365 Pink Feather Boas All in a Row - Day 7 : There's a Visitor in These Here Parts

Today was supposed to be a very busy day.


First day back at work after the Christmas break, and then racing home to take a friend of my good friend from Boston, Mark, out for dinner in Sydney. That was the great and glorious plan anyway!


What happened though was that my sore throat, which had been bothering me for a couple of days now, grew steadily worse overnight so that by this morning it was increasingly hurting to swallow anything. But I soldiered on to work, figuring that it was just my throat that was hurting and nothing else. Somewhere between walking out of my apartment building, and arriving at work, my body developed a fever, ramped up the "OUCH!" factor on the throat and I barely lasted 3 hours at work (got a lot done thankfully so next Monday won't be the horror story it might have been) before hightailing it to the doctor who was very helpful but had no idea what was wrong. A swab of my throat and a sizable bill at the chemist later, and I headed home, slept for a few hours and then hauled myself out of bed to take my American friend of a friend out to dinner.

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It was his , John's, last night in the Emerald City and I didn't want to disappoint him by canceling dinner just because I wasn't well. Besides he was so friendly and easy to talk to that within seconds of meeting him in his hotel lobby - a lobby we were late finding because my friend Fahmi's Tom Tom got a tad confused about it's location... I am fairly confident that should the machines rise up a la Terminator, that we will have plenty of time to escape while the machines endlessly go left and right trying to find us - we were getting on famously. 

Fahmi, and then Stephen hit it off just as well with him, and pre-dinner drinks and nibblies (dips/Turkish bread/wedges) on the roof top at Zanzibar, followed by a delicious Thai meal at Sumalee Thai, across the road at The Bank Hotel, and dessert gelato at Dolce and Gelato (love the pun) flew by in a rush of shared experiences, anecdotes, cultural comparison and laughs. We even made it to the facade of The Imperial Hotel (still sadly awaiting a grand reopening) so John (and my beautiful guy!) could get photos outside this iconic gay pub.

A wonderful night with a new friend made, and another voice added to Mark's insisting I make it to Boston yesterday already!