It just keeps getting better

We got off the plane nice and quickly.  Business class has it’s share of perks.

When we made it to the arrivals area we were told by the Shuttle company that there were two other parties to come and to wait “over there”.

I managed to finish the book I’d been reading and then got bored.  So out came the Creamy Creamy Caramel popcorn.

What a mistake that was.

I broke a tooth

It was a bit of a Déjà vu moment because while in Sydney we’d talked about how you hear a crunch and then run your tongue around your teeth to make sure you didn’t bust a filling.

Here I was, plucking a bit of tooth out of my mouth.

For some reason I cradled it all the way home and it’s now sitting on the DVD stand.  I don’t know why I bothered.  It’s not like they can glue it back.

My annual Dentist check up is in October (oh that’s tomorrow) so I guess this time round I’ll be getting some work done rather than just the x-rays and a check up.

Now I’m wishing that someone had confiscated the popcorn, why not the popcorn and leave me the cosmetics???

Even the sniffer dog sniffed it out but no one was interested in taking a peek.  The Customs people only cared that it was already popped.

Come on people, you could have saved me from breaking a tooth!  Ok, it was probably going to go sometime soon I guess.

Poohs! 

Now during my “relaxing” holiday I have to contemplate going to the Murder House.  Poohs again.

Strange sights in Sydney

While sitting here peacefully (berating myself in my head over the confiscated cosmetics) I see a women wearing a lovely fawn coloured fine knitted dress.

As she turns around it’s clear she’s wearing black underwear.  And we’re talking a black g-string.  I can tell this because she scoots her hand under her bum to smooth her dress to sit down.

It reminded me that I was going to blog about the strange things that we’ve seen while here in Sydney.  Of course I really can’t remember nearly all of them now but I’ll jot what I can recall down.

• When entering Australia at the immigration counters a young girl and her brother were waiting for Mum to finish writing out the entrant cards.  The young boy (maybe 2yrs old) kept going through the gate area as if he’s passed immigration.
• The officer kept telling the sister you have to keep him this side until he’s allowed in.  She did her best but a 2 yr old who’s not properly supervised is just going to run rampant.  It’s boring after all.
• The officer calls over to the mother and explains she must ensure he stays the right side of immigration until they are cleared.  She yells back to him “but he wont listen to me”.  Cripes!
• We were in Bondi having lunch at a restaurant.  The waitress was re setting a table and dropped the knife onto the ground (it was an outdoor part), she picked it up and we all watched interested in what she was going to do with the knife.  She popped it back into the cutlery drawer and got a clean (I presume) knife out of the drawer and put it on the table.  I say I presume it was a clean knife she got.  Maybe she had a morning of dropsies and all the cutlery had one passed over the ground.
• At Myers yesterday they were having a sale.  The sale actually stared on Friday I think.  Anyway there were about 3 ladies serving in the Petites Women’s wear section and all of them were having to call out asking if such and such was on special.  That’s shocking.  How come they don’t know?  They work there.
• Also at Myers at the Petites department I bought a dress.  I went downstairs and found the same dress on special.  I asked the lady how come it was on special there when I paid full price.
• She explained that there are so many Asians in Australia that Petites sell very well.  They discount the same goods in the “normal height” (my words) department to get them sold.
• While riding on the Train to get to Seven Hills where Mark’s Aunt lives we were sitting across from about 8 school boys.  They looked High School age.  Not one of them spoke English.  They all spoke in their native language.
• I had trouble spotting a true blue Aussie.  The population is so diverse that there are more of every other culture than there are Australian looking Australians.
• The bonus of living in Sydney is that there is no recognisable fashion.  I reckon you could wear anything and no one would look at you as if you were severely out of date and in need of some fashion sense.
• Yesterday when we walked across the crossing to get to Mum’s a homeless looking older man stumbled across the crossing in our direction.  I swear he must toilet in his clothes.  I’ve never smelt anyone as bad as him.  I’ve smelt people who appear to have a bladder problem but this man was so bad, the worst I’ve ever smelt.
• Talking of toilets.  When we were at Bondi I headed for the public toilets.  There were only 4 toilets and a line of people.  Thankfully I was about 4th in line.  I couldn’t understand what was the hold up.  I’d been waiting a while and the 3 ahead of me and still no one had come out.  I soon realised that people here don’t use the toilet in the sense it was designed to be used, rather they used the locked cubicle to get changed into/out of beach gear.  How annoying.
• Seeing someone running must be a novelty.  I had lots of toots from various cars while out running. 
• Our bus broke down leaving Bondi.  You have to bus from the beach to Bondi Junction.  When we got to a stop the driver yelled back for people to not block the exit.  This lead to the doors not opening which lead to some sort of message to the computer on board the bus to just have a sulk and do nothing.  Blow me down if the same types of people who ignored the “don’t block the exit” didn’t then turn around and give the bus a bit of a hiding as they walked past it.  Some people!

