Down Under, Day 3: Time Has Come to Today - Unless it's Already Tomorrow

When I wanted to dump Rhona Davies - she knew about it, moved to Australia, I had to wait two whole years to tell her we were through. -- Johnny Drama

It could be the time or the geography, but it quickly does seem like things are happening at a completely different pace in Australia, to the point where it seems like coming here was the equivalent of telling the rest of the world to take a big "time out - let's pick this up when I return from Brisbane. Whenever that may be."

Down here we're 17 hours ahead of New York City, so it's way beyond the 5/6 hours that separate most of the US and Europe. It's full days - if anybody happens to stumble onto this webpage and reads it tonight, by the time you were going out to party on a Friday night (let's say 10 pm your time), my Saturday was more than half over. Coming back the other way is even weirder, as you actually manage to return to the States on the same day you left - but before you actually left; roughly speaking, a plane departing SYD at 1:00 pm Monday returns to Los Angeles at 10:00 am...on Monday. People thought it was cool when Doc Brown traveled through time in his DeLorean? The pilots who fly the Sydney to Los Angeles route do it every week.

The time warp is definitely one thing that's still blowing my mind a little bit, in case you couldn't tell. Between always trying to do the math in my head about the time back home (for whatever reason I'm constantly doing double takes even though nearly every room at the Australian Open broadcast compound has two clocks, one from Melbourne & one for Bristol) and grasping how a NFL playoff game is on TV 'live' a full day after it's been played (picking the Saints big in one game, and hoping a meteor destroys the Metrodome during the second quarter of the Cowboys-Vikings game), I see where all the puns and jokes come from about Australia being its only little world. The country is big enough for it, seeing as it's the only nation-continent.

I know I'll get the hang of this time shift in the next couple of days, which ought to be just enough for me to be totally used to it by the time we all leave in two weeks, and then there's no telling what might happen. I saw what went down during seasons 4 & 5 of Lost!

Flinders St. Station main building says it's 6:30pm Saturday in Melbourne, which would make it...um...late on Friday in the US?