Category: australia

01 – jan 20: new zealand trip, flight there

morning

after a morning that consisted of packing my bags (gosh, that sounds so trite… i’ve been meddling with bags of Stuff That is Mine for the past endless amount of days. i swear, no more moving. ever. unless i can consolidate all my stuff into one bag.), talking to tim, and discovering that our reservations for stay in auckland had fallen through (they emailed me last night when i couldn’t check my email anyway and said they’re full), we departed to the airport at 1:30pm, for our 4pm departure.

upon arrival to the airport and a soft pleasant goodbye from our amazing hosts (oleg’s family friends, who have kindly hosted not only him, but me as well as they would their relatives), we went to check in and discovered that our flight (with air new zealand) has been delayed to 6pm (boarding at 5:45).

this is where the good news started. (and i’m not being sarcastic!)

the flight that was delayed by 2 hours apparently on this side of the equator means that we each get a $8 voucher to spend on food and drink. KLM, which is imho a gazillion times huger gave me a $7 coupon for 5 hours of waiting, and i’ve never heard of anyone giving a voucher for 2 hours.

waiting

upon the discovery of our abudant amount of time, oleg and i proceeded to walk around the lovely sydney airport. it is not huge enough to be intimidating, but not small enough to be ugly. all of it is designed quite nicely, with smooth flowing lines of everything, and generally feeling quite awesome. high ceilings, pleasant lighting, nice arrangements, a LOT of stores, and generally nice accomodations. free internet booths, and – get this – an observation deck that’s free for access, has a bar, and is friendly towards all various addictions of a mortal human being. the observation deck looked out onto the flightrs, so you could watch take offs and landings while sipping on a beer and enjoying a sudoku puzzle from a book that you bought in the airport, of course if you bought one. (i did. i decided that i’m not spending another moment in the airport being bored, ever, even if it costs me whole $3 australia dollars!). we ate sandwiches that were given us by our hosts before departure, sipped on our coronas that were bought for the $8 coupon, and enjoyed the warm weather (its not super warm, but geez, a tshirt and a cardigan? nice!)

afterwards oleg used the free internet booth to book our stay in best western which was found for us by tim. only $10 more expensive (but not in the city, close to the airport), but its a real hotel, so we’ll at least get to relax nicely. unfortunately i didn’t get a chance to reach internet, but my laptop kept me occupied with pleasant reading and watching the first episode of firefly.

here one of many nice things of the day happened – when oleg came by to where i was sitting he found a pair of really cool ray bans that he thought were mine. since no one sat there for the past 20 minutes, i decided to give them ownership. proceed to photos of happy olya with her new sunglasses!

after some more hanging out at the area we decided to march towards security, as it turned out far too early as our flight was even later than expected – 6:30pm boarding. i used the time for walking around the airport, charging up my laptop, taking photos of myself in the new sunglasses, and doing sudoku puzzles while listening to music. fun!

the flight

upon boarding, it turned out the flight has only like 35 people, so i got a whole row of seats (3).

all of these things are nice, but air new zealand managed to impress the hell out of me with their service.

  1. first of all, since the flight was empty they offered us to partake in both of their meals – chicken cutlets and lamb pie. both were totally tasty and fantastic.
  2. when i asked for some tomato juice (my drink of choice on flights and generally lately), and some red wine i was given a choice in the kind of red wine i want. japan airlines didn’t have anything like that.
  3. after THAT managed to surprise me (i chose merlot by the way), they came around and gave ICE CREAM. do you KNOW how awesome that ice cream was? GENIUS. honey and kiwi and it was AWESOME.
  4. and after THAT they came buy with offerings of coffee and tea (again average) BUT this coffee was served with REAL milk. like none of those “this milk will not expire in the next 20 years” containers, but an actual pitcher of milk.
  5. and after that they came around again to offer more water.
  6. i think they generally were awesome – came by very quickly to collect the “rubbish” (i quote the flight attendants) that collected from the food
  7. to top this off, the seats were super comfortable.

so, my battery is blinking bright, i finished first episode of firefly, kinda finished typing this, and i shall shut down for now. till next time!

arrived at the hotel

the continuation of this saga is being typed from my super comfortable bed (i got the smaller one) at best western. apparently all of auckland is booked up as people in the airport RETURNED to the airport to find a place to stay. so i’m even more thankful for having a good place to sleep (and cheap too).

