You go on an extended interstate weekend getaway, where you visit friends and sing and dance and steal things. However, you have to take a day of unpaid leave of work.
+10,000 Life Points, but – 500 Job Points.

Game of Life fans will get that reference. Even if I made up that part about Job Points. Because they sure don’t exist in the Game of Life.

So anyway. I was lucky enough to zip off to Melbourne for a few days. I flew down on Sunday morning, and flew back thismorning. Bright and Early. Okay… maybe early, but certainly not bright.

My Thoughts On Flying:
I had a great flight going down to Melbourne. I flew with Qantas, and was lucky enough to score myself an exit row seat, so I had a little bit of extra leg room. Quite lovely. I didn’t even realise we were decending until we practically hit the ground (aka.. the way it SHOULD be). I had two nice ladies sitting next to me who fell asleep before the plane had even taken off. Tops.

However.. I flew back with Virgin Blue and did not enjoy the flight at all. They’re a cheaper airline and it kind of showed. There were far too many spew bags used. Not by me, but by other people on board, and the cabin crew did little to hide the fact that someone was horrifically ill during the flight. “Hello sympathetic vomiters! Lookie over here where one of your fellow passengers is trying to see just how much stuff will fit into one of the on board motion sickness baggies! Oh score! Almost completely full! Well done, lets everyone give him a round of aplause!”

But seriously. I was rather surprised at how.. erm… unprofessional the flight crew were. The girl doing the voice over things was laughing hysterically all the way through it, so tough luck if you actually wanted to know where the safety exits were!

I also have to wonder if the cheaper airlines don’t have the same presurisation doo-dahs in their planes. Whenever I fly with a more expensive airline, like Qantas, or even when I did my America flights with United, I was perfectly fine. But when I’ve flown with Jetstar or Virgin, I’ve had massive problems with giddyness, and dizzyness and have felt entirely .. ‘off’ during the flights. Is anyone smart with their aircraft/airline knowledge and can actually tell me if this is in my head or if there is some kind of phenomenon whereby cheap airlines mean higher chance of mid-flight illness due to poor inflight conditions?

My Thoughts On Melbourne:
I love Melbourne. I fell in love with it when I was there last in 2006. It was good to be back.
There was also a 24 hour 7-11 downstairs from our hotel this time that satisfied all our 1:30am slurpee needs.

However… St Kilda beach has an odd smell, our hotel had a weird atrium thing in the middle of it that freaked the bejesus out of me, and entirely too much junk-food was consumed. There was also a questionable food item that smelt delicious, but resulted in the fact that the mere thought of vegetables now turns my stomach.

Hooray for socialising:
I got to catch up with an old friend, who.. when we worked it out.. I had not seen in FIFTEEN YEARS! It was lovely to see her again, and her little boy and her growing baby bump! Was nice because she’s moving further out from Melbourne soon, and with a 1year old son, and another baby on the way, I can’t expect that she will come to Sydney to see me, and it’ll probably be a while before I get back to Melbourne again on account of trying to save for going overseas and getting The Man and I on the same continent for an extended period of time. So it was a nice catch up.

And then of course I got to hang out with Miss Juliekins and she is pretty damn awesome.

My Thoughts On Melbourne Events:
Comedy festival shows are great.

However…. it’s slightly weird when you walk into a venue that is actually smaller than your bathroom. I’m not kidding. There were five rows of five chairs and barely enough room to lie down across ways. Not that you would, because it smelt a bit seedy. On the way out, we noticed the door said “CARPET ROOM”, which leads me to believe it was a storage room for carpet. Tops Venue.

Mraz. Round Two.
There were more Jason Mraz concerts. Both had different setlists to Sydney and on one occasion, he skipped getting Stinking Lisa Mitchell to sing Lucky with him. Greatly appreciated by the masses. Thumbs up for Mraz. My faith in Jason Mraz was completely restored after this trip. Amrazing.

Thanks to Juliekins’ stealthy ninja moves (shes so small and stealthy.. she just sneaks in and people don’t realise until it’s too late!), she grabbed me the very last Polaroid book of the entire tour. THUMBS UP. That very Polaroid book is now signed by Toca, the percussion and back up singer guy who is very awesome, and Bushwalla, The Mraz BFF.

However, it is not signed by Mraz himself though, because he decided its more fun to jump into van and leave straight away before acknowledging the handful of fans who just wanted to wave and say hi.. andgethimtosignmyphotobook. AHEM. Nor did he come out and say hello to us when Toca was sitting with us for almost half an hour. Hells yes. Toca came over of his own accord and sat with us for a while. Then some fangirls came over and recognised him and did the “OMG YOU IS AWESOME!” craps that fangirls normally do. But anyway. We got to hang out with Toca, and that is pretty fabulous.