Oz today

Well, strictly speaking, it was Oz yesterday.

I arrived in Sydney along with pretty much half of the population of the world, all here for god knows what. Could be cricket, but there's a lot of Americans here as well and to be honest I imagine their interest in a cricket match between Oz and the UK is pretty much the same as mine. Zippo - in case you needed that explained.

So yeah, we get sent up and down the coast of Sydney for 20 minutes or so before we can finally land. When we land, they send us to some remote part of the airport where there's no gate and you have to do the whole, get off the plane, onto the bus thing. Once off the bus we had to queue for customs where they put all these secret codes on my immigration form, but I think it was to do with the fact that I was carrying in my luggage the most deadly of weapons..... chocolate. They've got serious 'concerns' about the immigration of all sorts of things (in case you're planning a trip - it's meat, dairy products, poultry and eggs, vegetables, fruits and anything made of wood). However, my chocolates were declared 'safe' (well duh) and after having queued up for nearly as long as in T3 at Heathrow they scanned my luggage for the umpteenth time and I was free. (Hey, how come they don't scan the luggage before releasing it to the pick-up carousel - then we don't have to queue up the length of the terminal....??? I'm going to have to find a native who I can quiz....)

So yes, I'm here in Sydney and the weather is HOT! My arrival (coincidentally) brought with it a heat wave. Drove past Bondi (in a very very cool black Lexus - oh yeah, check me out!) and it was seriously packed. Before I'd only even seen Bondi in the 'winter' and it had been empty. Personally, I prefer the empty version - this time it just lived up to it's reputation. The intention was to drive on to another beach, but there was some art event going on combined with toasty weather and no where to park. Mission aborted.

I can report to you that I have seen no *actual* spiders yet, although I have seen a load of nasty looking webs and have discovered from a local that they have the big bastard spiders down in the south as well as in the north. Way to make me sleep at night.

So tomorrow I'll visit the bank, see what hoops I've got to jump through to get a cash card. No money actually transferred yet, figured that it might be better not to give them any of my cash until I was happy with the service they might offer. If they're anything like the banks in the UK.... well, let's just say that banks aren't far from spiders in my list of things the world could do without.