after landing, we fairly quickly went through customs, another xray of all our luggage to make sure that we’re not smuggling in healthy foods (only unhealthy shrink wrapped ones please), and started to figure out how to get to our hotel.

new zealand accent is THICK. like, wow. both oleg and i had very tough time understanding what anyone said! while oleg was getting his backpack into backpack condition from luggage condition, i ran outside and saw a “hotel pick up point“. after talking (where talking is from now on is asking everyone to repeat themselves at least twice – i felt SO BAD!) to the driver there it turned out we gotta call the hotel from free phones at information. talking to the hotel was fun too – eventually we all understood eachother.

oleg’s done with his shower so i’ll just forward to now. we got picked up, checked in, check out is at 10am, late checkout is at 12, and time has changed again – 2 hours forward, thus we’re losing 2 hours of sleep. blah. my body is all mad at me now: “3 days ago you told me now is morning, then a day ago you told me now is evening, and now you’re telling me its the middle of the night!”. fun!

off to the shower, then probably an episode of firefly until i fall asleep, or just falling asleep.

(all the photographs for this entry are here)

australian saga: time goes by so slowly (part 2)

continuation of part 1, story of my arrival.

arrival to sydney

i was woken up by oleg saying that we’re arriving. i was totally out of it (think 6 hours of uncomfortable sleep in an airplane chair after of like 20 hours of awakeness), so i was like “already?” turns out that it was breakfast time – 6:20 am. after a fairly small sandwich, 2 cups of green tea, a cup of coffee and some yogurt, we still had to circle over sydney for 40 minutes due to bad weather. apparently for them bad weather means warm and humid with some light drizzle.

customs was easy – got my australia stamp, w00t!

australians are extremely scared about people importing anything “natural” – food, or any food derivatives. we had propaganda with crocodile hunter playing on tvs for about 30 minutes, and all the way to the customs there are bins where you should throw out stuff that you don’t want checked (i threw out my small bag of nuts that i snacked on. thankfully i finished almost all of it by that point). after picking up your luggage, you go through 2 more people that check your forms (i.e. that they say that you’re not importing anything) and then you and all your luggage go through an xray machine. oleg’s stuff went through juts fine, but i got stopped.

of course i mildly freaked out, even though the lady was nice and polite, they put the pressure on you (did you pack this? did you fill out this form? is your name so and so? “no, its olya”). after opening the huge-ass-70lbs-suitcase turns out they wanted to check the big climbing rope that oleg brought with him but was put in my bag cause didn’t have enough space. turns out they just couldn’t figure out what it was on the xray and wanted to check, and thankfully oleg jumped right there when she pulled it out and said that its brand new and wasn’t ever used, so i kinda relaxed that i’m not at fault. they didn’t fine me or anything – its not one of their restricted products – they just weren’t sure. still a bit unnerving.

outside the airport

upon exiting the gates easily at that point oleg tried to find the people that were supposed to meet us, as they are his family’s friends, while i hung out outside at the SUPER WARM AND HUMID AMAZING WEATHER WITH PALMS AROUND ME. JOY. after so much time in air i was like “i dont care if we have to cab it to a hotel, i’m here, its warm, life’s great”. i had enough time to change into flip flops that i pulled out of my bag, so life was peachy.

after about 30 minutes of waiting, oleg found them (or rather they saw him on the way to the phones to call them). we stuffed the insane amount of stuff we had into their tiny hatchback corolla, and we headed to their apartment. this was around 12:30pm, sydney time, or 9pm toronto time. definitely felt weird.

upon arriving to their place, these nice people provided us with a phone to call our families, food to feast on (breakfast), and a place to house all our stuff. the long wait to evening began.

the day was spent peacefully – after getting internet we set it up so that i can connect to it through an ethernet cable to the couple’s dsl modem, and oleg connected to it through the wireless service on my laptop. i did some browsing of your people’s blogs, wrote emails. we ate again around 5pm, after i finished talking to tim, and i noticed a SCARF (that was your another mention) in my bag. after the dinner they provided us with instructions on how to get to the beach, and off we left to explore sydney.

