honeymoon detritus

we’re back in the states. and only ten hours before we actually left! thank/curse you, international date line!

various detritus:

• we got back in lost angels, and it’s sunny and 71. which is significantly nicer than the rainy and 50 in new zealand. but it’s summer there and winter here, right? everyone there kept saying that it was unseasonably cold, and it’s usually very hot by now. maybe it’s a big conspiracy by their tourism board to say that all the time.
  
• thanks to a little research on seatguru, we got nice seats in the back by the window that were just a pairs of seats, aisle and window. that way there was no stinky third person stranger to deal with.
  
• if you’re travelling, definitely order the vegetarian meal. even if you’re not vegetarian. hmc got the asian vegetarian meal, and it was a delicious indian dinner! my lamb thing was relatively crappy.
  
• speaking of which, this trip has reinforced for me that one of the most terrible things america has done for the world has to be fast food. it’s paramount to the destruction of the fine meal. food can be so delicious and incredible, and to have people eat baked cardboard that’s made palatable through lots of salt and fat is a crime. it’s just the pursuit of the almighty dollar, and it does help drive the economy, but it doesn’t really have to be that way, does it? in japan you can get quick meals at noodle stands everywhere, and the food is a million times better.
  
• speaking of the dollar, thanks to deficit spending and the resulting declining international confidence in our economy, the dollar kept dropping during our trip to new and newer lows, making our trip progressively more expensive as the days went on. thanks again, dubya!
  
• perhaps the strangest part of being back is not the weather but the twilight. or lack thereof. because it was (allegedy) summer there, and because we were so far, uh, south (farther from the equator), it didn’t get dark until almost 10:30. and here, it’s pitch black at 5. no wonder i’m sleepy all the time.

here’s my last vacation story. maybe.

while we were on our rainforest walk around dunk island, we saw lots of brush turkeys. inevitably we would run on two female turkeys walking head of us on the path. when we got close to them they would split in different directions, one to the left and one to the right. maybe this is instinctual to either confuse the predator or to at least make sure that one of them would survive.

i found that walking around in australia and new zealand, when we would encounter anyone walking towards us on the sidewalk, we would essentially do the same thing: i would go to the left, hmc to the right. i think i was trying to do what was expected since they drive on the left so they walk on the left, and i don’t know what hmc was trying to do.

but maybe we’re just brush turkeys at heart.

Posted at December 10, 2004 2:51 PM