So who remembers the plague van of 04?
So we have like a little quasi-quarantine thing going on out here at the moment. In that my garage is currently occupied by four of us, plague-ridden to various degrees, with three laptops going and lord of the rings (fellowship) on the TV. \o?
We went to pick up Kat's friend K. from the airport last night - she's on a flying tour of NZ - and then this morning got up early to get the_antichris from her flight, and ALL of us are sick, so we're enjoying the rare break of actual sunshine by... lying around doing absolutely nothing.
Quite seriously, we just went up to the grocery store to get various essentials (and non-), and I have been feeling really guilty about having an entire WEEK OFF WORK (seriously, four days off sick, this is the longest I've ever been off sick in my LIFE) but as we were walking back to the car I started feeling dizzy - from walking around the grocery store, sheesh and have had to admit that, um, yes. My spoons are very much lacking, still, even if I can mostly breathe again. Oyyy. Also, since I know many of you are duly concerned: yes, we got the olive leaf extract and are all dosing ourselves with it.
(Lord of the Rings is also funnier with the appropriate addition of "that's what she said".)
I have realised that, what with getting sick and all, I haven't really posted properly in a long while. To the rather large clump of you I just friended -- hi, welcome, do not feel obliged to stick around, I'm just nosy about what you're up to -- and also, I swear I'm not usually quite this whiny. It's sort of been a weird week. (Also, ftr, I have been trying for months to catch up on LJ, on the grounds that once I did I could friend a bunch of people I lurk after regularly properly; this week I realised this will never happen even if I don't have to work for a week and have nothing else to do BUT read LJ, so I gave the fuck up and just friended you lovely folk already anyhow.) ...also I am inordinately fond of parenthesis.
This week can largely be written off as "I went the doctor, I came home, I went back (repeat times three, with a bonus meltdown during the third visit, sigh), I got a flu diagnosis and came home with a lot of drugs and have been reading the internet and watching Bones and Leverage and movies ever since."
Last week was more variously fun.
So, on Friday, after cunningly posting about my brevet aunt visiting from Brisbane (true!) to hang out with my mother and do fun things on the weekend (also true!) and hopefully implying that we would be doing these fun things with them (lies!), katrin and I headed out to the airport.
Our cunning plan of awesome was to emulate airinshaw and soupytwist's Musktrat Jamboree shenanigans by turning up as technically invited yet unexpected guests at digitalsprawl's birthday party. We had been keeping this secret for MONTHS, had jamethiel_bane covering for us for the RSVP as her "cousins staying from overseas who I have to entertain this weekend" (lol, in conclusion cousins), and were staying with her, and aside from an unfortunately not cryptic enough whinge from me earlier in the week about not wanting to be possibly getting sick (OH HOW LITTLE I KNEW) since we had plans for the weekend, things were actually still pretty much on the dl.
...and then when we met Jame at the airport she followed the prime fangirl directive and joyfully twittered our presence. Of course, R. follows Jame's twitter. :D OOPS. Of course, none of us REALISED this at the time since we didn't actually go online at all and instead huddled on the floor of Jame's room clutching each other and her cat while she scared us all silly with Guillermo del Toro's the Orphanage.
Except, of course, in getting to this, I have skipped a fairly important part of our Friday. Namely the deeply unpleasant discovery we made - at the airport, after standing in line for like forty minutes to check in - that Canadians need visas to visit Australia. Even for FOUR DAYS. What the ACTUAL FUCK. I think our faces of deepest horror might have made good tv. That was NOT a good moment. It turns out Australia is a special little snowflake and demands everyone bar NZers have a visa for ANY visit longer than 8 hours in transit. WTAF. After a lot of being terrified and grumping about how we are ALL COMMONWEALTH COUNTRIES FOR FUCKSSAKE we established that you could get a visa at the airport at the last second (frankly it feels like a money making exercise to me; we can go to Canada visa-free and vice versa, and Aussies can go to Canada visa-free, bah), so we did that, and sort of collapsed in relief. Slightly tetchy relief, but relief all the same. HAD WE BUT KNOWN.
