Land of the aboriginies-Getting there

Almost 15 hours of flying time it read on the screen in front of me. Thank Krsna for all the junky magazines my friends gave me, all the "House" and "Lost" Episodes I downloaded to my ipod and the ambien Dr. Goldberg prescribed.


I have gotten travelling this sector, JFK-SFO-SYD, down to a science. This was the 3rd trip I made in less than six months. Yup, sure do have many a miles now, except that the airlines always make it crazy hard to bloody use them. Apparently my ticket was ineligible for an upgrade to business class. Atleast reinvent the usage of miles - how about use miles to pay for excess baggage - so people like me who usually have a whole bag full of shoes or this time around 3 BIG bags of all the clothing I could possibly fit into the bags, since I moved to Sydney 2 weeks ago to start a new adventure (boy little did I know it will literally be one, more on that later).


My charm did not work this time around with the check-in agent. I guess the fatigue, 4 weeks of running around to wrap up 8 years of my life in NYC, showed on my face. He finally took pity and moved me around to another seat in a row where there were 3 empty seats next to me. Boy did that make me happy but also brought out the nasty side of me (a side I never see or even like). This new (mean) person spread all her stuff, neck pillow, books, jacket on every seat so it looked occupied so no one would steal them away from her. She even looked through some college kids who struck a conversation with me at the gate worried that the fellow "Lost" fan would come and plonk himself next to her for the duration of the flight.


Rewind: As we waited for the flight to be brought in from the hangar - passengers started conversations with fellow travellers and thats when I met these kids - they were headed to various parts of Australia for a vacation. The jokes were endless - none of them had ever stepped foot outside of the United States and the longest flight they had ever flown was from Boston to San Francisco. Our flight was delayed because of a technical failure and of course that led to the "Lost" fan saying - "this ain't good, the Oceanic flight that crashed was on its way from Sydney to Los Angeles". Not funny I thought, I had my reasons to not participate in conversation about crashes but I kept them to myself.


Fast Fwd: Much itv, 3 movies, few pages of a book and an ambien later I wake up and decide to walk around, stretch, brush my teeth and use the loo before the inhabitants of the plane arise and the loos start to resemble the ones on Indian trains.


A vegetarian breakfast and a few tears later (it finally hit me as we started our descent into Sydney that I had just left behind a life I love so much and people I love so much), we land at Kingsford Smith International Airport.