Prague

Well, we finally made it. About 6 months after we booked it, and after a few weeks where we didn't know whether Aer Lingus were going to go on strike and either strand us there or stop us going at all, we're just back from our few days in Prague. So, the xmas shopping is pretty much all done and dusted now!

For once, there wasn't a delay in Dublin, even tho we were flying out of the Ryanair prefab, and we got to Prague about the time we expected to. Was a bit of a shock when we got there - it was warm! Well, not exactly t-shirt weather, but 1-2 degrees, just like back home. After weeks of taking the piss out of Michelle, saying she was going to freeze to death there, it was almost disappointing not to be in -10 degrees! The hotel was pretty damn good, it was in a quiet back street in Male Strana, and the room we got was huge! Was nearly the size of our apartment, with gilt everywhere and a four-poster bed! Hell, even the bathroom had a chandelier! there was only one problem tho: their computer system was on the fritz when we arrived so they couldn't code a keycard for our door. Meant any time we left and wanted to go back into the room, we had to get the receptionist to come up with us and leave us in with the master key :-)

So, after settling in it was still early, about 4pmish, so we headed out to wander around town. I still pretty much remembered the way to go, so we headed for the main market in Old Town Square. Once we got there, it definitely looked the part anyway, very picturesque. First order of business tho, food! So we wandered around the stalls seeing what sort of edibles there was. Pretty soon we found something that was very much to Michelle's taste: a pastry thing called trdelnik, which is wound around a wooden roller, cooked on the spot and eaten still warm and rolled in sugar. After that, it was time to take a look at the market itself.



To be honest, I was a little disappointed in the marketplace. It was very nice, and looked very nice, but there wasn't a huge amount of stuff to get there. There was kitchy handmade xmas decorations, and various types of food and drink, and loads of stalls selling prague souvenirs, but not a huge load else - and stuff was repeating itself about every 4th or 5th stall! The markets that I was in in Brussels and Leuven 2 years ago when I was over visiting Sara actually had a lot more to offer goods-wise. But hey, at least we were there and not at home!

Next thing, as we were heading down towards Wenceslaus square to see the other market, it started raining. That wasn't what we came over for, we can get that at home! The rain pretty much settled in for the night, so after the markets were winding up and we were fed and stuff, there wasn't much motivation to go off exploring for a nice night-spot in the rain, so was back to the hotel. Turns out the hotel bar had something in common with our room - we couldn't get into either on our own! So, was an early night.

The next morning, we decided to do a bit of touristy stuff before we started the real business of the trip, so we went up to the castle. the rain had turned to snow overnight, but the ground was wet so it wasn't sticking, it just made things a bit more slippery. In the castle I found myself pretty much retracing the same paths I'd gone the last time I was there - is funny how things come back to you. We could have taken a funicular to the top of the nearby hill to a sort of mini-eiffel tower called Petrin, but as it was still a bit snowy and overcast the poor visibility wouldn't have made the trip worthwhile, so we set about the main reason of the trip - shopping for xmas pressies! :-)

Contrary to our expectations before we went over, the shopping wasn't done a little bit here and a little bit there - because there was a lot less on the market than we'd thought, I think we got pretty much everything in one of the stalls and one of the shops off the main square! It was also somewhat curtailed by the fact that the bedroom safe had locked shut on us that morning and the hotel staff had had to call in whoever made the safe to open it for us while we were out, so the only money we had was the walking-around money I'd put in my wallet the night before - or about 1/3 of what we'd brought over with us! By the time we got back to the hotel to find the open safe, we'd pretty much bought all that we reckoned we were going to buy, so the rest of the day was just spent wandering around at random with no particular objective or destination in mind - I think we ended up sitting in some cafe with a baileys coffee (for Michelle) and a beer (for me), watching the world go by.

The next day we had an afternoon flight, so there wasn't really any time to do anything before we had to pack up and go home. Turns out that we got to teh airport stupidly early - I'd estimated it'd take about 35-40mns to get to the airport by taxi, and it only took 20 in the midday traffic, and then the flight was at 3:15 when I'd thought it was at 3. So, we were there close on 3hrs before the flight! And then, naturally, just as we were wandering towards the gate after killing as much time in the duty free as we could, the flight was almost inevitably delayed! The flight coming in was late, we were boarding when we should have been taking off, we lost more time de-icing the wings and eventually took off about an hour late! Ah well, it wouldn't be a trip abroad without a delay somewhere would it?