Anyhoo, we got to Jame's, met her charming housemates, played with the cats (SO CUTE) and then went to bed. At this point I thought the getting sick thing was totally a false alarm and basically felt pretty good. We got up lateish on Saturday, toddled into town, wandered the shops a bit before leaving Jame to get tattooed for a couple hours and perused the Queen Vic markets some more. I managed to get a decent chain for my pocket watch, for the grand sum of $6, which I think means I win.
Then we wandered as a group back towards the main part of the city to meet up with pink_soprano and mawaridi in Starbucks, preparatory to (what we thought would be) the Great Reveal. We sat around for about an hour before digitalsprawl was due to arrive, just running our mouths off in the most approved fangirl fashion and drinking much coffee. Basically it was amazing and C. and S. are made of shiny win and I'm glad to now know them.
Then zero hour approached, we got a text from R saying she was at the train station walking up, and I ran off to hide in the stairwell so she could walk in and I could then approach the table for full surprise value (my plan was to ask the table en masse if they knew where to find Gothic Man Love on the internets. It's funny if you know us.)
...this would all have worked significantly more surprisingly had a) I not posted a picture of Kat less than a week ago so R. knew what she looks like ANYWAY and would have recognised her and b) R managed to catch up on twitter less than an HOUR before leaving the house and thus got confirmation of her suspicions that we were indeed Planning Things before she came into town. So there was a lot of giggling about twitterfail and how awesome we all are(n't), but basically one and all agreed it makes for a better story even than the full surprise. It was totally worth it, all the same.
Then we wandered around town some more, killing time as an unwieldy and terribly inappropriate group before the dinner reservations at a very nice restaurant, where people ran around getting us all fixings for name tags (there were a LOT of us) and pretty stickers for same, and there was a lot of chatting, and glomping of people I hadn't seen in far too long.
Dinner was excellent, and we all talked our heads off, which was great, and then most of us traipsed around the city trying to find somewhere both accessible and that could accomodate THIRTEEN FOR DINNERCOFFEES AND HOT CHOCOLATES, wound up being separated across a couple of tables at a Max Bremmer, after we... scared both the maitre'd dude and the actual waiter. Possibly our semaphore of OH LOOK A FREE TABLE INSIDE RIGHT BY US LOOK LOOK SEE HERE? was not the most subtle nor least terrifying thing ever.
Also we learned that chocolate pizza comes with cornflakes on it, and a well-timed ON THE ASTRAL PLANE will actually cause the majority of the table to snort, choke, spew water out their noses and generally make asses of themselves in public. We were all absolutely losing it while the table of Slightly More Maturity kitty-corner to us stared and tried to figure out what had set us off this time. It was sort of too hard to explain given we were all crying with laughter (and sugar overdose).
After that, imjustlikeme (who I FINALLY got to spend some quality time with yaaaaaaay &Patty;), Jame, Kat and I all tromped back to R's place to stay the night there, stayed up far too late giggling on the internets and flailing at each other and passing around pictures from comicon (THEIR FACES WE LOVE THEM), before falling into bed.
...I then managed to wake up on Sunday morning feeling like utter sore throated DEATH, about which the less said the better. I don't remember much of what we did on Sunday; I know there was wandering around downtown and faily coffee, there was me whining a LOT and drinking a lot of water/juice and eating all the rice in the world and some faily service at the chinese restaurant we stopped in for lunch, although my red bean pancakes were excellent. Also a lot of nose-blowing.
When it started getting later in the afternoon we bid a fond farewell to fangirls so that we could make it back to Jame's in time for daylight, got screwed over by connex (lol inevitable) when our train was delayed 20 mins and thus missed the bus by 5, sigh. So after waiting for a while for the next bus, judging the awful fashion choices of passing Yoofs (1. leggings are not pants oh my god Australia how are you even more numerously wrong IRL than NZ is? 2. smashing a glass bottle on the road doesn't make you cool, it makes you a giant asshole. also your tight jeans emphasise how not-endowed you are, skinny-jeaned annoying hipster wannabe dude.) and then got on a bus. And then we walked from the bus stop back to Jame's.
