Back in rainy old London again

I'm slowly getting over my "jetlag" and I'm taking it easy this week to make sure the sore throat I picked up in Sydney goes away for good! My second week in Australia was spent with a whole lot of animals, we had pets running up and down the bed, the cat seemingly happy to keep me awake all night by purring in my face.

Since Hunter Valley was still more or less flooded and the wine tours only running on Sundays during most of winter, we drove up to Nelson Bay to catch one of the many whale-watching boats. The wind was quite brisk so we decided the best chance of avoiding sea sickness was to have a proper aussie burger meal first while admiring the view of the bay.

Our boat left the dock more or less empty so we had the place to ourselves and plenty of deck space to be blown about on. We finally spotted 3 whales and 2 dolphins that kept swimming parallel to the boat for quite a while so the captain decided to come back in a bit early as we were a bit frost-bitten towards the end!

On Thursday it was time to head back to Sydney to see some of Matt's friends for a few drinks. My Sydney mission was to eat sushi and thai so Matt took me to a fantastic thai restaurant in Newtown where you get to sit on cushions on the floor. We ordered more than we could really eat but couldn't finish until it was all gone!

As we hadn't had quite enough of fish Matt and I went to the aquarium in Darling Harbour and the new wildlife zoo thingy next door. We've now got a hundred or so photos of animals we'll never look at again haha.

The flight back was ok, after 5 gruelling hours at Sydney airport, BA let me on their flight to Bangkok so I was a bit "worried" I would get stuck there for days as it's the worst airport to travel stand-by from normally. But I rushed off the flight, collected my bag and managed to check-in on the next flight so my dream of spending the night at BKK airport was sadly just a dream.

Arriving to London on a rainy Sunday morning I texted Erika so that we could meet for breakfast at Heathrow before she flew off to Sweden on holiday. We basically drank coffee in the queue for security before her coffee cup was whisked away by the guard. Perhaps we shouldn't have annoyed them when everyone was on high alert...

Thanks to the coffee I couldn't manage a nap before I met Chris, Jen and Nath at the pub for a drink and a few games of pool to fight my jetlag and make sure I didn't fall asleep too early. What better way than to persuade Jen and Nath to take me dancing for a couple of hours at the Reddie ;)