So there’s just a few of what we can remember as being odd or confusing or just plain silly from our point of view.

I should have known better

The liquid restriction for carry-on luggage bit us in the bum today.

I can’t believe that last night when searching out more information about the TRS refund scheme I never twigged that part of what we were claiming a refund for was liquids, and some of those – 3 in fact – were over the allowable amount.

I read it out to Mark and yet I still didn’t register.

I think it was mostly becuase all the cosmetics we bought were still in the original bag and we never looked at it to have that “ah-ha” moment.

I couldn’t work out why they had put our carry-on bag aside.

Finally a lady brought it over to us and asked if it was ours.  Yes.  She had the gloves on and I realised she was going to search it, but even before that I had a suspicion it was the liquids. 

My “ah-ha” moment was too late. 

There were 3 things, they cost more than the refund we got and it just annoys me so much that it’s money wasted.

I asked if we could put it in our checked in luggage and she said it was too late.  Could we call someone to pick it up.  No.  She said all along we’re asked abou liquids and I agreed that we had.  I knew it was our mistake.

As soon as it happened I was telling myself to “just let it go”, like the lady says to Michael on the Vogels ad.

I guess I need to beat myself up about it just a little more because it’s been 30 minutes and I haven’t managed to let it go.

It’s the waste.

As Mark says, it’s not like we’re broke.  But it’s a waste of money.  We’re not broke but we’re not that flush we can just throw money away either.

Oh well.

Guess I’ll be working on letting it go while we’re on the flight home.

I really wanted the hand cream.  It was in a big (probably 500ml) bottle with a pump.  I was going to reuse it and reuse it with other hand cream.  I’m really bad for putting on hand cream and I look at my hands and know they’re showing my age.  This was going to have been my way to remedy something that needs to be remedied.

Bah!

The 2nd thing was a more liquid body moisturiser.  Again another area I’m bad at.  I don’t put moisturiser on my body.  It was in a tube and I had designs of taking it with me to the pool and applying it straight after a shower.

The last thing was a nice Gloom away tube of Grapefruit exfoilant that was for Mark.  He loves Grapefruit.

They all cost over A$50.  Boo hoo!

As you can see, I need some serious work on “letting it go”.

Anyway, as I write this we’re sitting in the Qantas Lounge just finishing breakfast.  It’s not nearly as stocked as I had expected.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not starving.  But I think I expected more variety.

There’s plenty of booze though.  Not that I’m interested, and Mark’s not making any moves to get himself a drink.

We both agreed it was easier to find than the food though

Hotter than it was meant to be

Yesterday we did get to 33deg in the city but it never felt that hot, mostly because we’d spent the time in a couple of malls.

Last night the weather report was for a high of 21 deg today and a southerly change.  I pulled out a T-shirt and shorts for the run in the morning (today).

While we still threw off most of the covers it was cooler and breezy.

I pulled on my clothes and headed out the door.

