Lisbon

Well, there goes my last trip for the year anyway..... Probably!

Now I have another country marked off on my map of europe - Portugal. Think at this stage the only pre-accession states of the EU I haven't hit now are Greece, Sweden and Norway. And all thanks ot Air France! Thanks to them overbooking my flight and stranding me in Birmingham last year on my way home from Paris, I had a €150 token to use with them - which I forgot about nearly as soon as I got it and only found in the drawer 2 days before it was due to expire! Was a quick "Oh shit" moment, and straight on to the info-hyper-global-web to see where I could go with it. After finding out to my disappointment that their other sky alliance (or whatever it's called) partners wouldn't take online bookings with air france tokens, I found myself back at airfrance.com. Looked at the destinations, and decided that Lisbon was the place to go - Sara had been there last year and loved it apparently. Then, I discover something else. Not only did their partners not take them. but you couldn;t boko on Air France witht he token either! I had to ring them up, book over the phone, and then post off a print-out of my booking details along with the token! How 20th century!

The day of the flight arrived, and I found pretty quickly that the one disadvantage of booking with Air France was that I had to fly with Air France, which meant going via Paris. Knowing Dublin Airport's less than stellar record of getting planes off on time, I'd given myself plenty of time for a stopover in Charles de Gaulle, which was a bit unfortunate since we only took off maybe 30mins late and I had about 2hrs to kill in the airport. Landed at terminal 2F, and had to make my way to terminal 2D. I'd forgotten how big Paris airport was! Thought at one stage I must be passing by lisbon on my way! When I got there, I took an instant dislike to the termional. I know that airport terminals are there to be endured rather than enjoyed - Charleroi airport for example has all the aesthetic grace and ambiance of a school gym, but doesn't pretend to be anything other than it is - but for some reason Terminal 2D in Charles de Gaulle really rubbed me up the wrong way. A big long half-tube of a place with a ceiling so high that any flight announcements drowned in their own echoes if you weren't directly under the speaker, and yet such a lack of space on the floor that you had to squeeze past the queues of people boarding their flights. Crap shops and a crap-looking restaurnat at either end complete the ensemble. Having such time to kill, I decided on getting a coffee, only to discover that whatever about Gay Paree itself, the airport can give good old Dublin a run for its money in the rip-off stakes - €5.50 for a regular coffee! At least I thought that, it being france, the coffee would be good when I got it, but it seems that however they may complain about "France for the French", they have ebraced globalization enough to have discovered the machines that spew black plastic crap into a cup with "coffee" written on it at the push of a button. To top it off, the waiter made a big osmg and dance about having to break a €50 whe I went ot pay - lots of gallic shrugging and sighing!

Finally, the time came to leave, and we started boarding. Problem is, after the first 5 ppl went through, we stopped boarding again, and remained that way for 20mins. Eventually, we got ont he bus, which proceeded to bring us all the way back to a gate at terminal 2F, which I believe may actually have been the gate I landed at! All that walking for nothing! I wouldn't have minded had we been bussed to a plane out on the tarmac, but we even had to climb the steps abd board via the jetway just like we'd been checked through at that gate! Anyway, eventually Paris receded beneath me, and I was on my way to Lisboa!

When I got there, I decided to be a bit adventurous. Never mind the fact that I didn't speak the local lingo, or know my way around, I decided to take the local bus into town. According to the guide book, I could take the 41 bus which would drop you off at gare de oriente, at the end of one of the metro line, which would leave me on my favourite form of transport. Unfortunately the airport was just another stop on the bus route rather than one end of it, and I forgot to check which direction the bus was going! Luckily I copped this soon enough, and hopped out at the first sniff of a metro sign. I eventually got to my hostel at about 7 in the evening, after leaving the flat at 9 that morning. The joys of transfers! The hostel itself was pretty small - only held about 30ppl total, and I arrived to discover that on friday nights some local woman came in and for a minimal fee, cooked a meal for whoever wanted it. So, I threw in my dosh and was soon snacking on Portugese chicken and pasta - score! Before dinner, there was also a free portugese class of ppl wanted it, and seeing as I knew a grand total of zero portugese words, I decided to take part as well. I soon discovered that portugese, while similar enough to spanish that I could read it (yeah, like I'm fluent in spanish), is pronounced a lot differently. It's sort of like spanish as it's be pronounced by a russian with a Sean Connery accent. So, after learning such useful words as "thank you" ("obrigado"), "sorry" ("me desculpe" or "con liciensa"), and "beer" ("cerveja" - some things don't change), munching on damn fine chicken, and getting to know some of my fellow hosteliers, I was ready to head out and see what Lisbon had to offer. Then I discovered that the hostel bar was serving bottles of beer for €1 a pop and cocktails for €2.50 each, I decided "shur it's been a long day, might as well relax for a bit, I'm on holiday after all" and proceeded to do just that!