So, that was the lats of our big pre-planned trips out of the way, have to start thinking about the next one. So, would I go back to Prague? Probably, during the summer. Would I go back to the xmas market there? Probably not.

Slough

Well, I've finally made it to Slough anyway. Since I joined the project, the mention of Slough has been sort of like the boogey-man: "if you screw up on somethign we'll send you over to Slough for a few weeks". Now that I've been there, it isn't apparenly all that bad. From what the lads had been saying, I was expecting the O2 office to be stuck out in the middle of an industrial estate outside of town, but it was actually pretty close in, directly opposite the main train station in fact. That puts it one up on Vodafone UK, where the office was a good mile or so outside Newbury! I didn't see all that much of the town itself, only what I saw out the taxi window, but it was at least on a par with the last place I got stuck - there was one shopping center there that the lads were complaining about, saying it shut too early in the evening - but at least it's there in the first place! Is one up on Newbury right there. And I don't know what the Travelodge that they stay in is like, but it can't really be any worse than that Fawlty Towers-type place I was stuck in when I was working in Vodafone!

To be honest, I don't really see the point of the trip over. Was up at 7am, in the airport at 9am for a 10am flight (which actually took off at 10:30, that's dublin airport for you), got to Heathrow around 11:45ish, made it to the O2 office around 12:30, had a sandwich in the canteen for lunch, had a meeting from 1pm to about 3:30pm, got the taxi to Heathrow about 4:15 and were stuck there til our 7:45 flight took off (on time!). We spent more time in Heathrow than we did in the meeting! I suppose the customer was just looking for that nice warm fuzzy feeling of being looked after, that we care enough about them to send 3 ppl over for a day to listen to their problems. Hey if they're paying for the flights, we'll go! And at least it got me out of the day as well, that's always good.

And now I can also scratch "Seeing Slough" off that list I have of things I have to do before I die :-P

Well, it had to happen eventually........

This day has been coming for a while now, but I guess I can't put it off any longer. The customer I'm working for wants some face-to-face meetings (capacity planning for christmas), so I'm off over to Slough on weds, over in the morning and back in the evening. At least it isn't overnight job I suppose!

What will make this trip even more fun is the fact that apparently some chemical plant is after exploding over there today. Great, chemical fires, will have to have meetings in hazmat suits! I love the comment on the sky news website's page tho: "From what I have heard about Slough this explosion could cause millions of pounds worth of improvements!" :-)

Skiing is booked - finally!

Well, I've finally booked my ski trip for Feb now anyway. I say "finally" because 2 weeks ago I mailed one of the lads to see what the story was with the ski trip, only to get a reply that said "Dude! Were you not cc'd on that?". Seems everyone else organized and booked everything at the beginning of September, but someone forgot to include me on the mailing list! So, I've spent the last 2 weeks teasing out the flight/accommodation details that have already been booked and trying to find myself something similar. At least this year's trip is earlier than last year, the beginning rather than the end of Feb (31st Jan -> 7th Feb), but seems to be a bit more scattered in terms of planning: the destination is the same for everyone (Zermatt in Switzerland) but there seems to be 3 separate airports in 2 countries that ppl are flying into. I managed to get the same flights as some of the lads but after that we have a 3hr train journey to Zermatt, and I didn't manage to get the same accommodation.

What makes the return trip awkward is that the flight back is at 9am on the sat from Zurich, which means either getting up at stupid AM from Zermatt (like the first 2 trips) or leaving Zermatt on the fri evening and staying overnight in Zurich. Problem I found was that I could book a 7-day stay (sat-sat) with almost no problems but a 6-day (sat-fri) was over €200 dearer! So I went for the 7-day option and will figure out closer to the time what I'll do about getting to the airport.

Now all I need to do is book my gear.....

Pictures from Malta

Well, I finally have my pictures from Malta uploaded to flickr. So, here they are!

Malta: a quick catch-up

Agh, I always do this: I go away on a holiday for a week and when I come back I blog about the first few days and then I lose interest and never do the rest. Well, here's a quick-and-dirty update of the rest of the malta trip, before I forget it all!

