Melbourne Loft

Last Friday British Airways published a flight deal for Christmas that was much better than the Finnair deal we bought in June. So I rang Helsinki and had our flight cancelled and popped another fare on my credit card. This is also means a slight change in the itinerary. This is now the routing:
Melbourne – Sydney – London – Budapest (stop) – Berlin (stop) – London – New York (stop) – London (stop) – Paris (stop) – London – Sydney – Melbourne
There’s a lot of London’s in there, but we only actually stop there once. I know it looks like a lot of flying but it’s actually only 5 stops and will be done over one month. It’s exhausting looking at all those flights though. Now it’s time to start working out where we’ll actually stay in all those places!
This is the British Airways 747 sitting at Sydney airport waiting to take off.

I have Greg from Wollongong visiting me this week. I dragged him out shopping this weekend with Tyson and Nico to look for some new (or old) furniture to furnish the Loft. I’m looking for a couch for the front room and a new couch to replace the old blue one (that is now 12 years old). We visited a whole lot of second hand furniture stores as well as new ones. But I didn’t see anything that I really liked. So I guess I’ll keep looking.
I did find a new lamp and a rug at IKEA. But I’m thinking I would like a 60’s Eames style couch for the front room and have a bit of a retro theme going in there. In the meantime Nico has been coming over and tidying it up for me to make it nicer for guests.

Last week I finally completed the bookings for our Christmas trip to Europe. I know we are booking really early. We did that to try to avoid higher ticket prices later in the year. We got a great deal with Finnair to fly from Melbourne to Oslo via Singapore and Helsinki. So we will fly to Asia with Qantas and then change to the big Finnair Airbus on their new Singapore service. Then we swap to the smaller plane in Helsinki to go on to Oslo. I’m going over with Chris. We will be in Oslo for a few days before Christmas before we head to Berlin to spend Christmas there. After Christmas we will jump on BA/AA to go to New York. We’ll be in New York for New Year’s Eve. I think we’ll be there for roughly 10 days. Then we’ll head back to London for a few days before grabbing the Finnair flights home again.
Very exciting isn’t it! It’s going to be quite an expensive trip since we’ll be travelling in the high season. But it will be really worth it to see a white Christmas. I’m hoping for big now falls. It will be the second time in my life that I’ve seen snow. I’m sure Oslo will have snow. The other cities may or may not have any snow. The whole trip will take almost a month to complete.

I’m doing loads of cooking at the moment. It must be a winter thing. Mostly mastering the slow cooking. So far I’ve mastered the beef goulash, corned beef and lamb shanks. What other meat product can I cook up next? It’s been fun cooking lots and getting the guys around for dinner. I just don’t like all the cleaning up afterwards.

Is it really that serious when you need someone to come round and help you manage your closet? My friend Nico is a professional visual merchandiser for some clothing stores around Melbourne. He offered to come round and help me sort out my closet… which actually is spread through 2 rooms now. I think it was too much for him though, he appeared from the room 2 hours later looking exhausted and defeated. I haven’t gone in there and looked yet, but I’m imagining it will sparkle like the David Jones department store. Nico now has his own blog now where you can check out the life of this Visual Merchandiser extraordinaire. It is: http://nicofamilar.wordpress.com/ Hopefully you won’t see any “before” photos of my closet appearing there soon.

I’m a little bit late posting about this one. My friend Tyson finally launched his new website Repertwa. I’d like to say that I helped him build it but I didn’t. I guess I could say that I drank many cups of tea while he told me all about it… is that helping? The site is for people to buy and sell musical theatre music and sheet music. There wasn’t much out on the market for people to do this before and now Tyson has built a great site for this to happen. So for all your Musical Theatre Music needs check out Repertwa.com. Or you can just stare at this delicious Repertwa cake that Tyson made for the launch.

What a great weekend! I headed off to New Zealand with Chris for the weekend. Auckland is just a 3 1/2 hour flight from Melbourne. So we got up very early on Saturday morning and arrived in NZ just before lunch in Auckland (with a 2 hour time difference). Auckland is a great city. I really like the harbour area where there are loads of great restaurants. We stayed at the Westin which is located right on the water. Most of the weekend was spent eating and exploring the city. We also stopped to check out the Sky Tower and the attached casino. New Zealanders seem to be a pretty friendly bunch too. But what I also noticed is that there are loads of people from other countries living there. It seemed like everyone we spoke to had an accent that wasn’t from New Zealand. I suspect it must be a country that has easy immigration laws. Next time I go back I’d like to stay a few more days.

I actually called it a mini retirement when I started my two month long vacation from work. I didn’t really have any set plans for when I started the time off. But I quickly had plans going when Jake called me up and told me to go meet him in Malaysia. It started with a road trip to Geelong, then a few days in Queensland with my family, then a week in Malaysia with Jake, and then 3 weeks in the USA. It didn’t take long before the 2 months were gone. I guess I’m kinda glad to be going back to work tomorrow. It’s time to move on and get on with the next chapter of this life. I feel a lot more settled and happy with what I’m doing now. I’m happy to see where things take me.
And I promise I will post more about the trip soon. I have a tonne of photos to post here.

One of the highlights of our stay in Palm Springs had to be the day we took the aerial tramway up the mountain to 12,000 feet and saw the snow up there. We hadn’t planned to go there so we had to buy tops at the tourist store so we wouldn’t freeze up there. It’s funny how you can go from desert heat to snow within an hour. Here are a few pics of our stay in Palm Springs. It was mostly all about swimming and eating. I think I would to try going there in winter next time.

I was a bit worried about getting off a 15 hour flight and driving from LAX to Palm Springs. But it actually turned out okay. We got lost as soon as we drove out of the Avis car lot. But Chris turned on his maps on the iphone and managed to get us out of trouble and on to the right freeways to Palm Springs. It was a bit strange driving on the other side of the road, but I managed to do it fairly competently for 5 days. And I caused no accidents. But I was really glad when we arrived at the hotel in Palm Springs and jumped in the pool. I will definitely go to PS again. We both liked it there a lot.