Any other day that probably would've been really awesome, and it was a really nice walk objectively speaking - super flat, not too long, pretty pretty scenery, good company - but mostly by this point I was communing with the Vile One and felt like shit, so I was paying a lot less attention than I would otherwise have. Also my camera appears to have been playing terrible tricks and my pictures are not-spectacular, le sigh. Although I have some cute ones of the three of us, and some super blurry ones of the KANGAROOS bouncing around the park near Jame's. NGL, I have been to Australia quite a lot in my life - my mother is Australian, virtually all my living relatives are in Melbourne anyhow - and this is the first time even I have seen them in the wild. Generally my Australian wildlife encounters are seeing, y'know, crocs and cassowaries. I LIKE VICTORIA BETTER. (Not that kangaroos aren't also dangerous! I just. Cassowarys are fucking terrifying, okay? I blame Jurassic Park.)
So that was neat! ...and then we got back to Jame's and they fed us delicious pasta foods and I nommed desperately onto all the orange juice in the world, and we watched a lot of JEM season 1. My god it's terrible. But hilarious. And it's research! But mostly terrible. Jame also non-conned us into Smallville season 1, so I have now watched four WHOLE episodes, which frankly don't make much more sense than the clippy bits we get every get/together, but were still unexpectedly hilarious and o_O-inducing by turns. And everyone is creepy! And they admit it! It was sort of an eye-opener, actually.
After that, I tapped out, and later found out Kat and Jame had only made it another half ep anyway, so I feel less faily.
I actually woke up feeling pretty okay, other than grossly sinus-y on Monday, and congratulated myself on shaking the cold with record speed. Which was super, cos then we headed back into the city for the 11am showing of Star Trek.
The group of us for Star Trek wound up being pink_soprano, imjustlikeme, digitalsprawl, and me, Kat and Jame. Which was basically awesome, because it also wound up being JUST US IN THERE. Thank TAWG. So we basically got a private screening for under a hundred bucks, and since we are the fucking funniest people in the world (seriously, you have no idea, I wish I'd thought to phone post), it was basically just amazing. Also I suspect we amused the staff a LOT. Possibly we were audible from outside the theatre. Possibly we were LOUDER THAN THE MOVIE. Oops. I maybe seized onto "my name is James Tiberius Kirk, you killed my father, prepare to die!" at the end and would not let that go.
We piled into another Starbucks after that, aiming to watch Leverage on C's computer, but that was sadly not to be (it was too loud and our speakers too puny), so mostly we just sat around and giggled in a caffeinated fashion. Even that had to come to an end, though, so we tore ourselves away from the warm and coffee-filled bosom of the 'bucks, got into a tram filled with poor innocent people who were then treated to the lot of us cheerfully declaiming that "Gondor has no cupcakes! Gondor NEEDS! NO! CUPCAKES!" We still wound up down at Spencer St (yes I took photos of Kat with the sign, what do you people think I AM? :D) far too early for our bus to the airport, so we made a second stab at Leverage down the quieter end of the terminal (okay, those of us who'd seen the ep before perved on the ot3 scene and the others tried to listen), and giggled and hugged and took silly pictures some more.
Then at last, it was time for our bus, so we lined up, and hugged more, and as I was turning away from the last person to step towards the bus (at this point MAYBE a foot of space had opened up in the line in front of me, the bus was nowhere near ready to leave/full), and made to start hurrying, because I am actually pretty considerate-- and then the bus driver totally screamed at us all to get out of the way so people could get on. It was, frankly, pretty uncalled for. It was not at all like we were holding people up - I know that's easy for me to say on the internet with no proof, but SERIOUSLY. REALLY pissy driver. Did NOT like us at all. We decided discretion was by far the better part of valor and also that standing sucks so figured we had plenty of time and could just catch the next bus. So we removed ourselves from the line, puppypiled some more and then ignored the people judging us.
The second bus came along less than five minutes later, had no one standing at ALL (HA!) and while a group of people did jump the line in front of us (before the bus door even OPENED; subtle, people, very nice) and got soundly mocked by the Australian residents of the hug-fest, we got on fast and sat very far away from them (lol like we're that scary) and were very quiet and well-behaved.
We got to the airport in plenty of time, and had planned to sit quietly, maybe have some junk food and a coffee or w/e, and watch stuff on the laptop while waiting to go home. Unfortunately, what we learned this weekend is that WE PLAN and AUSTRALIA LAUGHS.
