things are working out. i thought they would, but they actually worked out faster, smoother and better than i could have hoped. my australia journey started out low, with the sky opening and massive amounts of rain starting to come down just a minute or two before i was going to leave for the train to the airport. so i had to get my rain gear out of the bag, and i couldn't bring my hat, and i missed the train. i felt like shit when i was running up the stairs to the platform, because if there's one time you shouldn't miss a train, it's when you are going on an interhemispheral flight on a sunday and the next train doesn't leave for thirty-five minutes. i still had decent time, but missing that train meant that i had used up my buffer time for "things that can go wrong" for that part of the trip, and if the next train would be delayed, i would be in serious trouble. fortunately, it was not and the rest of the trip worked out way too well.
on friday, around noon, i applied for a tourist visa for australia. that's two days before i was leaving. now, i already had a working holiday visa that lasted until mid-september, but i would like to stay longer than that and i wasn't sure how difficult it would be to extend my visa from australia. because of this, i contacted the closest australian embassy and they said it was possible to get an extended visa as long as i applied before my current one expired. what they didn't tell me was that applying before going to australia would cost me exactly $0, whereas applying whilst in australia would cost $215 (that's for the exact same type of online application). i didn't realize this until i rummaged different official websites for the third or fourth time, on friday, around noon. my flight was on sunday. i applied for the visa, but for it to be valid it had to be granted before i got on my plane to australia. fat chance, i thought. australia is 8 hours ahead of sweden in time, so when i applied it was 8 pm there and a weekend coming up. then i started thinking. why is it that i can't seem to get things done until the last possible second? i do this with everything. i waited way too long with getting my ticket, resulting in having to pay extra and getting 18 hours in bangkok. i needed to buy an mp3 player and new headphones, but i didn't look into it until wednesday, meaning it was too late to order them online and i had to settle for worse and more expensive options locally. and i only had to buy one because my old one broke and i haven't pushed enough on the manufacturer to get a repair and now it was too late. and i only booked a hotel in bangkok they day before leaving, meaning i couldn't be sure i would be able to get a room at a good place.
when i booked the plane ticket and found out that my three days of procrastinating had cost me so much, i felt awful. when i realized that my procrastination when applying for a visa extension would cost me a totally unnecessary $215, i felt awful. why is it that i can't seem to learn the lesson? why is it that i find it so hard to do everyday stuff like this, that i know needs to be done at some point? and i know i'm not the only one who's like this, why do people just not learn the lesson and start living happier and more efficient lives?
this time, like most times, things worked out better than they should have if i was to learn some sort of lesson. my visa was granted on saturday, i got the e-mail at about 4 pm, which means that it was midnight in australia. my visa was granted at midnight on a saturday in australia. i find this very amusing. my hotel reservation in bangkok came through within a few hours, not that that ended up mattering anyway, because i was able to get on an earlier flight in bangkok and cut down my idle time there from 18 to 2 hours. i spent most of it going back and forth on horizontal escalators (i know that's a contradiction, but whatever they are called - you know those things they have at airports that make you feel really jet-set because you are walking at lightning speed) and then went through the usual security thingamajig before boarding the plane with a giant smile on my face. i had considered the possibility that i might be able to get an earlier flight, but i couldn't count on it, i couldn't expect it or i'd be crashing hard if it wasn't possible. they took care of my baggage and everything, it was really smooth.
i should probably try hard to find some sort of structure to my life that would make it harder for these situations to occur in the first place. i'm not sure how to create it yet, but i need as much assistance as possible with getting things done in time. i'll try to learn the lesson even if i managed to get out of it this time.
so i got to sydney monday evening instead of tuesday lunch, which made everything a lot better. it was also infinitely better to arrive in the evening than at the ungodly time of 4 am, which i did last time. rachel picked me up at the airport, we took a cab home and had turkish apple tea and tim tams and i patted the cat and i felt so at home and so in love.
on a different and more humorous note, someone yesterday found my blog when searching for "+calculon +pirate +hamburgers" from google in chile. i hope my post answered all their questions. at least it's more likely than the personed who found me after googling "bra adventure".