Now, nightlife in Lisbon apparently doesn't really get going until 2am, just about the time us poor Irish folk are trying to hang on to our last drinks of the night and listening to "are ya right there folks, have yis no homes to go to!", so a bunch of us decided to head out about midnight(ish). In typical hostel fashion, it was a mixed group, there was an irish, an austrian, a few yanks, a few aussies, a couple of brits, a mexican and a welshman - there's a joke in there somewhere..... The bar street in Lisbon (or at leat the one we found) was, um, different, not like back home at all. Was a pokey little side street on a hill, with the bars being on average the size of your front room at home, with ppl packed in and cheesy music on. We hopped from bar to bar til about 4am, at which point the combination of a long day travelling, the pissing rain and €1.50 a bottle of beer made me decide enough was enough for my first day!

The next morning dawned bright and sunny - too bright and sunny, as I realised I'd left my damn shades at home! So, first stop, buy sunglasses. Luckily there were some nice gentleman hanging around placa de commerciao who were quite wiling to part with "genuine" armani and DKNY shades for a mere €25 (must have been a special limited edition, as they didnt even have armani written on them!). there was a british guy who was bying a pair ahead of me, and he drove a hard bargain, and got hem for €20. Then it was my turn, and while the guy was prob used to haggling, he hadn't learned his trade in Beijing's Pearl Market like I had. So, newly adorned with my €5 pair of shades, I got on the hop-on hop-off bus to get my tourist on! I always find this is the best way to take a look around a city you've never been in before, take the tourist bus first thing, stay on for the whole trip and then you know what you want to go back and see later. This time tho I actually got off at one of the stops, which was a bit out of town and which I'd pretty much have had to get a train back out to again. On the way we passed by a big-ass bridge across the Tagus river which is the spit of the Golden Gate in San Francisco, and that added to the fact that Lisbon is probably the hilliest city I've been in since San Fran made me a bit confused as to where I was for a while. Then, I looked across the river and was even more confused as they also have a big-ass statue which is the spit of the statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio! By the time I got off the bus in Belem tho, I had my bearings back again. So I wandedered around a bit saw the big monument to Henry the Navigator, went up to the top of it (good view), and was just debating whether or not to eat there or go back into town to eat when the hop-on hop-off bus arrived along. Seeing as they only go every 45mins I took it as a sign from the gods that I was meant to eat in town and hopped on.

Once I arrived back, I headed up Baixa to get some grub. there were no shortage of restaurants but they were all pretty much serving the same thing, so it was a case of pick one at random. The food was OK but nothing to write home about, but the experince was slightly enlivened by guys coming up to me every 5mins and offering me drugs - and I mean nodges of hash the size of your thumb for feck-all money! And this just off the main shopping/touristy street in the town, Rua Augusta! After that I decided to do my pressie shopping for the folks back home, as I heard that pretty much every shop in Lisbon closed on sundays. Miracle of miracles, I managed to get every single pressie I needed in two shops! So, laden down with gifts, I struggled back up the hill to the hostel (did I mention that Lisbon is bloody hilly?) Got there and met Gunther, the Austrian guy I'd been on the piss with the night before, and we spent a bit of time chatting to the really, really cute Estonian girl who was working the reception at the hostel. Gunther had been to the butchers and had gotten pork kebabs at a ridiculously cheap price, which he threw in the oven and offered to share with a few of us, so instad of going out for a meal that night we again ate in again! While he was cooking, Guenther hatched a plan to save himself a lot of money on groceries - apparently it'd be cheaper to catch a flight to lisbon on fri night, stay in the hostel, do all of his food shopping in Lisbon and fly back sat afternoon than to go out and buy everything at the local Tesco in Edinburgh! We hung around the hostel again, got chatting to a Serbian girl who'd just arrived, then about midnight headed out with our new-found Estonian and Serbian friends, the barman from the hostel (a yank) and a few other guys. Went to a small-ish club near the hostel, which was deserted til about 2, but after that the place filled up in short order and it was jammers by 3. Music was shyte (crap danc remixes of crap 80s tunes) and women were nothign to write home about, so left early-ish - maybe 5.