sydney – clovelly beach

this was definitely the highlight of the day (haha, says me after freaking FLYING TO SYDNEY AUSTRALIA WHICH IS ANOTHER CONTINENT DID YOU KNOW?). the walk was nice and easy:

me: so how far is it to the ocean?
owner of house: hmmmm… slow walking its like… hmm…
*me thinking: shit, its like 2 hours away*
him: 20 minutes?
me: *bursts out in laughter*
him: what?
me: that’s so close
him: (i think thinking that i am sarcastic) its not that far really
me: in toronto you have to walk a few months to the nearest ocean

in case you didn’t know, in australia and new zealand all the roads are backwards. i.e. driver’s seat is on the right hand side, and the traffic moves forward on the left side of the road, not right. it feels pretty surreal on turns especially – they are completely opposite in terms of sticking to the curb or pulling away from it. walking to the beach thus was an excersize in futility – each road we crossed i was spinning my head around like the exorsist, trying to ensure that we won’t die (this fast). it worked, no one hit us.

the beach was awesome. sunset, waves, huge ocean waves. they built a small bay like enclosure that lets people swim in the ocean water without being afraid of getting carried away by the waves. all along the beach there are huge huge rocks. we hung a bit at the ocean side, and watched the waves, listened to the birds, and just marvelled at being near the ocean. aftewards we went back up to the beach walk and walked further down the beach, where the rocks weren’t as huge, but more flat, and allowed us to actually walk around the small pools of water that gathered from the ocean’s movements. this turned out to be very cool – in the last picture i linked the black dots are lots and lots of shells, which all have snails (i suppose) inside of them. after some wandering around that area (its fun walking among the rocks, and the salty smell of the water, the warmness and humidness – its relaxing), i noticed amazing sunset started. unfortunately my camera’s batterys died, but i managed to snap 2 photographs before it died.

as it got darker around 8pm we headed off back home, walking under the super pink skies as it quickly got dark.

upon arriving home, i blogged about the day before that, and then i got tired and so i went to sleep.
fortunately for you its only 8:20pm here, so i’ll blog about today too.

january 18th

upon waking up i noticed that my hair has formed a most magnificent mohawk, just through its shortness and awesomeness. i seriously wish i could keep it this short and not grow it out that much more over the next few months. of course i took a photograph :P

next was a snapshot of the outside. the reason why oleg and i ended up waking up at 10am is because there are PARROTS here. i don’t have any photos, but i promise one as soon as we returned from auckland. today just wasn’t a photogenic day – it was raining and grey the ENTIRE day. the parrots are bright green, blue heads, red and orange chests – i mean, people, they are REAL PARROTS. just like flying around. not like those budgees that flew into maha’s balcony either! no, these are freaking parrots. and there are also blackbirds, pigeons and some other small bright yellow black and white medium sized birds. and they all squawk. a lot.

other than parrots, and more eating, we planned out the new zealand trip (the extra 5 days will be used throughout the time beforehand as needed), which took a decent 4-5 hours. i spoke to tim on the phone for about an hour, which was heaven embodied. also i spoke to my parents, which was nice but i’m kinda used to living away from them at this point :P sorry mom and dad! i still love you, though! i think the distance makes my love for you grow even stronger. right. yes.

moving on.

we also watched australian tv:

  • a guy making some bbq lamb while surfing
  • during show he spontaneously fed some of his food to a bird that landed next to him
  • victoria secret model showcase is on in an hour
  • 2 chicks TEARING APART memories of a giesha in a way that NO north american show would. they seriously spent like 10 minutes dissing it. brutally. on tv. insane!
  • 2 channels playing same australian open match

    • and this brings me to this moment, so i’ll stop typing and:

  • upload pictures and post this
  • pack for new zealand
  • watch victoria secret’s show if we can OR
  • watch robin william’s stand up comedy OR
  • watch firefly, episode 01

    • and then go sleep. flight to auckland is at 4pm tomorrow. our place to stay in auckland is reserved (a twin room, meaning 2 single beds in one room, sharing with no one. w00t.), we got all the addresses for car rental figured out (500 meters from the sleeping place), and as you can see we got our plans laid out.

    i definitely won’t write as detailed from NZ, since as far as i know i won’t have internet from laptop for the entire 3 weeks. i will write on my laptop however, so you’ll get a report eventually. and, duh, pictures.

    and i can’t promise 1.8k word essays each day :P its just the initial excitement. my goal is for about this much per week once i get settled in.

    i want time to move by far faster than it is right now.

    p.s. note the statistics section that has appeared on the right hand side

    flight to australia – we come to the land down under (part 1)

    so, first of all, i have arrived to australia, safely, soundly, with some issues along the way, but nothing major.

