After about 20h+ of traveling, we finally made it. (ugh!)
Getting out of SFO was an interesting experience for me:
- Pack your bags to weight, otherwise you’re either going to have to pay $$$ (10lbs overweight almost hit me for $130.)
- SFO has a box shop (much to my happiness) that let me split up my check-on bag so I wasn’t charged anything when I headed back to the check-in desk.Â
- I personally don’t believe in their “Random Selection” for searches.  Kristen and I were heading into the security area, she went first, then I. The lady checking the passports let her through but then saw mine, she quickly looked up and then called Kristen back to double check her passport before letting her go again. You see, I was born in Lebanon Beriut (middle east) so I got the full treatment (except for the body search thank god!), chemical scans, equipment wipe downs, etc.
Once we got on the plane things were much better, unfortunately we were assigned different seats due to my baggage snafu, but the flight attendents were nice enough to help juggle some people around so we both ended up with aisle seats across from each other. Finally the plane took off, and we were underway. It was a long trip, but luckly we were able to take full advantage of the on demand TV/Movies (Oh how I love Air New Zealand, both of us started with Simpsons episodes :).
We arrived in Aukland around 515am to a dark sky and lots of fog, if we didn’t know better it almost felt like we’d been circling SFO for the past (13h). After we landed, we had to pass through another security check point, again I was picked, luckly this one was quick. We had a 4h layover but we weren’t allowed out of the Airport at all, so we wandered around for a bit, grabbed some coffee and found our gate. We watched the sun creep up over the horizon to a wonderful sunrise. One thing we learned was that you don’t want to ever be late to your plane in Aukland, they first start of polietly calling over the intercom “…flight xyz is departing at x time, please hurry to your gate…”, then it moves to something like “…flight xyz is expecting 4 people at gate abc…” and then you finally get full names”….John Smith, Alex Johnson, etc….please hurry to gate xyz, everybody is waiting.” We were luckly to avoid this fate when we noticed our gate didn’t have enought time to recieve two planes before ours and I talked to an attendent. Right before we got on the plane, I was called aside and was told my carry-on was too heavy (for a 747?!?). So I broke out my laptop bag (SFO told me to combine them) and was able to split between two carry on bags.
Soon we were on our final flight to Brisbane, better seats, more on-demand tv, and something they called breakfast.
After landing, customs was relativly quick (I love electronic Visas), grabbed our luggage and I braced myself for more security screening, but, much to my surprise, this time it was Kristen that got searched. (hehe) They tagged her because of the snacks (food) that she was carrying.
We found the school driver that was assigned to pick us up, got grouped with some other students to be taken to the coast. Brisbane is about 30-40 min drive from Southport and I spent the time looking around, napping, and trying to adjust to the fact we were driving on the left side of the road. (it just feels wrong, I’m really going to have to practice to get used to the turns and round-abouts).
We dropped off a few students, helped our driver find the hostel we were staying at, checked in, and immediately changed out to shorts and slippers (it was about 80-90 degrees and really humid)
At this point it was early (2pmish) and we couldn’t sleep yet (if we wanted to get used to the new time zone) so we wandered around, found some basics, computer shop, internet cafe, mall, kebab shops, Atm for our bank, general grocery store, etc.
We ended the evening with a BBQ at the Hostel, hanging around the pool talking to some people, and then crashing hard at 9pm.
wheph!