Traveling Part 2

(This post was written on Tuesday 8 Feb)


We left New Zealand this morning and traveled to Sydney.

New Zealand is a very beautiful country; I recommend it highly. And not just because they’re about to start filming “The Hobbit” there either.
We stayed in an area with a lot of geothermal activity: hot springs, geysers, etc. It was very interesting to see steam just coming up out of the ground all over. And not just at the national park, but right next to our hotel! It made me think I’d be rather nervous to build anything there. Not to mention the still-active volcanoes; the last eruption was in the nineties!

Yeah, the NINETEEN-nineties!

Of course, who am I to say anything. I live on a volcanic island myself….

Also we learned a little about the native people there, the Maori, and why they’re always sticking out their tongues in every picture.

(It’s supposed to look threatening and scare off enemies.)

Everywhere we stayed was really nice, except the airport motel, who neglected to inform us they don’t have air conditioning.

It’s summer here in the southern hemisphere, of course, and it’s pretty warm. I’d tell you how warm, but the temperatures here are all in Celsius, and I’m just not up to doing the math. I’m on vacation here!

Anyways the airport motel had no A/C, and opening the windows was not practical.

I mean, could YOU sleep with wide-open windows if you were on the ground floor of an AIRPORT MOTEL? I think not.

So after a night in that sweatbox, we were ready to hop on the plane to Sydney.

Here our hotel is in the middle of the city, but it has air conditioning and we’re safely on the ninth floor.

I don’t know when I’ll be able to post this, by the way; right now I’m having a bit of trouble with internet connectivity.

In our hotel you can pay extra for an internet connection, but it’s twenty dollars a day.

This caused a bit of an argument between me and my husband.

Him: I’m not paying twenty bucks for internet!
Me: But I want to go online!
Him: It’s a rip-off! We should be able to connect for free!
Me: Everywhere we’ve stayed has a charge for internet!
Him: We should just go to an internet café then!
Me: Where would that be?
Him: I don’t know. There’s got to be one around.
Me: WHERE? I’m in a foreign country here!
Him: Or the library. There’s always free internet at the library.
Me: Are you KIDDING me?! I can barely find a bathroom here, much less the library!

Anyways. Finally we agreed to purchase the connection. And then it was super-slow, and eventually cut off altogether.

So my husband actually had to call tech support, probably in India or something, and when they couldn’t get it going again, we got our twenty bucks back.

I guess it really was a rip-off.

Fortunately, he didn’t say, “I told you so.”

(By the way, I'm still having MAJOR internet problems; this connection is absolutley REFUSING all of my pictures. You'd think I was in a foreign country, or something!)