    it is amazing how little i have done in terms of physical movement in the past 36 hours, and yet how many things i want to write about and how exhausted i am!

    so, in chronological order.

    departure from toronto

    departing toronto was early, cold, and fast. at the airport gate we had to go straight through to security & customs right after checking in, which imho was total b/s, as this essentially limited goodbye to a few hugs (and kisses) and a wave as you walked in. short goodbyes are good, but come on – checking in early and having breakfast/coffee at the airport was such a nice plan. oleg checked in uneventfully, while i had to repack my extra huge 72 pounds suitcase to be 70 pounds – thankfully, my bags are packed loosely, so i just moved my climbing shoes (2.4lbs) to the duffel bag, and we were off to see the wizard of US customs.

    US customs were easy and fast – where are you going? – sydney – blah, you’re boring. security asked us both to take out cameras and swabbed them for explosives.

    we came about 40-50 minutes early for the flight, so oleg chilled at the waiting rows (he said he enjoys it – i was too overwhelmed with thoughts to sit still), while i went and bought myself some spoilage – i.e. 2 journals, time and wired. after a quick 12 minute phonecall to tim to see how he’s doing, some snapshots of our plane, i kinda shut down at the waiting rows until we started boarding at sunrise.

    flight to chicago i cannot remember almost at all. it was about 1.5 hours long.

    chicago airport

    upon arrival to chicago, much waiting and walking was done. we changed terminals with their nifty monorail, then had to stand in a line up for JAL counter to get boarding passes (even though we theoretically shouldn’t have needed to do so as we had boarding passes from the woman in toronto. they are all so confused), then insane US security check – shoes off, bags open, etc etc, no camera swab this time, then heading over to the gate where we saw our huge insane Japan Airlines 747 plane. after much much wait, we at row 65 being 2 rows away from last one were boarded and ready to go for the 13 hour flight to tokyo.

    flight to tokyo

    this by far was the most physically and emotionally trying leg of the trip. first of all, there are only so many things you can do. the economy class in JAL is awesome cause you get your own tv screen and controller, but all the movies you can watch only so many times over. i saw mr and mrs smith another 2 times i think. and rewatched magadascar’s good parts. and saw some other movies. and read my journals, twice. killed the battery on my laptop (if they only gave me an outlet i’d be in heaven). and played out all their cheesy games (tetris, etc). and took photos of the things we were flying over (see alaska photos here). and missed tim. over and over again. and after i did all that there were still 5 hours to spend in the air.
    i was really good and didn’t pass out almost at all – maybe a few times, like 3, when my brain would just shut down in the middle of a thought. but all in all, i kept myself up, so that i could fall asleep on sydney’s night time and wake up on sydney morning.
    if there was one thing i would do differently, is that i’d buy a sudoku book (my palm is for some reason totally dead – unfortunately i couldn’t get it to work before i left – that’d be another thing i’d change i support), and i’d bring a nice thick book i want to read. there’s enough time for eeeeeeeeverything you want to do, and then some.

    arrival to tokyo was welcome and extremely anxiously anticipated.

    tokyo

    i’ll switch to point form notes because that’s what i feel like doing here.

  • JAL switch from one of their flights to another involves staying in a 100 person line up that goes to security (when all you’ve done was just get off the airplane that came from a 13 hour flight) and then standing in another 130 person line to a mosh-pit infront of the counter and disappears in 50 minutes. if we knew that we’d go and relax first instead of wasting time and nerves standing in the stupid line.
  • a distinctly japanese trend – a lot of couples wear tshirts/sweatshirts with the exact same design on them. imagine a scarfy like theme (paint splatters, weird funky fonts, cool clipart), but on both couples. identical. we’ve counted at least 10, probably more.
  • tokyo had showers (see photos) that positively are now stand as one of most remarkable events of my life. after being treated like total cattle in the flight (in terms of food and such, you know, group herding), in the line ups, and in the transfers, for mere $5 you get a clean personal 2 room shower with amazingly complex toilet, 3 fresh towels, a bunch of supplies, and awesome water in terms of temperature and pressure. i came out feeling like i’m a human being again.
  • i have some japanese coins with holes in them now.
  • i can also tell the difference between mandarin and japanese by ear. i know its not remarkable, but its especially cool when you can tell different words in mandarin.
  • mandarin, japanese and korean writings are remarkably different and can be recognized in an instant
  • spending 3 hours walking around the airport and getting free internet – not wireless, which is paid, but internet from yahoo’s kiosk desktop – while japanese pleasant voices announce stuff on the background all the time, is extremely nice.
  • they totally rip you off for coffee and beer. coffee was $3US, beer was $6US for small.
  • upon boarding the tokyo plane to sydney i fell asleep before we even pulled away from the gate, and slept soundly for 6 hours until breakfast was served.