Sunday morning, I got chatting to Olja, the Serbian girl, and Lynette, a Canadian who was in my room the night before (who, probably rightly, was accusing me of snoring), and they said they were heading out to Belem with some others (mostly aussies), and did I want to come. Decided to tag along despite it being what I'd pretty much done the day before, but I had no better plans of my own so we headed out with a bunch of about 8 ppl to catch the train out. We discovered when we got there that touristy stuff like museums in Lisbon were free in until 2 on sundays, so we went into the Mosterio dos Jeronimos, then wandered to the castle at the mouth of the river, then to a bakery which our guide books told us was famous for some local custard-filled pastry delicacy. Have to say it was damn nice!

After that, the Aussies decided to head back to the hostel, and me, Lynette, Olja and Mel (an Aussie girl) hopped on a tram to got to see the castle. The tram ride was a bit mad, the hills were so steep and the roads were so windy it was almost like a slow-motion roller coaster! We got to the castle and were just debating whether or not to spend the €5 admittance fee whn it started to piss rain, which decided the issue for us, so we browsed the touristy shops a bit and then headed back to the hostel, as we'd agreed to meet the rest of the crowd from that morning for dinner. The plan was that maybe 4, 5 ppl were going out for dinner, but then someone else heard we were going and wanted to tag along, then they asked their mate, who suggested it to their friend, and so on and so forth, until eventually 17 of us forayed out to invade some hapless unsuspecting restaurant! I have to say, I was well impressed with the place we found - not only did we all manage to get the one table, but the food was good and the service was so fast that we gave the one waiter we had a big round of applause (and a big tip!) at the end. We eventually rolled back to the hostel and, despite the rain, ended up huddled up underneath the umbrellas out at the outside bar talking bullshit til the wee hours - a pretty chilled night I must say. Lots and lots of beer was drunk, and I'd say we drove our cute estonian friend nuts after teh bar closed by going down to buy beer off her at reception!

Finally, eventually, on monday morning I had to leave. The sun broke though the clouds just as I was leaving (typical), and seeing as Gunther was heading off as well, we split a taxi to the airport. We were both going to the same place (Dublin), but seeing as he was going direct and I wasn't (Bloody Air France!), he was taking off at 10:30am and getting to dublin at 12:30, and I was taking off at 11:30 and getting in at 6pm! Seeing as I hadn't had the chance to do much shopping for myself over the weekend, I was hoping to pick up a t-shirt or somethgin in the airport. So, I went thru security fairly early only to discover that there were shag-all shops thru the gate so all I could do was get a coffee! I only had about 1h15min of a stopover in Paris this time, so I was a bit concerned about the flight, but we took off relativly on time (as in, we were boarding at the time we should have been taking of and in the air 15min later), and I made it to my gate with hust about enough time to catch my breath in CDG before we boarded. Was too bad actually I didn't have more tiem, as Terminal 2F looked like it had a lot more going for it than the one I was stuck in on the way over! When we went to board, I was a bit unnerved to see a 747 waiting for us at the gate - to dublin? - but instead of boarding that we went down the stairs and hopped on a bus which seemed to take us half-way back home already before dropping us at the expected little BaE 50-seater plane, same as we had coming over (think "minibus with wings").

So, I arrived in dublin again evenbtyallu, and pretty much went straight out on the piss with Gunther who had a night's stopover in dublin! A nice way to end the trip!

Oh, and the pictures from it can be seen here.....

The Jihad Joes are at it again.....

I was just reading an article in the paper about some of the reactions in the Muslim world over the weekend:

A NUN was killed by gunmen and churches were firebombed in an apparent escalation of violence over the Pope's speech about Islam last week.

Sister Leonella Sgorbati (65) was shot four times in the back by two men at the front of a hospital in the Somali capital Mogadishu.

Her bodyguard was also killed.

also:

An Iraqi insurgent group, the Mujahidin Army, threatened a suicide bomb attack against the Vatican.

Addressed to "the dogs of Rome" it said: "Our minds will not rest until we shake your thrones and break your crosses in your home."

The reason? The pope quoted from a 14th-century Byzantine emperor, Manuel II Paleologus, in a conversation with a “learned Persian” on Christianity and Islam — “and the truth of both.”

“Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread the sword by the faith he preached,”

He apologized yesterday but "stopped short of the full apology or retraction demanded by some Muslims. Most still insisted his speech portrayed Islam as tainted by violence."

