Sydney 2006: My first holiday alone

Holding my trusty Sydney Lonely Planet City Guide, I embarked on my trip to where the sun shines.

The Outward Flight

First impressions were good, Virgin Atlantic had 4 check-in desks dedicated to Premium Economy, and knowing the 20"x38" seat (rather than 18"x31" in standard Economy) I was looking forward to the flight... well, as much as you can look forward to a 24hour flight.

Upper class and Premium Economy passengers are allowed to board before any of the standard economy passengers, and are also given a pre-flight drink of either champagne, orange juice or water. Still impressive, I got settled into my seat ready for take-off.

Once in the air, the stewardesses brought round another drink, and announced the entertainment would be turned on shortly. Their v:port system sounded pretty amazing as far as inflight entertainment goes. The welcome video appeared, poor quality as if it was on VHS tape, but eventually the screen turned onto the real v:port system start screen. I popped out the awkwardly placed remote control (stupidly placed on the center armrest, right where your hips can hit the buttons), the system seemed quite smooth, although not particularly straight-forward to use, there were far too many unnecessary menus to get to things, and a couple of pointless features, like their so-called 'web browser' which can only view information about Virgin Atlantic and Land Rover. So, after browsing through the system I decided to see what movies were on there, and surprisingly there were about 100 movies to choose from, I chose '40 year old Virgin' to start the journey off with some comedy... "Loading..." Nothing! ok, maybe that movie's corupted or unavailable for some reason, so I choose another, and again, a blank screen. I looked around, and some people were viewing movies, some were looking at a blank screen as I was. It appeared that the system wasn't working correctly, so the stewardess rebooted a lot of people's consoles... BEHOLD, Tux appeared in the top left corner with a Linux boot screen showing the hardware drivers (mostly proprietary by the looks of it) before going back into the v:port display. Tried the movie again, but nothing appeared again! Needless to say, I was a bit annoyed, and even though I had a different allocated to me for the second half of the flight from Hong Kong, I got yet another duff terminal.

Needless to say I wasn't very happy, but I wasn't going to cause too much trouble. On the second half of the journey the steward offered us DVD players and DVDs, but because so many people's terminals weren't working a few of us ended up using our laptops and just being given DVDs (most of Upper Class weren't working either).

In Sydney

Darling Harbour

Taronga Zoo

Chinese Garden

The Opera House

Restaurants