the 12 hour flight ended up being about 14-15 hours, and we eventually got to Sydney around 6.30-ish.

Sydney itself is pretty awesome though. On Sunday afternoon we braved the crappy weather and went to Darling Harbour around lunch time, and then took a ride on the monorail to Paddy's Market, which is a big flea market/shopping center type thing. From there we walked through Chinatown, which was pretty cool. Sydney seems to have lots of Chinese/Asian people. Then we tried to take a walk home, but due to a confusion between Dowling Street and South Dowling Street, and nobody's GPS's having maps of Sydney, we ended up North instead of South, so we took a taxi back home.

Taxis are everywhere, and not the crazy minibus taxis either - metered car taxis. They even have credit card machines in them. The driving isn't much better than the taxi drivers in South Africa, but since there's hardly any traffic in Sydney, it's not that bad. The taxi drivers can be hilarious though. The one told us about his wife that went on holiday without him because he had to work 7 days a week until he paid off all the money he had lost in the casino. And another took us to a place to have supper and gave us directions to walk to Kings Cross afterwards if we wanted to find some prostitutes.

I was also impressed when I got myself a prepaid sim card + 2gb of 3G internets for AU$30. That's like R200... my 500mb 3G contract in SA costs R249/month :(
Speaking of money, Australia's money is weird. The notes seem to be made out of plastic, and they have a plastic see-thru window in them. And the coins are weird also - the silver ones are the cents and the bronze-ish one are the dollars... and the cents coins are huge and the dollars are tiny. Very strange.

This evening we stopped at a woolworths - it's not a clothing store with a high quality food section... it's something like a checkers/spar.

I'm eating way too much though - I'm going to be a blob by the time I get home. There doesn't seem to be much of a selection for vegetarians though. Also, there seems to be a lot of "kebabs and pizza" places, which seems odd. Bottle stores are called bottle shops.

We were reading an article about how Sydney's traffic congestion was at breaking point, and that people were outraged, and that the public transport system was falling apart, and found it hilarious. I think even Durban has more traffic than Sydney, at least the parts that I've seen.

I'll put some photos up once I've taken a few more and aren't so lazy/sleepy/jet-lagged.