I was somewhat surprise how warm it was.  In fact I’d say it felt warmer than  Sunday when I was running around Olympic Park.

Possibly it felt warmer because I had a T-shirt on and not a singlet running top.

I followed the directions Mum and Brian had given and made my way down to the golf course.  From there I could run around the perimeter of the course.  This was the longest off-road run that I’d had.  Sunday was meant to be as off-road as I could but that turned out to be on-road due to the carefully laid out walking paths.

So lots of little up and down bits to make the golf course more interesting to putt on.

I was running in and out of the trees and at times realising I was running into spider webs.  After the big hairy spider in Mum’s bedroom I was getting the willies thinking I had spiders crawling up my hair and down my back.

As I was running back to Mum’s I thought I had gone up the wrong street but realised the road changed name part way through.  I ran on the side of the road that had no footpath so it was ups and downs for driveways.

Just a short 45 minute run but it just seems so much harder here with the warmer temperatures.

Richard had said that if I didn’t feel like doing the run I could give it a miss.  However I see from my programme that it was meant to be an intensity level of 5.  I reckon it was 4 and only that hard because of the heat.  It wasn’t fast by any stretch of the imagination.

Sly old Richard huh, give me a short run with a higher intensity than usual but tell me I can give it a miss. 

Now that I’ve run it and then looked at the programme I feel like I short changed the session, yet I did actually get out there.

No training tomorrow.  We’ll be up at 5am.  We’re keen to get to the airport so we can make the most of all the luxuries you get when travelling Business Class.

Though I suspect we might be parting with some cash for excess baggage, even with the 30kg allowance!

My training will involve lugging heavy suitcases to the check-in counter and getting to the TRS office at a good clip so that we can get to the Qantas Lounge and sample the goodies there.

TRS, we’re coming!

TRS stands for Tourist Refund Scheme.  If you spend over $300 in any one shop and have the items on one docket, you can claim the GST back.

Myers are terrific here.  They let you shop over several days and then turn up with all your receipts where they then refund everything so they can then put through the purchases on one receipt to allow you to claim the refund.

I’m not sure we’ll get the refund from the luggage we bought.  No we didn’t need more luggage, we’re now taking back 4 suitcases.  One is still inside the other (as we’d done when we came), now we have a second large suitcase which will need to be checked in (and may disallow the TRS refund), then a cabin sized bag.  There’s 4 suitcases.

The scheme allows the GST back but you’ve got to show you have those items with you, therefore the items have to comply with the hand luggage restrictions.

This could be the undoing of claiming the GST back on the luggage because of the checked-in bag. 

In the past they’ve never actually crossed off each time, they casually ask if you have the goods with you, you either point to them, or open up a bag to show and they give a cursory glance and put through the refund.

I’m relying on this same thoroughness tomorrow.

So I’ve spent all of my money – well the clothing allowance I have every 6months.  I have some money left over from my pocket money.

I guess all the Tri shops aren’t in the malls and department stores we’ve visited.

We’re brining back about 10 bottles of shower gel.  These are Mark’s favourites that are no longer sold in New Zealand.  Those 10 bottle sure weigh a bit.  We’re also brining back Vanilla Coke which you also can no longer get in NZ in the 1.5 litre bottles, and it’s Diet Vanilla Coke no less.

We’ve got a huge back of Pop ‘n Go Creamy Creamy Caramel pop corn.  Hoping they let us away with that too.  We’ve bought it back before and declared it without any hassle.

Packing was quite stressful.  When we packed to come over we each had 1/2 of the suitcase.  I was busy checking the TRS details online while Mark did most of the packing.  He’d taken 2/3 of the suitcase and then told me I still had things to pack.

Well I wasn’t too happy to see my space whittled away to nothing.  There were a few tense moments.  We really don’t fight over ANYTHING so it’s quite something to get all hot and bothered over the lack of suitcase room.

Right, it’s the Last Supper before leaving for home.