Because there was utterly no line at checkin when we got there, so the somewhat snooty looking lady at the Business Class checkin waved us over to check in there instead, which we did. And we hand her our passports, and then she looks at us, looks at the passports, looks at Kat and then says "Your [year long working] visa for New Zealand has been voided by leaving the country, so we need to see your return flight details before you can get a visitors visa to enter the country today."
World comes to a screeching halt.
Reader, to be perfectly honest, we kind of hope this lady has our flu.
Because she was so absolutely unsympathetic, unhelpful, didn't want to know that in fact a) it says nothing anywhere on Kat's stamped visa about single-entry (nor in the paperwork), and that b) basically everyone we know who has done a working holiday to NZ has tripped all around the South Pacific with nary a care, so it kind of had to be bullshit. However, because she clearly didn't actually ring the NZ embassy (no one gets through to an embassy in less than five minutes, I'm sorry, red tape says no) but just looked up Kat's original return flight, they did let us through. But since we couldn't conclusively, you know, prove it or persuade ourselves it would be completely fine, we basically spent two hours at the airport freaking out quietly, and then three and a bit hours on the PLANE freaking out, and didn't calm down much until about an hour before we landed when we realised we could just move to Melbourne for six months and both work THERE. Uh. Yes. Hi, our priorities, let us show you them.
...of course, once we got to NZ customs, we went up to explain our dilemma (Kat: "I didn't fill this form in yet because... I'm not sure if I'm going to be ALLOWED TO LIVE HERE for most of the next year help?" /paraphase) and the lovely guy there was basically like "of course it's multiple entry, wtf Australia?" and waved us both through. SO MUCH RELIEF OH MY GOD.
After which we returned home, and I'd planned to have one day off sick recovering the rest of the way, but we all know how that turned out, and now it's Friday. So. And now we're catching up with the present! :D :D :D
OMG, that was very much the longest post I have made in a very long while, I apologise for my long-windeded-ness and also offer cookies to those of you who made it through. We bought a wide range of NZ biscuits for Kat and K. to acquaint themselves with and Chris to nom on having missed them for 15 months, so there is VARIETY, however virtual. <333
We went to pick up Kat's friend K. from the airport last night - she's on a flying tour of NZ - and then this morning got up early to get the_antichris from her flight, and ALL of us are sick, so we're enjoying the rare break of actual sunshine by... lying around doing absolutely nothing.
Quite seriously, we just went up to the grocery store to get various essentials (and non-), and I have been feeling really guilty about having an entire WEEK OFF WORK (seriously, four days off sick, this is the longest I've ever been off sick in my LIFE) but as we were walking back to the car I started feeling dizzy - from walking around the grocery store, sheesh and have had to admit that, um, yes. My spoons are very much lacking, still, even if I can mostly breathe again. Oyyy. Also, since I know many of you are duly concerned: yes, we got the olive leaf extract and are all dosing ourselves with it.
(Lord of the Rings is also funnier with the appropriate addition of "that's what she said".)
I have realised that, what with getting sick and all, I haven't really posted properly in a long while. To the rather large clump of you I just friended -- hi, welcome, do not feel obliged to stick around, I'm just nosy about what you're up to -- and also, I swear I'm not usually quite this whiny. It's sort of been a weird week. (Also, ftr, I have been trying for months to catch up on LJ, on the grounds that once I did I could friend a bunch of people I lurk after regularly properly; this week I realised this will never happen even if I don't have to work for a week and have nothing else to do BUT read LJ, so I gave the fuck up and just friended you lovely folk already anyhow.) ...also I am inordinately fond of parenthesis.
This week can largely be written off as "I went the doctor, I came home, I went back (repeat times three, with a bonus meltdown during the third visit, sigh), I got a flu diagnosis and came home with a lot of drugs and have been reading the internet and watching Bones and Leverage and movies ever since."
Last week was more variously fun.
So, on Friday, after cunningly posting about my brevet aunt visiting from Brisbane (true!) to hang out with my mother and do fun things on the weekend (also true!) and hopefully implying that we would be doing these fun things with them (lies!), katrin and I headed out to the airport.