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
to reiterate, my terrible secret is...
i am preparing for australia. and bangkok. mostly bangkok, really. anyone who's talked to me during the last month knows about this, so if you have, you might as well skip to the next paragraph, where i talk about...god knows what. i sure don't. so, bangkok. right, i booked my trip to australia a few weeks ago, it seemed fine and was both faster and cheaper than last time. then i get to the travel agency, almost mentally prepared to pay over 12 000 SEK (that's somewhere around two thousand dollars) for an e-item, and find out that the bangkok-sydney part of the trip has been cancelled. and it's now sold out on all days in the near future when i was planning on going. except...there is one left, but it's a whopping 18 hours after the plane from copenhagen arrives. and it's 1 500 SEK more expensive.
***aside on terminology used in magic: the gathering***
this year i started playing magic: the gathering ("magic") again. it's a collectable card game that resides somewhere between chess and poker in style, with a decent amount of random factor but where the best player still wins nine out of ten. magic, like most sub-cultures, is filled with terminology that applies to the game but with varying amounts of creativity also to the non-magic world. applying terms from a sub-culture to totally different situations is something i find very amusing, and sometimes there really are useful terms that deserve a wider use. the term that brought this aside on is "stab". yes, that word already has a meaning and yes, the meaning it has in magic is pretty close to that one. there is a playing format in magic called draft, where you sit eight people around a table, each one with three packs of cards, and you each open a pack, take one card and ship the remanining fourteen to the person next to you. then you pick one of the fourteen that are left, and so on, and then you build a deck with the cards you've picked. magic has five colours and you typically play two or three and try to stay out of the colours the poeple next to you are playing. sometimes, in a pack there will be no good cards in your colours but some good ones in the others; taking a good card in a colour you are not playing to make sure someone else doesn't get it is referred to as a stab. switching to a colour after passing a lot of good cards in that colour (thus giving your neighbour the signal that the colour is open) is referred to as stabbing someone onthat colour. and we are now approaching the poodle's core of this aside: stabbing here means making someone else's situation worse with no real gain for yourself.
***end unexpectedly long aside***
i like to refer to the eighteen hours in bangkok and added cost of 1 500 SEK as the ticket stab. i was stabbed on the ticket. it was a savage stab. but what choice did i have? i had to have the ticket, the suboptimal ticket, so i bought it and started to think about what to do with my 18 hours in bangkok. all i know about bangkok is that the traffic is horrible and that it's a typical primal city in that it's massively bigger than any other city in the same country (good ol' urbanization in the global south that i took at ubc finally coming in handy), and it's not like i've ever felt any pressing need to go there. especially not for such short time. so i probably won't, i'll try to find a hotel by the airport somewhere and spend the day there sleeping and kicking it back and up a notch and attempt to be decently rested for the second part of the trip and my coming life in the southern hemisphere. how's that for unadventurous?
apart from those 18 hours, i think australia will be great. it may not have saltlaktrits or ernst kirchsteiger, but it does have my favourite person in the whole world, and also other good things such as cheap thai, vegetarian thai and funny thai restaurant names. funny thai restaurant names include:
thaitanic
thairiffic
thai me up
i think thai restaurants in australia are like hair dressers in sweden, the type of business where it is expected from you as an owner to include a witty pun in your name. i love it! i wish all lines of business were forced to use puns for their names. in vancouver, there was a printing/framing shop called prints charming, that is truly the name of names.
anyway, australia. australia will be AWESOME. there's so much i miss that i can't wait to get back to. i find it weird that it's a lot like here, i don't think living there as that different from living here, but it's so incredibly far away. to get to a house that's a lot like houses here except with no heat elements and worse isolation, with cats that look like the cats here and cars and streets and shops that look like they do here, i have to spend 20+ hours in the air. does that not sound strange to you? why would someone do that? it might not really apply here, but i still think of a bit from "love love love" by the mountain goats. yes, the mountain goats. naturally.
some things you do for money
and some you do for fun
but the things you do for love
are gonna come back to you one by one
and that might not sound overly impressive, but in its defense the song also mentions sonny liston and raskolnikov. in other musical news, interpol have released a new album and so far it sounds pretty good, it's been a while since i listened to them and they're really good at that big city angst thing. didn't i write about that somewhere? i'm sure i did. right, here. hearing the new album also made me go back to the old stuff and i was reminded of how incredible a song "leif erikson" is. some of their other songs are also positively amazing, but leif erikson's the one that i listen to the most on repeat. over and over. helps me catch up on my mime. i'm a slave to the details. you should check it out.
