One month to go

A month from today I leave for Australia. It sort of freaked me out when I was thinking that this morning, like it's not a few months or a couple of months anymore, but just 1. Four weeks from this coming Sunday. It's starting to sound very close and I have so much to do before I go. It'll all get done somehow, but busy weeks are ahead.

Now that I have the Lonely Planet for Australia, I'm not having as much fun reading it as I did with the one for New Zealand. Part of it is that it's a much larger country, so they have to fit so much info into one book. I've discovered that this means that a lot of the info on things to do is very brief, so I'm always left wanting to know a bit more about a place. I know I can look things up online, but it makes it more time consuming.

Also, the very first time I sat down to start flipping through the book, there were two things that peeved me about it. One was a short bit quite distinctly ripping on Bill Bryson and his writing. I dunno what's the problem with whoever wrote that, and I know not everyone likes everything, but I thought it was a bit weird and unnecessary since usually Bill Bryson is quite highly regarded.

Actually now that I think about it, there's a quote from Bill Bryson praising Rough Guides on the cover of the Rough Guide to San Francisco that I have. So perhaps Lonely Planet is just bitter towards him. And to be honest, I prefer Rough Guides over Lonely Planets (though thank god LP has improved how they organize their maps because that's what really turned me against them, how much the maps in the LP Budapest pissed me off) and I only got the LP New Zealand because I was going to get a copy of the LP Australia from the agency I got my visa from and I figured it was best to stick with the same series. While the maps are easier to find things on, the maps, especially in the New Zealand book, are so hard to read that they make my eyes ache. They were printed poorly or something, it's near impossible sometimes to tell what is land and what is water.

The other thing that started the LP Australia off on the wrong foot with me was that in their list of Australian films and recommendations, there is nary a mention of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, which is just inexcusable. It's maybe not the best movie ever made, and I know I have a personal bias towards the movie, it's one of my favourites, but if you're going to mention Mad Max and Muriel's Wedding, then I think Priscilla should be in there. I mean, Christ, the bus was part of the party at the end of the Sydney Olympics.

In less-ranty news, O returns from Prague today. It feels like he's been gone longer than a week. I'm looking forward to having him back, at least just so someone else can feed the cat in the morning.