Our cunning plan of awesome was to emulate airinshaw and soupytwist's Musktrat Jamboree shenanigans by turning up as technically invited yet unexpected guests at digitalsprawl's birthday party. We had been keeping this secret for MONTHS, had jamethiel_bane covering for us for the RSVP as her "cousins staying from overseas who I have to entertain this weekend" (lol, in conclusion cousins), and were staying with her, and aside from an unfortunately not cryptic enough whinge from me earlier in the week about not wanting to be possibly getting sick (OH HOW LITTLE I KNEW) since we had plans for the weekend, things were actually still pretty much on the dl.
...and then when we met Jame at the airport she followed the prime fangirl directive and joyfully twittered our presence. Of course, R. follows Jame's twitter. :D OOPS. Of course, none of us REALISED this at the time since we didn't actually go online at all and instead huddled on the floor of Jame's room clutching each other and her cat while she scared us all silly with Guillermo del Toro's the Orphanage.
Except, of course, in getting to this, I have skipped a fairly important part of our Friday. Namely the deeply unpleasant discovery we made - at the airport, after standing in line for like forty minutes to check in - that Canadians need visas to visit Australia. Even for FOUR DAYS. What the ACTUAL FUCK. I think our faces of deepest horror might have made good tv. That was NOT a good moment. It turns out Australia is a special little snowflake and demands everyone bar NZers have a visa for ANY visit longer than 8 hours in transit. WTAF. After a lot of being terrified and grumping about how we are ALL COMMONWEALTH COUNTRIES FOR FUCKSSAKE we established that you could get a visa at the airport at the last second (frankly it feels like a money making exercise to me; we can go to Canada visa-free and vice versa, and Aussies can go to Canada visa-free, bah), so we did that, and sort of collapsed in relief. Slightly tetchy relief, but relief all the same. HAD WE BUT KNOWN.
Anyhoo, we got to Jame's, met her charming housemates, played with the cats (SO CUTE) and then went to bed. At this point I thought the getting sick thing was totally a false alarm and basically felt pretty good. We got up lateish on Saturday, toddled into town, wandered the shops a bit before leaving Jame to get tattooed for a couple hours and perused the Queen Vic markets some more. I managed to get a decent chain for my pocket watch, for the grand sum of $6, which I think means I win.
Then we wandered as a group back towards the main part of the city to meet up with pink_soprano and mawaridi in Starbucks, preparatory to (what we thought would be) the Great Reveal. We sat around for about an hour before digitalsprawl was due to arrive, just running our mouths off in the most approved fangirl fashion and drinking much coffee. Basically it was amazing and C. and S. are made of shiny win and I'm glad to now know them.
Then zero hour approached, we got a text from R saying she was at the train station walking up, and I ran off to hide in the stairwell so she could walk in and I could then approach the table for full surprise value (my plan was to ask the table en masse if they knew where to find Gothic Man Love on the internets. It's funny if you know us.)
...this would all have worked significantly more surprisingly had a) I not posted a picture of Kat less than a week ago so R. knew what she looks like ANYWAY and would have recognised her and b) R managed to catch up on twitter less than an HOUR before leaving the house and thus got confirmation of her suspicions that we were indeed Planning Things before she came into town. So there was a lot of giggling about twitterfail and how awesome we all are(n't), but basically one and all agreed it makes for a better story even than the full surprise. It was totally worth it, all the same.
Then we wandered around town some more, killing time as an unwieldy and terribly inappropriate group before the dinner reservations at a very nice restaurant, where people ran around getting us all fixings for name tags (there were a LOT of us) and pretty stickers for same, and there was a lot of chatting, and glomping of people I hadn't seen in far too long.
Dinner was excellent, and we all talked our heads off, which was great, and then most of us traipsed around the city trying to find somewhere both accessible and that could accomodate THIRTEEN FOR DINNERCOFFEES AND HOT CHOCOLATES, wound up being separated across a couple of tables at a Max Bremmer, after we... scared both the maitre'd dude and the actual waiter. Possibly our semaphore of OH LOOK A FREE TABLE INSIDE RIGHT BY US LOOK LOOK SEE HERE? was not the most subtle nor least terrifying thing ever.