    • i shall depart to sleep right now (it is 9:30pm sydney time, 5:30am toronto, and i have successfully stayed up until now). the story, picking up in sydney and commenting on my today, shall continue tomorrow morning, with photographs of me at the ocean, and more!

    leaving in a few hours

    i’m a bit tired. all packed (for a while now). had a great going away party, and now will have a short nap before breakfasting and leaving to airport- flight departs at 8am.

    what i have:
    duffel bag, ~13kgs
    big suitcase, ~32kgs
    carry on rolley (camera stuffs and wires and blanket and towel and change of shirt)
    backpack with laptop and miscelenea for trip (like a travel pillow, yay)

    life’s good! i’m tired though, but i’ll have all of 20 hours to sleep.

    passport check
    camera check
    laptop check
    visa check

    i’m ready to go!

    reading titles of papers

    this is one of those “if i never had to work what would i do (beside photography and travel)” things.

    BBC posted an article on Romantic love ‘lasts just a year’ citing a research article. i love these kinds of news as they lead to a fantastic amount of facianting research.

    so, again, upon reading such an article i jet to e-resources of u of t and try to find the original. unfortunately news articles cite their sources very liberally (i.e. mention the author and journal, but not paper title or anything like that), thus it involves some looking up.

    the moment i open any given journal on scholar’s portal (biggest collection of online research journals and articles at u of t), i start to drool and wish i could read alll of them. i still haven’t found the original of the BBC article, but here is a skimming from today’s “casual research”; the articles i’d love to read just to gain the knowledge:

  • The role of the amygdala in human fear: Automatic detection of threat
  • Stress hormones in health and illness: The roles of work and gender
  • Coping with critical life events and lack of control—the exertion of control
  • The effect of a low dose of alcohol on allopregnanolone serum concentrations across the menstrual cycle in women with severe premenstrual syndrome and controls
  • Weight loss strategies, stress, and cognitive function: Supervised versus unsupervised dieting
  • Prenatal stress and children’s cortisol reaction to the first day of school

    • these are from Psychoneuroendocrinology journal.

    i couldn’t find the article there (grr, and google scholar ain’t helping either), so i looked up “romantic love” in the u of t scholar’s portal. results (ohmygosh! hesi i think you’ll like this) – there is a journal called Psychology and Marketing .

    articles from that:

  • Romantic love and sex: Their relationship and impacts on ad attitudes
  • Direct evidence of ending-digit drop-off in price information processing
  • On-line product presentation: Effects on mood, perceived risk, and purchase intention
  • The dark side of discounts: An inaction inertia perspective on the post-promotion dip
  • A cognitive and behavioral hierarchical decision-making model of college students’ alcohol consumption
  • Memory for advertising and information content: Comparing the printed page to the computer screen
  • The interaction of retail density and music tempo: Effects on shopper responses
  • A cross-cultural exploration of attitudes toward product expiration dates

    • the The Journal of Comparative Neurology Volume: 493, Issue: 1, 5 December 2005, pp. 58 – 62 has an article titled Romantic love: An fMRI study of a neural mechanism for mate choice

    i want to read them all, collect them all. and this is just from a 15-20 minute casual browsal/search of just one of the many (at least 10 major, 50 minor) online collections of journals, all searchable.

    and each article has references, which lead to more facianting stuff, and and and this is just the latest research (all of these are at most 6 months old – nearly nothing, given how my friend published a linguistics article on a book written in 1973!)

    i wish i could be one of those people who writes news articles based on these journals. that’d be FREAKIN’ SWEET!

    P.S. Tickets to Australia bought. Tickets to New Zealand bought (open-jaw – flying into Auckland and leaving from Christchurch). Residence secured (the mixed orange roof thing around a big tree). All that’s left is visa (easy), and figuring out the pleasantries of what to do in NZ, and what and how to pack. i foresee a lot of pleasant shopping for bags for me.

    update: boingboing to the rescue! they posted a link to the original paper i was looking for