Homeward bound
Jan 23rd, 2008 by Nick
As I write this, it’s 11:10AM in Sydney. In an hour, the shuttle service will arrive to take me to the airport, where I’ll hang around for a couple of hours before getting on the flight to Sydney. It’s been a great trip (except for the getting sick part), but it’s time to start getting immersed back into the real world.
The best way to do that is to adjust to Chicago time. As a result, I ended up only taking a brief nap last night. 7pm Sydney time is 2am Chicago time, and my plan is to try to sleep immediately after the dinner service. To keep myself awake after getting back to the hotel, I packed and then made a variety of phone calls back to the states. I also got plugged back into work, and after talking with several people to find out if there was anything that would annoy me when I read my email (there was not), I held my breath and downloaded my email to the laptop. Surprisingly, there were only 192 emails for 23 days. I had planned on going through a larger stack of email on the plane, but I could knock off most of the 192 email in a few hours, and by 5am I was done.
After a two hour nap, I cleaned up and headed off to the original Darlinghurst bills, the restaurant of Sydney’s TV cooking presenter Bill Granger. I’d seen a couple of episodes of his show while laid up in bed and was impressed by his approach. He’d made his initial mark with breakfasts, so I thought it would make a pleasant going-away meal. I was not disappointed. His main trademark is hotcakes with ricotta and banana, but I’m meh about ricotta, so I went with his other mainstay: a supposedly Jamaican coconut bread, along with a raspberry muffin that ended up being ridculously huge, and an order of bacon.
I’m not sure how Jamaican the coconut bread was, but it was excellent. For a typical breakfast instead of a “I’m not going to be fed anything but airline food for 24 hours” breakfast, just the coconut bread and some juice and coffee would have been more than sufficient.
After taking the subway over, I splurged for a taxi back to the Hilton. A couple of last minute shopping items, and after 45 minutes online, it’s time to shut down and finish the last bits of packing.