Also we learned that chocolate pizza comes with cornflakes on it, and a well-timed ON THE ASTRAL PLANE will actually cause the majority of the table to snort, choke, spew water out their noses and generally make asses of themselves in public. We were all absolutely losing it while the table of Slightly More Maturity kitty-corner to us stared and tried to figure out what had set us off this time. It was sort of too hard to explain given we were all crying with laughter (and sugar overdose).
After that, imjustlikeme (who I FINALLY got to spend some quality time with yaaaaaaay &Patty;), Jame, Kat and I all tromped back to R's place to stay the night there, stayed up far too late giggling on the internets and flailing at each other and passing around pictures from comicon (THEIR FACES WE LOVE THEM), before falling into bed.
...I then managed to wake up on Sunday morning feeling like utter sore throated DEATH, about which the less said the better. I don't remember much of what we did on Sunday; I know there was wandering around downtown and faily coffee, there was me whining a LOT and drinking a lot of water/juice and eating all the rice in the world and some faily service at the chinese restaurant we stopped in for lunch, although my red bean pancakes were excellent. Also a lot of nose-blowing.
When it started getting later in the afternoon we bid a fond farewell to fangirls so that we could make it back to Jame's in time for daylight, got screwed over by connex (lol inevitable) when our train was delayed 20 mins and thus missed the bus by 5, sigh. So after waiting for a while for the next bus, judging the awful fashion choices of passing Yoofs (1. leggings are not pants oh my god Australia how are you even more numerously wrong IRL than NZ is? 2. smashing a glass bottle on the road doesn't make you cool, it makes you a giant asshole. also your tight jeans emphasise how not-endowed you are, skinny-jeaned annoying hipster wannabe dude.) and then got on a bus. And then we walked from the bus stop back to Jame's.
Any other day that probably would've been really awesome, and it was a really nice walk objectively speaking - super flat, not too long, pretty pretty scenery, good company - but mostly by this point I was communing with the Vile One and felt like shit, so I was paying a lot less attention than I would otherwise have. Also my camera appears to have been playing terrible tricks and my pictures are not-spectacular, le sigh. Although I have some cute ones of the three of us, and some super blurry ones of the KANGAROOS bouncing around the park near Jame's. NGL, I have been to Australia quite a lot in my life - my mother is Australian, virtually all my living relatives are in Melbourne anyhow - and this is the first time even I have seen them in the wild. Generally my Australian wildlife encounters are seeing, y'know, crocs and cassowaries. I LIKE VICTORIA BETTER. (Not that kangaroos aren't also dangerous! I just. Cassowarys are fucking terrifying, okay? I blame Jurassic Park.)
So that was neat! ...and then we got back to Jame's and they fed us delicious pasta foods and I nommed desperately onto all the orange juice in the world, and we watched a lot of JEM season 1. My god it's terrible. But hilarious. And it's research! But mostly terrible. Jame also non-conned us into Smallville season 1, so I have now watched four WHOLE episodes, which frankly don't make much more sense than the clippy bits we get every get/together, but were still unexpectedly hilarious and o_O-inducing by turns. And everyone is creepy! And they admit it! It was sort of an eye-opener, actually.
After that, I tapped out, and later found out Kat and Jame had only made it another half ep anyway, so I feel less faily.
I actually woke up feeling pretty okay, other than grossly sinus-y on Monday, and congratulated myself on shaking the cold with record speed. Which was super, cos then we headed back into the city for the 11am showing of Star Trek.
The group of us for Star Trek wound up being pink_soprano, imjustlikeme, digitalsprawl, and me, Kat and Jame. Which was basically awesome, because it also wound up being JUST US IN THERE. Thank TAWG. So we basically got a private screening for under a hundred bucks, and since we are the fucking funniest people in the world (seriously, you have no idea, I wish I'd thought to phone post), it was basically just amazing. Also I suspect we amused the staff a LOT. Possibly we were audible from outside the theatre. Possibly we were LOUDER THAN THE MOVIE. Oops. I maybe seized onto "my name is James Tiberius Kirk, you killed my father, prepare to die!" at the end and would not let that go.
