Australia: Day 1

I know that my blog has been neglected over the last few years, but what better time to attempt to give it new life than when I've travelled to the other sid of the planet?

I left Amsterdam on Tuesday at 2200h, and arrived here in Sydney roughly 24hours later, or Thursday morning at 0600h for those not yet fully understanding the pain of travelling east through ten timezones. We had a 3 hour stopover in Dubai, which was a little exciting until I realised that the airport is effectively a giant mall that also has planes. They did have a McDonald's though, with the signage in Arabic, and a menu which contained no pork ;-)

The architecture of the airport is pretty amazing though: Insanely high ceilings, with walls of steel and glass. I couldn't get a view of the giant tower in the downtown core though -- not from the ground at least. From the air, Dubai is about as depressing as you'd expect: hectares and hectares of tiny clay buildings, and then off in the distance beautiful spires reaching into the sky. Not that income equality isn't a problem in North America, but Dubai is definitely below the curve on this issue.

I actually managed to get some sleep on the 13hour leg from DXB to SYD and then in a jetlaggy stupor proceeded to spend about three hours in Sydney's congested airport eeking through customs with two over massive flights and three agents processing us. I picked up a SIM card at the airport too (why doens't every airport make it this easy?): $20 for 1GB/day and infinite local calls / texts.

I got into the hotel Steph had booked for us (she'd already been here for a day and was at the conference when I checked in), walked down the hall and entered the room, at which point all of the blood left my face as I yelled HOLY SHIT and ran to the other side of the room. Our room had an unwanted guest, a spider roughly the size of my fist and it was hanging out by the front door. I considered trying to get the hell out of there, but it was guarding the door now, so I called reception for help. A maintenance guy showed up with a broom and attempted to remove the beast -- note that I didn't say "kill it with violence", but rather "remove" it, as apparently there are rules about killing GIANT FUCKING ARACHNIDS here. With much skill, he wrestled with the thing for a few minutes (it was a jumper, jesus christ), and he managed to coax it into a drinking glass and then take it outside.

I did some digging on the internetz to figure out what it was that clearly wanted to devour me in my hotel room, and it turns out that it was probably a crab spider. Its bite is venomous (and probably hurts and awful lot) but is non-lethal to humans. This doesn't make it any less scary though, and its brethren are all skittering about... just outside this hotel room. Honestly, I don't understand why anyone would want to visit a place that has beasts like this -- let alone live here.

For those interested, here's a picture of the creature in question, taken with my phone, from the far side of the room as I awaited rescue. Note the door hinge in the foreground for scale. The internetz tell me that these things grow to about 7cm in diameter, which sounds about right.

Once I was well showered, I headed over to the conference where I learnt some really cool stuff about how GitHub captures and logs front-end errors, as well as some pretty cool stuff about how we evaluate languages and frameworks.

...and now it's 0730 and we've got to get ready to head out to the conference again. But first, Stephanie has promised me that there's a good breakfast place nearby. I just have to keep an eye out for dragon bugs on our way there.