Beginnings and Ends

I have officially moved into my home in Australia for the next five months as of a couple minutes ago.  After a grueling 15 hour flight on the Quantas A-380 from LA to Sydney, which departed at 10:30 PM July15, our group arrived in the land down under.  The flight actually wasn't that bad despite being so long.  They had private televisions on the back of the seat heads for every passenger which had probably around 100 different movies to choose from as well as tv shows and interactive flight information maps among other things.  My flight consisted of a semi-restful seven hours of sleep, three movies, and a couple family guy episodes, and just like that it was over as we landed in Sydney around 6:15 AM July17.  Luckily no one among our group had a birthday on the 16th because effectively that day did not even exist for us.  If a major world event would have happened I would have had no idea where I was on July 16th.  After going through customs, we had to pick up our bags again, check them for our connection flight, go through security, and get to the boarding gate by 8:10 AM.  Because of some slow baggage appearance half our our group missed the connecting flight and had to wait for the next one at 10:45 AM.  Naturally with my luck I was in the group that missed its flight.  Actually I was only two people away from making the flight because they took us from security to the terminal by buses and wouldn't you know the bus filled up while I was within the next three people waiting.  Turns out it did not really matter as we just met up with the rest of the lucky ones in Perth's airport and then took a couple of busses complete with shag-covered seats over to St. Thomas More College our home for the semester.  

Going back to Sydney to Perth flight for a second I encountered a terrible thing while in flight. A deep sinking feeling suddenly crept up into my mind, the kind you get when you think you have forgotten something.  I looked around my seat futilely as I would have spotted it pretty quickly had it been there.  Got up to look into the overhead storage bin, no luck.  One last ditch effort had me searching through my backpack carry-on, but by that time I knew I had left it in the terminal at the Sydney airport while we were waiting for the flight.  The end of a brilliant, iconic legacy that started back in 2003.  The Arizona St. hat will never grace my head ever again.  Never will the faded maroon cap with multiple fabric splits on the bill, as well as sweat stains on the inside rim be seen in my possession.  We had a good run, and as I sat down after looking through my backpack, I strangely became less upset.  I remembered all the places and things that we had been to and done together in the last seven years, and in doing so it bouyed my spirits.  There would have been no better place to lose my hat than Australia, except for maybe New Zealand, but hopefully some little Australian boy picked it up and kept it as a prize from the airport, who then will become fascinated with a foreign university he had no previous knowledge about and move to the USA to go to school there, meet a beautiful sun-tanned beauty because of his accent and live out the rest of his days basking in the Arizona sun continually fading the hat to a paler and paler maroon.

Anyway, I am extremely tired but I had to stay of until the respectable hour of 9 o'clock before I go to bed in order to fight off any jetlag that will try to wake me up at obscenely early hours even for me.