Tainted by violence? No shit? "Someone said that our religion is a violent one. Let us refute their argument by torching some buildings and killing some people". So at exactly what part of becoming a muslim do you achieve the emotional maturity of a 4-year-old? It's like the Mohammed cartoons earlier this year - again the fuzzy-wuzzies went ape-shit. Yes they may be offensive to islam. Yes what the pope said may be offensive. But you have muslim clerics saying way worse about the "western zionist crusader infidel dogs" every day, do you see us rioting in the street and burning mosques?

I have one message to all the rioters and pissed-off

GROW THE FUCK UP! GET A SENSE OF PERSPECTIVE!

If you have a problem with what someone says, tell them you have a problem and try to deal with it in a civilized manner. Throwing a strop whenever someone says something you don't like is not a way to make people take you seriously.

bloody firefox auto-upgrade.....

Crap. Last time I reinstalled firefox I forgot to uncheck the "automatically download and install updates" button. As a result, I got "upgraded" to 1.5.0.6 without warning, and as usual, this nuked all my extensions settings, my taskbar, my themes, and for some resaon, my bookmarks file. Also, for some reason, whenever I get upgraded like this, I can't customize my toolbars - every time I do, when I restart firefix, they're back to the defaults. Only way I know how to fix this is to wipe my prefs folder and redo everything. Got to be an easier way!

Later..........

Yup, is an easier way, from the Mozilla FAQ:

Exit Firefox completely and then open the profile folder and delete the file "localstore.rdf".

So, pretty much the same way you fix the download taskbar going missing - except there you delete downloads.rdf.

Hmph

Just got this from airtran:

"I do understand that you accidentally forgot your camera on board ,however, we are not liable for items that were not checked into our airline and under our contract of carriage we do not cover electronic items."

In other words, "tough shit" :-(

A Busy Year For Flying

I was working this out when I was waiting in the queue to take off late from dublin the other day, I've had quite a busy year for flights! In chronological order, these are the airports I've been through this year:

1. Wolfgang Amadeus Airport, Salzburg


2. Dublin


3. Heathrow


4. Capital Airport, Beijing


5. Hong Xiao Airport, Shanghai


6. Xi'an


7. Narita Airport, Tokyo


8. Charleroi Airport (aka "Ryanair Brussels South")


9. Atlanta, Georgia


10. O'Hare Airport, Chicago


11. General Mitchell Airport, Milwaukee


12. Baltimore, Maryland


13. Logan Airport, Boston


14. Liberty Airport, Newark


15. Girona

...And I have at least one more to go, possibly more if I go on that ski trip I'm hoping for!

Reminders: Tips for travelling in future

• Don't book the 6pm flight to Barcelona via Ryanair - when you throw in the bus in from Girona, the inevitable hour delay at takeoff means you don't hit Barca until after midnight.


• Ryanair may look like the cheaper option most of the time, but you also have to factor in the €20 and extra hour you'll spend on the bus to/from the airport.


• Apparenly checking in over the internet works now with Ryanair going out of dublin, and it also bumps you to the top of the queue at boarding time. So, no need for the 2hrs hanging around the airport before you take off any more!


• You're allowed bring liquids again, so long as you're not going to/through the US or the UK. So no need to have to rely on borrowing toothpaste & shower gel from the ppl you're staying with!


• Don't put stuff in the seat back pocket and then fall asleep, as you'll inevitably forget it after you wake up. Last time, the camera, this time, a book. Thankfully, Ryanair are being rather helpful in this regard as in a lot of their planes now you don't have a pocket in the back of the plastic non-adjustable seat you get. (next helpful innovation from them will be removing the seat cushions so no loose change can get lost down between them)


• The bottle of Sangria that the pushy Indian dudes are charging you €11.95 for in the shops off La Rambla can be got in the airport shop for €4.

Barcelona - an "accidental" holiday.

Ever have one of those holidays that just sort of pops up out of nowhere? About 2 weeks ago, I was sitting at work thinking that two holidays in the space of 7 weeks was pretty packing them in, when I got an email from my old "email penpal" Sharon in Israel. We've known each other about 10 years nearly, but we've never actually met. Every year or so, we make all these promises about meeting up, but it never actually happened and we haven't really talked all that much the last two years. Suddenly I'm reading an email saying that she's after (finally) booking a holiday outside of Israel, in Barcelona, she has a 4-bed apartment and only 2 ppl to stay in it, so did I want to come over? Well, we were supposed to meet up in Barca about 2 years ago, but her college tuition fees came in just before she went so she had to choose between college and the holiday. I ended up going to Barca anyway that time, as I'd already booked my flights when she cancelled. Anyway, I took a quick look at ryanair.com, saw flights for about €120, so decided "why not?"

