Heading South
Wherein our narrator travels to Australia's
second city.
I'm up at about 10km, on a more-or-less smooth
Quantus flight from Sydney to Melbourne. As I was being cheap, I decided to
risk taking the train to the airport. It was completely easy to do - though I'm
not sure my ticket actually worked in the turnstile. It fed me some error
message, but let me out, so I decided to ignore it, and headed into the airport.
I have heard the Sydneysiders discuss the airport line - which was completed for
the 2000 Olympic games - as a bit of a boondoggle that no one uses. But I was
on a train relatively crowded with soon-to-be-passengers, so I don't get what
all the fuss is about. Probably it's coming from the owners of the taxi
companies, who are losing those sweet AUD $50 fares to ferry passengers from the
airport to the CBD. Oh well. You heard the same thing when San Francisco built
the BART out to its airport - something that only opened a few months
ago.
There was WiFi at the airport, so
I paid Telstra (evil) AUD $8 for 30 minutes of access. Rather too expensive,
but whatever. I actually got to handle a few last minute emails, and sent my
SPAA docs to my Yahoo! email account, just in case some catastrophic failure
wipes out my computer, my CDs, the copies I sent to SPAA, etc. The absolute
worst-case scenario.
I've packed a lot
of black clothing. I understand that Mebournians tend to favor black, though
Karen - a friend of mine from SF who is now in Melbourne - is reporting that
she's seeing less black than she'd find in San Francisco. Not that that, as a
metric, is particularly meaningful.
My
only neurotic moment now concerns connectivity - or the lack of it - available
at my hotel. It'll be difficult if I can't check my emails, etc., when I'm in
my hotel room. I didn't have any problem in June, at the Holiday Inn (of all
places, but it was by far the nicest Holiday Inn I'd ever stayed in or visited)
but the Grand Hyatt Melbourne may be another matter altogether. It's hard to
know, because the website seemed to say something about 128Kb ISDN access
available in the rooms. But what that means, I have no idea. Hopefully, like
every other major 21st century hotel, they've got broadband in the rooms. If
they don't, I'm gonna be pissed.
Ah, I
can feel the gentle shift of descent beginning. Whee!
Posted: Tue - November 18, 2003 at 02:02 PM