We piled into another Starbucks after that, aiming to watch Leverage on C's computer, but that was sadly not to be (it was too loud and our speakers too puny), so mostly we just sat around and giggled in a caffeinated fashion. Even that had to come to an end, though, so we tore ourselves away from the warm and coffee-filled bosom of the 'bucks, got into a tram filled with poor innocent people who were then treated to the lot of us cheerfully declaiming that "Gondor has no cupcakes! Gondor NEEDS! NO! CUPCAKES!" We still wound up down at Spencer St (yes I took photos of Kat with the sign, what do you people think I AM? :D) far too early for our bus to the airport, so we made a second stab at Leverage down the quieter end of the terminal (okay, those of us who'd seen the ep before perved on the ot3 scene and the others tried to listen), and giggled and hugged and took silly pictures some more.
Then at last, it was time for our bus, so we lined up, and hugged more, and as I was turning away from the last person to step towards the bus (at this point MAYBE a foot of space had opened up in the line in front of me, the bus was nowhere near ready to leave/full), and made to start hurrying, because I am actually pretty considerate-- and then the bus driver totally screamed at us all to get out of the way so people could get on. It was, frankly, pretty uncalled for. It was not at all like we were holding people up - I know that's easy for me to say on the internet with no proof, but SERIOUSLY. REALLY pissy driver. Did NOT like us at all. We decided discretion was by far the better part of valor and also that standing sucks so figured we had plenty of time and could just catch the next bus. So we removed ourselves from the line, puppypiled some more and then ignored the people judging us.
The second bus came along less than five minutes later, had no one standing at ALL (HA!) and while a group of people did jump the line in front of us (before the bus door even OPENED; subtle, people, very nice) and got soundly mocked by the Australian residents of the hug-fest, we got on fast and sat very far away from them (lol like we're that scary) and were very quiet and well-behaved.
We got to the airport in plenty of time, and had planned to sit quietly, maybe have some junk food and a coffee or w/e, and watch stuff on the laptop while waiting to go home. Unfortunately, what we learned this weekend is that WE PLAN and AUSTRALIA LAUGHS.
Because there was utterly no line at checkin when we got there, so the somewhat snooty looking lady at the Business Class checkin waved us over to check in there instead, which we did. And we hand her our passports, and then she looks at us, looks at the passports, looks at Kat and then says "Your [year long working] visa for New Zealand has been voided by leaving the country, so we need to see your return flight details before you can get a visitors visa to enter the country today."
World comes to a screeching halt.
Reader, to be perfectly honest, we kind of hope this lady has our flu.
Because she was so absolutely unsympathetic, unhelpful, didn't want to know that in fact a) it says nothing anywhere on Kat's stamped visa about single-entry (nor in the paperwork), and that b) basically everyone we know who has done a working holiday to NZ has tripped all around the South Pacific with nary a care, so it kind of had to be bullshit. However, because she clearly didn't actually ring the NZ embassy (no one gets through to an embassy in less than five minutes, I'm sorry, red tape says no) but just looked up Kat's original return flight, they did let us through. But since we couldn't conclusively, you know, prove it or persuade ourselves it would be completely fine, we basically spent two hours at the airport freaking out quietly, and then three and a bit hours on the PLANE freaking out, and didn't calm down much until about an hour before we landed when we realised we could just move to Melbourne for six months and both work THERE. Uh. Yes. Hi, our priorities, let us show you them.
...of course, once we got to NZ customs, we went up to explain our dilemma (Kat: "I didn't fill this form in yet because... I'm not sure if I'm going to be ALLOWED TO LIVE HERE for most of the next year help?" /paraphase) and the lovely guy there was basically like "of course it's multiple entry, wtf Australia?" and waved us both through. SO MUCH RELIEF OH MY GOD.
After which we returned home, and I'd planned to have one day off sick recovering the rest of the way, but we all know how that turned out, and now it's Friday. So. And now we're catching up with the present! :D :D :D
OMG, that was very much the longest post I have made in a very long while, I apologise for my long-windeded-ness and also offer cookies to those of you who made it through. We bought a wide range of NZ biscuits for Kat and K. to acquaint themselves with and Chris to nom on having missed them for 15 months, so there is VARIETY, however virtual. <333