On the tues we decided to go to Gozo, the other island. By now we were pretty used to the buses and so got to Cirkewwa to catch the ferry without too much difficulty. Once we landed in Mgarr, the fishing village on the other side, we were mobbed by taxi drivers looking to give us a tour of the island for a mere €70 each, or wanting to bring us into Victoria, the island's capital. When we said we'd take the bus the answer was "No! No bus for another hour!". This would have been a little bit more believable if we didn't see a bus pulling into the stop right behind yer man as he was arguing with us! :-) Once we got into Victoria, we took a look around the citadel, a sort of mini version of Mdina, where we'd been the day before, got something to eat, and headed back to the bus terminal to do some more tripping around, as we were by now used to doing on Malta. One snag: it was about 3pm at this stage and the next buses to the Gigantja temples and the Azure Window, the two places I wanted to go, were at 4:30 and 5 respectively - and we had to be heading back to catch the ferry for around 6:15pm as the last bus from Cirkewwa to Sliema went at 7:15! So, we ended up getting a taxi to Gigantja and forgetting about the other place. Ah well, next time!

On weds we went to Marsaxlokk, a fishing village on the south of the island which was supposed to have an open-air market (like the one we'd missed in Valetta on sunday). Am not sure what I was expecting, but it was mostly just the same kind of knick-knacky tourist crap that you could get in any of the shops in Valetta or Sliema. After wandering around that for a bit, we decided to go to see could we find this "Peter's Pool" that I'd read about. The guy who'd given us the directions had told us it was only a 15min walk form Marsaxlokk. Well, maybe he was getting "walking" and "driving" mixed up - it took us 45mins to get there! ;-( Once we did tho, it was lovely. Unfortunately there were no real shallow bits there, and Michelle can't swim, so she just sunned herself while I went into the water. Makes a nice change jumping into water without having to stifle the scream when it hits you! I had a good bit of a splash around anyway and then we headed back. The only problem was I'd sort of forgotten the small insignificant fact that swimming washes off sunblock - by that night I was quite a fetching shade of bright red! :-)

On the thurs we headed south again to the Blue Grotto, a series of sea caves that you can do a boat tour of. The tour itself was very nice, altho I don't think that Michelle was overly impressed :-) After that we decided to head to the stone age temples at Hagar Qim, just up the coast. So, we headed for the bus stop, fending off the usual taxi drivers and their warning of "no bus for one hour!". Unfortunately, they were right! 45 very hot, very boring minutes later. we were joined at the bus stop by an american girl, asking were we waiting for the bus to Valetta. We replied no, that was the other side of the road, we were going to Hagar Qim. "But that's only 10, maybe 15mins walk up the road, I'm just after walking down from there myself". D'oh! So, me, Michelle and Sabrina, the austrian girl we'd been waiting at the bus top with, walked up. Just as we got there, the bus pulled up behind us! I know I wasn't exactly expecting to see Gandalf there, but the temples were slightly less then impressive (altho the oppressive afternoon heat could have had something to do with that). After that it was another 30min wait for a bus back to Valetta, where we all wandered around for a few hours doing nothing much in particular bar chilling before heading our separate ways again.

On the fri, we didn't really have very many plans so we just headed back out to Mdina and Rabat to see all the stuff that we'd missed thanks to our time-sharing friends. So, we wandered around Rabat a while, did the catacombs, the dungeons and St. Paul's Cathedral, where St. Paul originally brought christianity to Malta (well, the cathedral was on the site, he didn't exactly preach from the pulpit! :-P). at least the cathedral museum there was better than the one in Mdina! After having a nice lazy day there, we headed back to Sliema to finish off the pressie shopping for the ppl back home.

The last act of the trip pretty much was a BBQ on the rooftop of the hotel on the friday night, all you can eat for just €15 each. As it was a BBQ, the inevitable happened: just as we were sitting down and waiting for the food to cook, it started raining! :-) Not to be deterred, we pulled up a few of the big sun parasols to cover us and had the BBQ anyway!

The next morning, it was all over. Nothing to do but pack and head to the airport, back to cold, rainy Ireland!

Acclimatization!

Hmph. the one bit I hate about travelling is the, well, actual travelling part of going to places. I'm definitely going to ave to think more about planing my flight times better, to get to Malta we had to get up at 4:45am - which meant after finishing packing the night before and all, was about 5 1/2hrs sleep! We managed to sleepwalk our way to the airport for our 7:45am flight anyway, made our way out to the Ryanair prefab and took off only about half an hour late (not bad for a flight from Dublin airport!). Three and a half hours later, we finally saw a patch of land under the wing - Malta!

