The Beach near my house on an overcast morning....From: Wayyy South of the Spider’s Nest on the Way to Sydney
Dear friends and Family,
You are about to read 5 pages of information and experiences that can save you and/ or your friends from strange men attempting to grab your boobs, spending the night in wet, pole less tents, 5-mile bike rides with meat juice dripping down your leg, the horror of losing your spouse somewhere between Asia and Australia, and discovering that all your clothes are on the wrong continent.
Please pay careful attention. What you are about to read is deceptively avoidable, and rather embarrassing. In fact, I’m going to have to ask for a bit of patience from some of you. Especially those of you who are “old pros” at this living stuff.
You see, the first pages of this post are going to reveal some stuff that most of you already know. Please bear with me. Some of my readers don’t know this stuff and besides, it never hurts any of us to take a little “trip down memory lane” once in a while.
And anyway, it’s all a “setup” to pave the way for me to explain my latest debacle in the line of outrageous shenanigans.
Onward. No more messing around.
It all starts back a few months, around December of 2009. I booked a ticket from Hong Kong to Australia for a couple of clearly intelligent reasons.
One: I was completely sick of going to bed with my hat, jacket, scarf, mittens, long johns, leg warmers, double shirts, sweat pants, and two blankets. Call me ridiculous, but I couldn’t make sense of the face that it was colder inside my 17th storey apartment than outside.
In fact, to get the weather report each morning, I would check to see if I could see my breath, and if I wasn’t satisfied with that, I just stuck my finger through the hole in the bedroom window.
Two: I couldn’t get a direct flight from Shanghai to go finish the screen play I had worked on with Tara Goejen aka Fat head for 6 mths in Alaska, so I used 40k Alaska airlines flyer miles to get from Hong Kong to Sydney on Cathay Pacific…an unbelievable deal that makes me feel all warm inside every time I think about it.
Honest frequent flier programs are not dead.
Two weeks after getting my flight, Brent decided to come too…
Tickets on my flight were sold out by then, so Brent got a flight out 1 day later.
Which brings me to my first lesson. You have to make a move first to convince others you are serious. The best way to do this is to lie about what you are doing and then go through with it at the same time they do.
With both Brent and I heading to Australia for 5 weeks, we needed to get a place to stay. Fat head told us not to worry—we could stay with her and her friend for the trip.
Hindsite
Brent told me this was a horrible plan and to start looking for an apartment. How was I supposed to know this had disaster written all over it? Fat head and I get along…what’s the big deal?
And, how hard could it be to get an apartment there? Worse comes to worse, we could just rent some 1 room-sh#t hole for the time being. What’s the worst that could happen? Seriously…my imagination sucked on that one.
If I’ve learned anything, its you can’t dream the worst that can happen, so don’t even try—pay someone else to worry about it for you.
Fat head started looking for a place for us to stay in Wollongong (1 hr from Sydney), and I did a half-hearted Internet search, going as far as posting a work/rent trade on craiglist (this turned into one of the most hilarious things that has happened to me yet...stay tuned).
The Railway Station
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