***aside on terminology used in magic: the gathering***
this year i started playing magic: the gathering ("magic") again. it's a collectable card game that resides somewhere between chess and poker in style, with a decent amount of random factor but where the best player still wins nine out of ten. magic, like most sub-cultures, is filled with terminology that applies to the game but with varying amounts of creativity also to the non-magic world. applying terms from a sub-culture to totally different situations is something i find very amusing, and sometimes there really are useful terms that deserve a wider use. the term that brought this aside on is "stab". yes, that word already has a meaning and yes, the meaning it has in magic is pretty close to that one. there is a playing format in magic called draft, where you sit eight people around a table, each one with three packs of cards, and you each open a pack, take one card and ship the remanining fourteen to the person next to you. then you pick one of the fourteen that are left, and so on, and then you build a deck with the cards you've picked. magic has five colours and you typically play two or three and try to stay out of the colours the poeple next to you are playing. sometimes, in a pack there will be no good cards in your colours but some good ones in the others; taking a good card in a colour you are not playing to make sure someone else doesn't get it is referred to as a stab. switching to a colour after passing a lot of good cards in that colour (thus giving your neighbour the signal that the colour is open) is referred to as stabbing someone on
***end unexpectedly long aside***
i like to refer to the eighteen hours in bangkok and added cost of 1 500 SEK as the ticket stab. i was stabbed on the ticket. it was a savage stab. but what choice did i have? i had to have the ticket, the suboptimal ticket, so i bought it and started to think about what to do with my 18 hours in bangkok. all i know about bangkok is that the traffic is horrible and that it's a typical primal city in that it's massively bigger than any other city in the same country (good ol' urbanization in the global south that i took at ubc finally coming in handy), and it's not like i've ever felt any pressing need to go there. especially not for such short time. so i probably won't, i'll try to find a hotel by the airport somewhere and spend the day there sleeping and kicking it back and up a notch and attempt to be decently rested for the second part of the trip and my coming life in the southern hemisphere. how's that for unadventurous?
apart from those 18 hours, i think australia will be great. it may not have saltlaktrits or ernst kirchsteiger, but it does have my favourite person in the whole world, and also other good things such as cheap thai, vegetarian thai and funny thai restaurant names. funny thai restaurant names include:
thaitanic
thairiffic
thai me up
i think thai restaurants in australia are like hair dressers in sweden, the type of business where it is expected from you as an owner to include a witty pun in your name. i love it! i wish all lines of business were forced to use puns for their names. in vancouver, there was a printing/framing shop called prints charming, that is truly the name of names.
anyway, australia. australia will be AWESOME. there's so much i miss that i can't wait to get back to. i find it weird that it's a lot like here, i don't think living there as that different from living here, but it's so incredibly far away. to get to a house that's a lot like houses here except with no heat elements and worse isolation, with cats that look like the cats here and cars and streets and shops that look like they do here, i have to spend 20+ hours in the air. does that not sound strange to you? why would someone do that? it might not really apply here, but i still think of a bit from "love love love" by the mountain goats. yes, the mountain goats. naturally.
some things you do for money
and some you do for fun
but the things you do for love
are gonna come back to you one by one
and that might not sound overly impressive, but in its defense the song also mentions sonny liston and raskolnikov. in other musical news, interpol have released a new album and so far it sounds pretty good, it's been a while since i listened to them and they're really good at that big city angst thing. didn't i write about that somewhere? i'm sure i did. right, here. hearing the new album also made me go back to the old stuff and i was reminded of how incredible a song "leif erikson" is. some of their other songs are also positively amazing, but leif erikson's the one that i listen to the most on repeat. over and over. helps me catch up on my mime. i'm a slave to the details. you should check it out.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