In our half asleep state, we had a little bit of a shock to the system - the weather. When we left Dublin it was 12 degrees and spitting rain, but in Malta, we hit 32 degrees and about 75% humidity. This felt like quite a pleasant change as we made our way to the hotel, but once we were settled in and decided to go out exploring, it started to hit us hard. Our hotel was located on the waterfront in Sliema, across the harbour from Valetta (hence the name: "The Waterfront Hotel" :-P), and as we walked along in search of something to eat, the sweat was pouring out of us (well, out of me definitely anyway).



At this point the decision to go at stupid o'clock in the morning as it was cheaper option turned out to be a not quite so good one: we were zonked out, and it was only 2pm! We took the option of least resistance: starting off with a harbour tour, offered by the many kindly gentlemen positioned about every 50 feet along the boardwalk. Unfortunately at that stage the heat, the early start and the lack of sleep started to take their toll: by about half-way around the 2hr trip Michelle was starting to doze off and I wasn't all that much better! The tour was pretty good, we were jut not in a really good mood to appreciate it. So, the saturday we arrived turned out to be a bit of a non-event, we pretty much bummed around Sliema for the rest of the day and got an early night.

The sunday started bright and early outside - unfortunately we didn't. We woke up around 9am, got breakfast, showered and dressed and were out and about by 11am. We soon discovered that by sheer accident we were in a pretty damn spot location-wise, about 200 yards from the hotel was the ferry acrtoss to Valetta, and only a little but further up the road was the main bus terminus for the west of the Island! So, we took the ferry across (for a whopping 93c each!) and started touring around Valetta. As we got off the ferry, we saw signs for "The Malta Experience", a sort of potted history of the island, 4,000 years in 30mins video sort of thing, so we decided to do that. Unfortunately we discovered that the Malta tourist board had seemingly arranged the signs pointing to this attraction with a view to giving you a tour of the city along the way - it took us ages of wandering around to find it!

After the tour we decided to take the horse-drawn carriage tour back down to the front gates of Valetta where the marketplace was supposed to be on (the signs for he Malta Experience had eventually brought us out to the tip of the peninsula), so we could maybe start the pressie shopping! Unfortunately, the market closed at around 1:30-2pm, so by the time we got there everything was shut. And then we discovered that so was everything else. We knew that Malta did the spanish-style siesta between 12 and 2, but what we didn't realise that the country was religious enough to really take the "day of rest" thing seriously - on sundays, pretty much nothing opened again after the siesta! Shops, museums, everything was shut - even some of the churches, which I thought was a bit strange on a sunday!

And then, much to our surprise, it started raining! Rain, the very stuff we went on holidays to get away from! Luckily though, rain in Malta doesn't mean the same thing as rain at home - it only lasted about 10mins and was almost pleasant (I never knew you could have warm rain before)! Once the rain was over, we managed to find one museum that was open (the archaeological museum) and so spent a bit of time wandering around that before we headed back to Sliema to bum around for the evening.

Edinburgh

Well, I've finally been to Scotland. With all my years of travelling, going to the other side of the world and (near) the bottom of the world and all, it's been sort of funny that I've never been to one of the countries that is closest to me. Well, now that particular gap has been filled, with a weekend in Edinburgh, courtesy of my g/f who booked it as my 30th b'day present (well, when I say "booked it", I mean I booked the flights she told me about on my credit card. She got the hotel tho :-P).

This trip was actually an unusual one for me in that the plane took off on time from Dublin Airport and we got into Edinburgh airport a bit ahead of time! I reckon the only reason we actually got into Edinburgh airport proper was that there's no other airport close enough nearby that Ruinair could call "Ryanair Edinburgh" with a straight face. So, no need to pay them the extra €10 each to take their bus into town, we could rely on public transport. Problem was, there were roadworks going on in the street that the Airport Express normally drops you off so the stop was in a different spot to where the maps said it was - and the girl in the airport tourist office told us it was in a diff spot from where it was! So, was a bit of confusion with finding the hotel, but we got there in the end anyway.

