Brisbane trip - Day 1

Sunday, 11th May 2008 - After I have been a month in Cyprus, finally my wife has planned to go to Brisbane Australia to visit her brother, who has been there for around 4 years. We planned for 2 weeks stay at his apartment, take a tour around the city and Gold Coast theme park, then travel to outskirt for some adventure trip.

The flight was on 10:20am Sunday morning and my wife got the tickets from AirAsia online booking. The deal we got is rather cheap for 2 people, return ticket, including on-flight meal and 20kg luggage for each of us. There is no entertainment on board, so usually we just sleep thru the whole journey. I found beside sleeping, a book, ipod, laptop or a mini DVD player is what other passengers carried on board.


A look out from the window before sun set.

Anyway, there is one misfortune hit me on-flight. As I walked towards the toilet and trying to push the door open, as it was clearly shows VACANT on the door sign, suddenly there was somebody inside the toilet quickly push the door close. Unfortunately, within that million of a second, I was able to see the face of that innocent person, who is unable to read or close the door. It was a Chinese old lady, who I think she is a Malaysian and clearly there is no Chinese word written on the toilet door. Faith is making fun on me as it happened again when I went to the same toilet for second time. Door not closed and the same old folk pushed the door close in a hurry. Enough is enough, I swear not use that same toilet again for the rest of the flight.


At the airport lobby.

After 8 hours of exhausting flight (it wasn't easy to get some proper sleep on the flight), finally we reached the Gold Coast airport. The time was around 8 PM and we still haven't see any sign of our relative yet. We haven't take our dinner as the sandwiches (we calculated that is not feasible to buy other meal. e.g. Nasi Lemak = RM15) are all sold out. At the airport lobby, I bought a candy bar for both of us just to kill the hunger temporary while waiting for our ride. After an hour passed, finally he has came with a Toyota Camry (by rental) and brought us to an Asean cafeteria, where they still open at late night, for dinner.

After the meal, we went back to his apartment and we're shocked. Not by the house, the decoration or the furniture but a 16 dog year old golden retriever. I have nothing against dog living with human in an apartment but the odor that it left inside really took us a while to get used to it (I'm not sure whose fault that is).

We went to sleep rather late that night: after we took the shower, organized our luggage and stuff, get used to the smell then only able to get some proper sleep.

So, that's it. End of day one.