Ahhhhstralia....

Note to self: If I should ever decide fly back to Australia, I need to do make sure to do so in first class. It’s almost impossible to convey, to an average human, just how long the flight is from Los Angeles to Sydney, something in the neighborhood of a month seems about right. We (Nick and me) had left Austin very, very early in the morning, our stomachs filled with one last bit of Austin: a couple Matt’s el Rancho breakfast tacos from the Airport food court. We arrived in L.A. around 10:30, as I remember, and had 2-3 hours to kill until our 12:30 flight to Sydney, the aforementioned one that takes a quarter century.

Qantas Flight 8 was to be our home for the next 15 hours of our lives, even longer, in technical “time”, if you account for all the crazy time zones and whatnot. To their credit, the people at Qantas do their best to make you comfortable. You can request drinks at any point during the flight, a snack if you want, whatever. They also sprinkle in the planned service of food and beverages (2 meals and maybe a half dozen drink services), and even a desert of a green Popsicle which Nick had and liked, but I passed on.

Just as an aside, I would like to mention that both Nick and me celebrated our 21^st birthdays on board Flight 8, so you should really have congratulated us already if you haven’t had the chance. I mean, of course, to say that as soon as we boarded the plane, we were of legal age to consume alcohol, which is really the only difference between a 20 and 21 year-old person, as I see it. We had wondered, prior to our departure, whether or not they would serve us alcohol on the flight, or if, perhaps, they could only serve it over international waters, or maybe once we crossed the halfway point and were closer to our destination than we were to the U.S. As it turned out, all of our worries were for naught, and they let us drink as soon as we took off. As you might imagine, our ceremonious first drink was a Foster’s, which is, if you haven’t heard, Australian for “beer”. Nick sampled the wine; I stuck mostly to beer, one G&T and an experimental brandy. The combination of a pressurized cabin and the mixture of alcohol in my stomach had me feeling lightheaded after a bit, so I meekly retreated to water for the remainder of the flight.

The flight to Australia did mark the first time that I have knowingly freaked out on board a plane. Somewhere in the first 6 hours of our flight, the pilot came over the loudspeaker and exclaimed, in a frantic tone, "Flight attendants return to your seats immediately," and said nothing else. He said that last word, immediately, so emotively that you had no idea what to think. He didn't say if we were headed into a patch of light turbulence, or if we had just commenced a 30,000 foot nosedive, and it was high time to start believing in Heaven...we had no idea. For the next 10 minutes or so after we frantically re-buckled our seatbelts (like it would really help), no one on the plane spoke, we were all just waiting for something to happen. It reminded me of when Anne Frank and her family were hiding upstairs when the Nazis came and searched their house. No one dared to make a sound. It was creepy. Eventually the pilot came back on and didn't even mention it, he gave no explanation for what happened, I think he just announced the beverage cart was coming back around. I bet the pilot just got bored and decided to have a little fun at our expense...ass.

We passed the time playing our PSPs and watching movies on the in-flight TVs everyone had in the headrests of the chair ahead of them. After Babel, Borat, and The Departed, I was pretty tired and did my best to get some sleep, 7 hours into the flight yet not even half way there…siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh. Reading and watching some TV passed the rest of the time until touchdown, around 10:30 local time in Sydney, where it was 75 degrees even so late at night.

We’d considered exchanging some money into Australian Dollars while in the airport in L.A., but decided to be dumb and chose not to, so when we got to Australia we had to use an ATM and pay a squirrelly-looking man to drive us in his bus to the hostel where we would spend our first night in down under. The Pink House as our hostel was called, was located in an area of Sydney known as King’s Cross , known for its rampant prostitution and drugs, a fact that would have certainly deterred our booking the room, had we known beforehand…oh well. I’m certain Nick wished we hadn’t booked the Pink House, or, at least, that we hadn’t booked that room in the Pink House, as we shared it with 6 other people, 3 of whom snored…loudly. I was tired and fell asleep almost immediately and slept soundly until about 10 the next morning.