Saturday morning started off lovely and fine and sunny, and then got hotter - almost too hot. Deciding that I wasn't going to end up looking like a tomato on this hol, I finally got sense and put on sunscreen before I started to crisp! We started the day by climbing the Walter Scott monument, all 270-odd steps of it, and then went on the bus tour. There's a fair difference all right between the old town and the new town, and who would have guessed that the lovely park we'd had lunch in had previously been a sewage-encrusted loch? The rest of the day was spent mostly wandering around the castle, before heading out for dinner to a Mexican restaurant several people had mentioned was really really good. They also said it's normally so busy that if you don't book you're not getting in, so we went more in hope than in expectation. We walked in the door, got a table straight away (the last table in the place), and spent the entire evening watching the manageress turn people away who hadn't a booking, saying the place was too full! ;-)

Later in the evening, we decided to do one of the ghost tours that Edinburgh was famous for, so we went on the Witchery tour. The tour was good, but it lacked a certain something. A ghost tour should really be done on a dark and preferably foggy night, but we unfortunately picked the wrong time of year: the tour was at 9:30pm, but it didn't get dark until about 11ish! The tour was very tongue in-cheek, and after the 2nd time the "jumper" jumped out on us we were on the look-out for him and it became a bit of a running joke. Was good fun tho. After that, we were pretty knackered after being up and about and walking around since about 10am, so we just went back to the hotel and to bed.

The next day was not quite as nice as the sat had been. In other words, it was pissing rain all day! Luckily, all the outdoorsy stuff had been done on sat so we spent the day doing the indoor stuff like the Camera Obscura, the Whiskey Museum or a tour of one of the old, now underground, tenement buildings. There were plans for doing one of the ghost tours as well, but it was a little bit too damp for wandering around town! Our flight back was on monday, but was an afternoon flight so there wasn't very much time to do anything, so the only thing that got done on mon was the obligatory present shopping for ppl back home!

All in all, a nice city, wud definitely go back. am thinking of trying to organize something for Hogmanay..... :-)

Flights

Well, I'm just after booking my 6-monthly trip over to see Sara in Brussels here. I decided to do it a bit differently than usual - I'm flying out with Ryanair and back with Aer Lingus. Is costing about €78 return, which is cheaper than going both ways with either airline - a return with Ryanair on the same days would be €95 before adding on their stealth charges (so probably about €100) and with Aer Lingus it'd be €126. Most of the flights here are taxes -t eh ryanair flight allegedly costs €3.99 before taxes etc (€30 after) and Aer Lingus was €10 before taxes (or €48 after).

The strange thing is that the Aer Lingus prices seem to vary quite a bit. I got the single flight for €10, but apparenly if I was getting it as the return leg of a two-way flight, it'd be €6.....

Off again......

Well, never mind what I said the other day about Ecuador, it looks like my next destination is Cairo. At least I got about 2 weeks warning on this one - plenty of time to put the light clothes in the wash & get them ready! Looks like it's going to be about 20-25 degrees over there. Nice. Thing is, I'll be back on a sunday and the sat after I'm flying out to Austria to go skiing. More temperature shock!

Be careful what you wish for.....

Remember how a few months ago here on this blog I was complaining that the company weren't sending me anywhere? Well, you know the old saying, "Be careful what you wish for, you might just get it!". I'm currently typing this sitting in a hotel room in a place called Newbury, about 10 miles from Reading in the UK.

Like the last trip I was on, I got about 3 days notice on this one. I was sitting at my desk on thurs evening, minding my own business when the boss comes over and says "Can I have a word with you out in the hall for a sec?". Now when this happens it normally only means one thing, and sure enough, someone has to go and firefight somewhere. So, fri morning I got my flights and accommodation booked and here I am!

I got in about an hour ago here, and about the only thing I can say about Newbury is "quiet". I took a bit of a wander around the town after I got checked in and there's nothing open but a Dominos pizza and 2 pubs - and the pubs look like they're shutting up for the night. It sort of reminded me of the night I flew into Shanghai, where I was wandering around with the streets pretty much all to myself (and I'm sure that this is the first and last time in its history that Newbury will be compared to Shanghai)!

So, at this stage there's pretty much nothing to do here bar head to bed! Maybe tomorrow the place will be a bustling hive of activity!

Oh, and while on the subject of "be careful what you wish for", I was talking to one of the project leads before I left, and apparently there will be someone needed on-site in Ecuador for a week some time near the end of January, with a choice of 3 ppl to go. So, my ideas of hitting all 6 continents before my 30th birthday may be one step closer! :-)

Cape Town

Well, I was complaining before that the company weren't sending me anywhere......

