Melissa's Flight Attendant Blog

Monday, December 21, 2009

So at the moment I'm in Perth and enjoying myself :-)

Here's me at the NuffNang party! (Photo courtesy of Juslin - my mobile phone camera gets pretty average in twilight) The lovely RetroJetGirl invited me along to see what it would be like. I was a little unsure as to what the turnout would be, and when we turned up there was only Christine there. But after about 30 min the party was in full swing, all the girls dolled up in blue and a bar tab & finger food to keep us all occupied. It was also probably the only function I've ever been to where it wasn't rude to Tweet or browse Facebook - in fact it was encouraged!

So the list of bloggers I could remember - a big up to you guys! RetroJetGirl, Christine/Childhood101, Juslin and Christopher, Amanda, Tanya, Nick and Will! If I forgotten your names I do apologise, feel free to leave it in comments and I'll have it changed. All the time I spend in the air affects the brain cells a tad.

Meanwhile I've booked a hotel and leave for the Eurovision Song Contest in Oslo next year (well the semi finals and the dress rehearsal anyways, I stuffed up my bids and my leave ends THE DAY BEFORE the final - silly Thai blonde!). It's Part II of my life's dream realised, with the first being to visit the beautiful old town of Estonia. However since booking the hotel, it's dawned on me how much this whole trip is going to cost. The hotel is the most I've paid out of any of my Euro trips, and it's actually very cheap compared to the rest of Oslo. I decided to book now because the whole reason I couldn't go to the ESC last year was because all but ten of the hotels in Moscow were already fully booked, and the ones that were left had a starting rate of $400 USD a night! Flights aren't going to be a problem, but then there are the tickets - 2 semi finals and a couple of dress rehearsals, price unknown. Food has me the most worried. Apparently it has the most expensive Big Mac in the world - and a large Big Mac meal there costs a whopping(?) $17 USD! I'm going to be living off tinned soup and pot noodles for 8 days!

So my mission between now and May is to be as much as a tightarse as possible. More than what I used to be. Saving as much as I can of my per diem as possible. If I'm at a cool layover, like say, New York, I need to stay away from shopping. Spend my time taking photos of landmarks and random stuff like I used to when I joined.

Same thing with Dubai - I need to eat out less. I'm actually kind of shocked by my actions over the past month - simply driven by a desire to avoid staying in at home watching crap TV, I'll hop on over to a restaurant for breakfast, then walk around a mall, then have a late lunch somewhere, and usually go to bed early without having dinner. So I need to cook more.

Which leads me to what I got myself for Xmas this year...

I spent the week before my Perth leave attempting to make sourdough starter, but the day before it wasn't active enough for me to leave in the refrigerator during my absence so I decided to ditch it :-( It was promising though, there were bubbles, so it was alive, but it wouldn't double in size - if anything the most growth I had out of it was maybe when it rose 1cm above the glass. The cookbook is great because it has a once-a-day then forget method which is definitely me. Unfortunately I have a lot of long trips coming up (SFO, BNE/AKL, MEL/AKL) so I am still trying to work out how to do the feedings within my schedule. As an aside though, with the trip to San Francisco, which is supposed to have THE BEST sourdough in the world, I can buy some already active starter from Fisherman's Wharf and use that to build my own.

If the whole sourdough thing is a bust, well I have already bookmarked recipes for meringues, summer berry custard tarts, vanilla and lime pannacotta, ginger brulee tarts, and pork & fennel sausage rolls. Oh how I miss a good sausage roll!

Labels: Eurovision, Homesick, Random Thoughts

Posted by Melissa at 7:58 pm

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