Singapore to Sydney

After the difficulty of figuring out what terminal I was departing from, which didn't help my irrational conviction that I was in the airport on the wrong day (I've not been sure all week what day it actually is, such confusion caused in part by time zone changes and in part by heading up from Cork on Monday rather than Sunday, an event that always throws my mental positioning in the calendar out of balance), and failing to find food, the flight itself was dull. We were delayed as two passengers failed to board, so their luggage had to be removed. I fear it was the unfortunate lady ahead of me at check-in and her husband, she left her handbag in the taxi. Hopefully she got it back, Singaporean honesty and morals would suggest she did, or will.

I watched District 9 – what a galactically upsetting movie. Seriously. I was traumatised. There was no way I was touching The Hurt Locker after that. Food was worse than the LHR-SIN leg, service was equally disinterested. Qantas – not my favourite airline. I should have known, I've seen the crew on off-days in Singapore, it's not surprising that they're not in the best of moods on the plane. My travel agent has somehow managed to stick me near the crying babies twice so far – I need to do seat checks for the flights in and out of South America to make sure I am not near any bulkheads. 20 hours of screaming infants is the opposite of fun. If this trip turns out to be exceptionally successful and I marry a Kiwi, my theoretical husband can take any theoretical kids to visit their theoretical grandparents by himself if he so wishes. I won't be holding my breath on the realisation of such a theoretical scenario however.

On landing, I thought we had taken a wrong turn and I was back home (this might not have been entirely unwelcome) as it is RAINING. In AUSTRALIA. Ok so I'd been warned such a thing was possible but it is summer and did I mention AUSTRALIA? It never rained in Home and Away* except when there was a requirement for a storm of epic, cast clearout proportions. Getting out of the airport and into the rain took about an hour – they do take their immigration seriously here. Which is hard to take seriously when the dude on the counter is called Pascal and is a Nordie. Anyway, queued for a million years, in some kind of random arrangement occasionally disrupted by an angry older lady who only got angrier when people failed to understand the directions she was clearly giving telepathically as she didn't actually speak them. Then they scanned my bags on the way out! OUT! Main target here seems to have been food, as one woman was arguing quite vociferously over a cured ham (iberico? serrano? I couldn't tell from where I was) while the rest of the biological crims looked sheepish about their various sandwiches and other food items. My crème egg survived.

Time to see if I've been horribly wrong about Australia.

* You know H&A is a fundamental part of the fabric of Irish society when you're trying to explain something (obviously crucial) about Emmerdale and you can see the lightbulb ping, “so Hotton is like the Yabbey Creek of Emmerdale!” and clearly it is understood that this relationships bears true in both relative size and location terms but more importantly in 'bad influence' terms.