Was talking to the boss about half an hour ago. One of the guys here was supposed to be going to Cape Town on Saturday to support a customer down there, but it seems that there's been some big panic in Jamaica on the product he normally works on so he's being shipped off there, and I'm being sent to Cape Town instead. On Saturday. This Saturday coming. For "two weeks".

The last guy who was sent there for "two weeks" left the beginning of October and he just arrived back today! Xmas on the beach perhaps? :-)

Early

Argh. For some reason, despite the face that we're going to a place that's a two-and-a-bit hour drive from Jakarta, we have to leave at 6am to get there. Want to beat the traffic or something? Tomorrow morning is going to be worse. the lads want to catch the sunrise over the tea plantations, so allegedly we'll be up at 3am to drive from Bandung to Punchak. So much for sleeping in on the weekends!

It's too early in the morning to be this early in the morning....

argh!

So much for "Now Blogger saves your drafts automatically"! Was writing a big long blog on and off all day, said the thing saved, so I exited. I come back, and all I have is the first line! Don't trust it now, technology has let me down. Going to write the next version up in notepad and save as I go along!

So, what was I saying? ah yeah....

Jakarta - Not a "tourist heaven"

Well, I had my first day out in Jakarta yesterday. Up until now, I've seen pretty much none of the city apart from my hotel, the office, the road in between and a few restaurants and shopping malls we've taken taxis to. Normally, I'd head out and take a wander around by myself in the evenings, but it';s dark by the time we get back to the hotel, and besides, you can't really walk around and see stuff locally (as in, we've been advised not to by the hotel). Luckily, one of the guys here has a local friend, Joey, who promised to show us a bit of the city, so we headed off early yesterday morning to "get touristy".

When I say "headed off early", I mean we left early-ish, but then we hit a slight snag - traffic. Anyone who thinks dublin traffic is bad, should head over to SE Asia and give it a go over here. Even Beijing didn't have this many cars clogging the roads! The concept of lanes seems to equate to "whatever space is big enough to fit my car into", and traffic lights are things that happen on the major roads around the CBD. If it were just cars it'd be ok, but for every car on the road there's maybe 2-3 bikes (sometimes with 2-3 people or even whole families) that are weaving in and out between them at high speed, sometimes with inches to spare on either side. So, in between having to collect a few other people (two of Joey's friends, Nina and Ami) and having to inch our way through the traffic, it was maybe 2pm before we got into the "old city".

Once we got there, there wasn't a huge amount to be seen. It definitely isn't a "tourist friendly" area, there's a few museums to see but it isn't the type of place you'd happily wander around for hours. We hit two museums, the bank museum (which technically wasn't even open til the next day, but they let us in anyway), and another museum which seemed to consist of nothing but teak furniture - and which let us in without telling us they were closing in 15mins! Apart from that, we wandered down a few fairly run-down streets and went to an old colonial-style cafe called Cafe Batavia to get a drink (which was necessary since most of us aren't quite used to that type of heat).

After that, we headed out to Sunda Kelapa, the port area. That was interesting enough, as all of the boats were the old-style Junks which are nothing like what we get at home, and all of the loading/unloading is done manually as there's no cranes or any equipment - so you have work gangs of guys loading/unloading 50kg bags of cement or big planks of wood off trucks onto the boats.



Two of the guys we were with take their photography quite seriously though, so we spent a lot of time there as they went for the artistic shots - maybe more than us non-photo people would have been happy with. So, we wandered around the port for a few hours, then as the sun was going down, we decided to brave the traffic, go back to the hotel to freshen up, and go out for dinner and a drink or two.

Once we got to dinner, things became interesting. One of the guys, Anirudh, is a vegetarian, and we'd picked this Thai place he'd found on the internet as they were supposed to have a vegetarian-friendly menu (which is apparently really hard here). Unfortunately, when we got there, he discovered this wasn't the case, about all he could have off the menu was steamed rice, so he kicked up a big fuss. Eventually the Maitre'D called out the head chef and together they worked out a plan where he'd come up with something especially for Anirudh. The rest of us weren't quite as fussy, so we went for the usual arrangement of picking a few dishes for the center of the table and helping ourselves to a bit of each. What we got was Fantastic, and even Mr. Picky had to agree that the food was good - and cheap!

