Blue Jeans Day/Play Hooky From Work To Go Holiday Shopping Day/International Volunteer Day/Twenty-first Amendment Day
2004-12-05 @ 7:27 p.m.

This morning's flight was one of the most uneventful in memory. That probably had something to do with the fact that we shared 10 seats among our family of five, which demonstrates the benefits of taking flights that depart something after midnight. Imagine that, three seats all to myself. Can't say it made much of a difference though, seemed too undecorous to just sprawl across them. I did catch De-lovely though. The first time I tried watching it was after I'd rewatched L'auberge Espagnole, so I sort of fell asleep. Then when I woke up, I caught two episodes of Coupling instead, which were so damn funny! I finally saw De-lovely in the last two hours of the flight. On the return trip, I'm going to see I, Robot and rewatch Jeux D'enfants.

Being a person who's not really into the whole tour thing when on vacation, today was one of the few days which I enjoyed. (Yes, I do feel able to tell in advance when it comes to this.) Anyway, there's nothing more irritating than being lost in a city for no good reason. Unless it's being lost with your clueless parents. Hailing a cab to send you back to your hotel is out of the question here; they're exorbitant and I'm not exaggerating. There was this driver from Shanghai who drove us from the airport to our hotel in the city, and he deliberately cheated our money, much to the displeasure of his Eastern European colleague. You'd be forgiven if you thought this area of Sydney was in the UK, what with street names like Oxford, Liverpool and Sussex. The convicts, first Sydneysiders, pining after their homeland perhaps?

I don't profess to understand my dad's insistence on taking a photograph every five minutes. Just get a postcard already. Don't you find that people spoil pictures? Hence their conspicuous absence from a sizeable number of postcards. It strikes me as quite bizarre to walk one round around the quay just to snap a few shots of the Opera House. It's just like going to great lengths to find the market at The Rocks, and then buying nothing from it save three bars of fudge and five stones. Utterly incomprehensible.