The checkie (G) has his wife over from Brisbane with him - they are originally from New Zealand, so as we now have staff travel, it works out well for her to accompany him. G invited Y (the captain) and myself to have dinner with them, and Y immediately backed out. My question was - did he really want me hanging around? Surely he would prefer to have a nice meal with his wife without some random pilot tagging along... I took from his muttered responses about having to have dinner with her every day of his entire life, that he would actually prefer some extra company... So I weighed up the options and decided it would be better to go along to keep the checkie happy!
I'm glad that I did. We went to a very nice little seafood restaurant called The Landing, which I was dubious about - having told G I would eat anything except seafood. Luckily, the menu had several non-ewwy options and my choice of rack of lamb was delicious. While we were waiting for our meal, G had to go take a phone call, which left me with his wife, R.
And that was actually very interesting! I was telling her about Kurt travelling to Ireland with me, and how I really hoped he would be ok there, and that he would like my family and that they would like him... And that really I hoped it wouldn't be too much for him because... Well... How to explain this? My family are quite religious people, you see.
"Religious? Well, I can identify with that!" was R's response.
"Huh!" I retorted, not to be outdone. "My parents live in a Christian Community with 20+ other people!"
"Well, I grew up in a community too," said she. "Although actually it was more of a cult."
So that was interesting! That filled our time excellently until G returned, with R telling me all about her upbringing, which didn't seem all that extreme to me, although of course we never had to wear head coverings and wrist/ankle long dresses. We sympathised on the pros and cons of offal (hers in a white sauce, mine more tomato based) and we discussed having to wear trousers under skirts for activities. And I think we both agreed that it was (mostly) good. (Not the trousers under skirts part)
She said that she saw something different in me, a quality that she couldn't explain, and that this was a good explanation! (Which I thanked her for - thanks, Mum, too!). Apparently G was there too, in her community, but he is apparently very embarrassed about the whole situation and neither wants anyone to know, nor wants to talk about it, so we stopped our discussion when he returned to the table. I could have talked about it more - it was very interesting!
She would really love to have Mum & Dad over for a meal when (if?) they ever turn up to visit me. That would be cool, I think.
They invited me to go with them this morning to visit G's older sister (he looks in his 60s so I guess she is fairly ancient - sorry Mum...) but departure time was 0730... (0430 Brisbane time) and not being acclimatised and with a late sim rostered, I decided not to. It would have been nice, but if I don't review what G brought up in the sim yesterday, and correct it... I suspect today's debrief could be longer than 50 minutes!
And having got the head's up of what to expect in today's check, I must study. All sorts of lovely manoeuvres such as emergency descents, TCAS RAs, evacuations, fires, failures, limited panel, unusual attitudes... The list goes on and on and on and on and on all so very exciting... Yeeehaaaw!
TTFN! PS I don't know how to change the font - I wrote this in my ipad 'notes' and pasted it across - sorry!
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