After that, it was drinks time! We headed to this bar called CJs which was supposed to have a live band, but when we got there we discovered that the "live band" was a boy-band type cover outfit who made n'sync look like talented respectable artists! The music was laughable, the drinks were expensive, but we stayed around for a good while nayway. The women were mostly pretty good looking, but the problem is that most of the bar/club scene is based around hotel bars, where a good few of the girls would be working girls trying to latch on to the rich western guests ("western" here equals "rich" - I wish!), so it was hard to tell which was which, girls there for fun or for "business". After a while the smoke was getting to Nina's eyes so we moved on to another, quieter place. where we stayed til closing time (2:30ish, same as back home). So, first real night out in JKT, was an interesting occasion!.

flights!

Well, I finally have flights! Checked www.lufthansa.ie this morning, saw that there were seats available on the flights I wanted, and rang up Amex. Sure enough, they said the flights were booked. I'm still not very impressed with them tho. Not letting me know that I was on a wait list was bad enough, but at what exact point were they going to let me know that I had the flights if I hadn't been pestering them? Am I supposed to be clairvoyant now, or shall I just wander over there and do their jobs for them?

Now all I have to do is get a visa! I had to email them over a copy of the pic page of my passport - is lucky I keep a photocopy in my wallet as a spare ID! They're not sure in the indonesian office tho if can I get the 60-day visa in time or not. Apparently if they can't get me one I'll have to just turn up, get a 30-day tourist visa and then head off to Singapore about half-way though for a weekend and come back in again to get another 30 days. If this happens it means the company pays for flights to a place I was planning on going anyway! :-)

Hmm, must look up whether I need the malaria tablets now.

More Muppetology!

Here we go again. It seems nothing is destined to be easy with this trip of mine.

It seems now there's a bit of a glitch in my flights. I rang Amex (our "travel partners") on tues to book them, and they said they would get onto it. I hadn't heard anything by yesterday evening so I rang them up a few mins ago to find out what was happening. Apparently I'm on a wait list for a Lufthansa flight - but they never bothered telling me this til I chased up on them! So much for "your call is important to us"......

I've been looking at alternatives and it seems I can maybe get flights on friday instead, which would mean changing my going-away do to thurs night, maybe having to take a day's hols from work and ringing Thomas Cook to see can I get my money a day early. Is either that or flying Dublin->London->Kuala Lumpur->Jakarta. Great eh? Can see myself standing on the end of the runway in Dublin with me bags with a sign saying "Jakarta" trying to thumb a lift!

Lovely....

Well, we still don't have a set date for the trip. I have a provisional date of 21st May but that can change at any time up to when I check my bags in at the airport. Last week, one of the girls was supposed to be going to Germany to do an upgrade. She was spending the weekend in Munich and then doing the work on mon/tues, and was on a 3:30pm flight fri so was leaving work at 1pm. She got told at 12:30 that the trip was off.

Also, was talking to one of the guys who's out in Indonesia at the mo and it's hot and muggy and smoggy there. Also, and this was sort of worrying, they're so paranoid about suicide bombers etc there that the hotel he's staying in has them big concrete barriers in front of it to stop cars coming straight up to it at speed, and once you get thru they won't let you out of the car until someone checks underneath with a mirror on a pole - looking for bombs! Great! :-( Looks like I'll definitely be bringing my "Don't shoot I'm not American" t-shirt!

Indonesia - the project from heck

The guys in Indonesia and Australia are really, really pissing me off right about now. After the last few weeks of constant questions from them on how to set up the hardware we need, with us having to make decisions based on incomplete information, getting it wrong (strange that) and having to redo it, now it turns out that a lot of it was the project manager's fuck-up in our Australia office. I've been going on the assumption all along that the Indonesians have had our environment config document which tells them how to set stuff up and they just haven't read it, but last fri I finally asked the PM in Sydney "so what version of this doc did they get anyway?" and the reply was "what doc?" Gaaah!

Then again, the guys in Indonesia haven't exactly been showing encouraging signs of competency either. We got the VPN connection to the servers that they finally set up for us last week, only to find that we couldn't log in as they hadn't set up any users for us. I asked them to do it and the reply was "you never told us that you needed user accounts set up". This made me wish you could send a smack upside the head as an email attachment - despite this being listed in the other docs we sent them (the ones they definitely did get, I know 'cos I sent them myself), they didn't put two and two together and realise we wanted them to actually create them for us. So how exactly did they reckon we were going to install the software?

