Right this moment I am supposed to be getting ready to go off to New Zealand and getting ready to pack my stuff I am totally ambivalent about going. I feel like I need a holiday but holidays in foreign countries (regardless of how close or similar in culture they may be) tend to involve a lot of stuffing around. Airport transfers, manhandling luggage (or in my case cajoling someone else into humping my luggage about), arranging for things that are likely to crop up in your absence – I was expecting a tapestry I ordered online to have arrived by now but Customs have their dirty little hands on it and no amount of attempting to be proactive and square away any duty payable on the item proved fruitful…. more bureaucratic bullshit than you’ve ever seen before one of those –
Call Customs and get –
‘you need to call Australia Post to find out about your item’
Call Australia Post and get –
‘you need to call Customs to find out about your item’ type situations… blah, blah, blah, di fuckin’ blah!
Anyway, between that and paying school fees and trying to write a bunch of stuff down for Mum who is kindly looking after the house, the Small Child and the Small Dog and then getting to the whole packing thing… it has just left me ambivalent about the trip in general.
So I left my packing to the last minutes which was okay given that I had already decided I would pare down my pack for this trip. One item of ‘real’ warmth (polar fleece jumper from hell) and lots of useful layerable items, toiletries, some study material and my latex pillow all went into my UberBag which I then cant pick up to roll it along cos it’s about 15-16 kgs (damn latex pillow is about 1.5kg of that).
We get to the airport with plenty of time to spare and then do that horrible wasting time hanging around the airport bullshit… airport gate waiting lounges are always how I kinda pictured Purgatory for some reason, We get on our flight no probs but unfortunately the flight is packed so there was no extra space to be had and it was three hours of forced sedentary posture with a movie on my laptop to try and keep my mind off the rather annoying way back was screaming ‘FUCK YOU’RE AN IDIOT FOR AGREEING TO SIT STILL ON A STUPID CRAPPY AIRLINE SEAT!!!’.
Somehow I don’t see any decent long haul travel in my immediate future….