Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Sydneyside

2008-05-17_sydney
Oh dear,
despite best intentions, I haven't improved my blogging frequency. Blame air travel. I'm back in Perth this week after a week in Sydney.
The haul from London to Sydney wasn't too bad. The best part was blowing some points to travel first class Heathrow to Singapore. As expected, it is a lot nicer, but not that much nicer. The best part is the flat bed and the snuggly doona.
Unfortunately despite a stop & shower in Singapore, first-class comfort did not prevent me arriving in Sydney at 5:15am horribly jet-lagged. Due to time zone confusion the hotel had cancelled my booking, but we managed to retrieve it. I spent the day walking around CBD Sydney and the Rocks, trying to stay awake. Had dinner in a nondescript seafood place in Darling Harbour and went to bed ridiculously early. The next day much the same in the morning - I had to be in Ingleside around 4:00, so got a taxi about 3:00.
It seems Sydney taxi drivers are not required to have the Knowledge. The driver got lost and started to get panicky. I had to take his street directory away and navigate intersection by intersection. Fortunately we were only about 2km from where we were supposed to be, and arrived quickly enough once a woman was in charge of reading the map...

The week in Ingleside was intense - 5 days of business strategy and leadership with ping pong in the evenings. I made it to my friends' house on Friday night totally exhausted.
Spent Saturday wandering around the Domain and the Botanic Gardens - spiders, cockatoos and Wollemi pines dominate the pictures this time.
Sunday back to earth (I mean Perth), and back in the office.
Unfortunately I have two laptops, a desktop and a portable hard drive scattered around the world at the moment, and I couldn't for a while quite remember which hard drive the pictures were in. I finally tracked them down in the home (Perth home) PC, cunningly filed in Lightroom instead of Picasa.