And now the project managers in Oz have shown us a blast of competence of truly dilbertian proportions. For the last 3 weeks we've been pushing them to try to give us dates on when we're going to Indonesia. Ages ago, we were told "July", then "April 28th". Then they went silent on us for a good while (well, except for screaming at us to get stuff fixed). This morning, they turned around and said "we want you there April 25th". Not only does this break the standard procedure of us getting a minimum of 4 weeks notice to go, it also just happens to mean that by the time we get over, development won't even be finished on their customizations so we won't even have anything to do! Then, we look at the project plan, and that is still talking about July, which was put by the wayside weeks if not months ago! The words "cluster-fuck", "headless chickens" and "piss-up in a brewery" come to mind.....

Skiing without much snow (pt. 3)

On our last day of skiing, we all managed to get together in a big group, with everyone there, for the first time in the holiday! It didn't last any longer than the first run of the day tho, as the girls who'd just graduated from beginners class didn't want to tackle anything harder than a few blue slopes, while trhe rest of us wanted to head over to another mountain where we hadn't been yet, at the far sie of the valley. The only way to get there was by cable car, right across the valley so we decided to head up to it. Unfortunately, as we wound our way up on the chair lift, what we thought had just been cloud at the top of the mountain turned out to be a full-fledged blizzard! The visibility was down to maybe 10 meters, the temp was about -15 with wind-chill factored in, and the snow was being driven horizontally into out faces. At that stage we decided to cut our losses and just go back down on the slopes we'd been on before. On the way though, we found the entrance to a run we'd been looking for before but had always managed to miss, and despite the fact that it had a big "closed" sign on it, we decided to try it anyway. It was probably the best run of the day, as we had it all to ourselves and were pretty much running on fresh undisturbed snow. After a (really) big lunch, we decided to try a few red runs before meeting the others again, and I was quite pleased with myself that I only fell twice (one was silly tho - crossed my skis on a flat bit!). After that we decided to call it a day, as everyone was a bit weary, so we started heading for the Hannenkamm lift. This involved taking a chairlift and two more blue runs though, and at this stage the weather had closed in again and visibility was back down to bout 5m - fun!

We made it back alive anyway and then headed down to meet the girls who had some sort of medals presentation thing from their ski school to go to, from some race they'd done on their last day (none of them had won tho I think!). After a drink or two in the pub, we all agreed to meet back up and have dinner in that place the lads had had the orgasmic steak in on tues night. So, after showerng, shaving etc, we all met up. Pretty much everyone ordered the same thing (the prawns for starter, then the steak) except for me - I hate prawns, and at the last second I had a fit of contrariness and decided against the steak. Judging by the silence around the table when the mains arrived out, a good meal was had by all, and after we set about the task of finding a good bar to park ourselves in for the night. Unfortunately, our first chouce was not the best one - a trendy cocktail bar full of the beautiful people, all dolled-up in thir friday finery - so naturally a big crowd of loud irish in ski outfits stood out like a sore thumb! We only stayed there for two drinks, then headed out to look for somewhere slightly better. We got distracted along the way by an outside bar where they were playing this game where you hammer a nail into a block of wood with the narrow chisel end of a hammer. Your strike had to begin with the hammer touching the edge of the block tho, so it wasn't as easy as it sounds. After a good few games of this we realised (a) it was nearly 1am and the bar was closing and (b) we had to be up early the next day to catch the taxi to the airport, so we called it a night.

The next day dawned bright and early - too damn early! We were getting a 7:30am pickup for the airport, so had to be up at 6:30am. Naturally the discussion in the taxi on the way to the airport was minimal, and we only really were waking up when we got into Munich. Checking in was uneventful, right up to the point where the girl at the check-in counter told em I had to queue up again to pay for my bags - damn Aer Lingus and their charging per bag policy! The guy at the Aer Lingus desk seemed to have had a serious attack of the slows just before I got there - there were only 4 people in the queue ahead of me, but it still took him 35mins to deal with them! And all of this for an €8 fine that had I known in advance, I could have paid online and saved myself all the hassle! At this stage the others had already gone through security, and by the time I reached them I didn't even have time to get food before we took off! Needless to say I was slightly a bit miffed at this. The flight itself passed uneventfully, apart from a pretty hard landing in Dublin, and so we all went our separate ways, probably never to see each other again until the next time we go skiing.

So, all in all, definitely not a leisure holiday, but a damn good one anyway!