Sharon was going to be there from the 1st to the 10th, so I decided to go over on the 2nd, the saturday, and stay a few days. Then things started getting complicated. I texted my ex-flatmate Leti, who I knew sometimes lived in Barcelona, to see did she want to meet up. She replied saying that she was actually going on hols on the 2nd, but that Raquel, our other flatmate was going to be visiting her in Barcelona from the 29th to the 31st, and did I want to go meet them? So far so good, but then I remembered that Dani, my Italian ex-flatmate was coming over to visit some time that week, so I got in contact to find out when she'd be in dublin. The reply? the 1st to the 3rd! So instead of going to spain the 31st to the 5th or 6th to visit my Spanish and Israeli friends, I was staying in dublin until the 3rd to meet my Italian friend, missing my Spanish friends, then going over to meet my Israeli friend. Confusing eh?

Anyway, Dani and her austrian friends came on over, we met up for the first time in 4(?) years, and hung out for the few days, then she headed to the airport sunday morning and I followed along about 4hrs later. I'd forgotten that Ryanair now had effectively their own pier in Dublin airport, and true to them being the "no frills" airline, it was an ugly prefab parked way out on the tarmac where you had to walk out so far to get to the gates that you felt like you were half-way to your destination already! They had improved it a bit, when when I was going to Brussels last it was an ugly soulless prefab with no redeeming features whatsoever, it was now an ugly soulless prefab with a coffee shop and a bookstore.

True to form anyway for dublin airport, we took off about an hour late, which meant me getting into Girona about 11 and Barcelona itself around 12:15ish. Now the last time I'd gone this way, that was enough of a delay to cause me to miss the last metro and have to get a taxi to Marta's place (who proceeded to get lost along the way), but that had been during the week, and luckily the metros ran later on the weekends. So, I abandoned myself to that (for non-irish people) most incomprehensible of pleasures on hitting a foreign city, relaxing on a public transport system that worked and was fairly on time! I finally got to Barceloneta where I was meeting Sharon, and strangely enough we pretty much recognised each other straight away. I say "strangely enough" as I'd only ever seen 3 pictures of her ever, the most recent being 2 years old!

So anyway, we decided to have a drink before we went back to their apartment,a nd she introduced me to her friend Alon. It was a little bit awkward for the first while, as while we probably knew more about each other that most ppl I actually know in "real life" nowadays, it was all over email and IM, and even then not much of it over the last 2 years. So, it was sort of a case of "where do we start"? It was also slightly complicated by the presence of Alon - not through any fault of his, but it's sort of hard to meet someone you know really well but never actually met in the flesh for the frst time and get a feeling for what they're really like, in front of someone you don't know at all. Also, Oran didn't really drink so I couldn't use the traditional irish icebreaker of getting drunk with him!

When we got back to their rented apartment another issue arose, that of sleeping arrangements. When the ad had said "sleeps 4 ppl" it forgot to metion that it was 2 double bed arrangements, and rather csy doubles at that. So, I'd been warned in advance and brought a sleeping bag, but was still sleeping on the floor! Not the most comfortable of arrangements, especially without a ground sheet or pillow. So, after an hour or so of my head bouncing off the concrete floor, we decided to try something different so I ended up in the same bed as Sharon (just sleeping!). It took a bit of getting used to on both our parts, but we managed and eventually got some shut-eye.

The next morning dawned as it always does in spain - damn hot! Before I'd headed over, weather.com was telling me that the temp would be about 25-6, which I thought was quite tolerable, so I wore jeans and only brought one pair of shorts. That turned out to be a teeny bit of a mistake, as I idscovered once the temp hit 30! :-( Seeing as it was my 4th time in Barcelona and their first, I was the tour guide for the duration, but since they'd already picked off the "low hanging fruit" of La Rambla, Passeig de Gracia and the Sagrada Familia, I took them around the Barri Gotic (where we hit the chocolate museum), Carrer Ferran and down to Placa Real, where we got tapas, Placa de Catalunya the big marketplace down by Licieu. We ended up in that wierd little fairytale-like bar I'd found before down by the wax museum, El Bosc Des Fades. Then we went back to the flat in Barceloneta via Port Veil. A pretty busy day!

Next day (tues), we were up real early as the plan was to head out to Montserrat. So, up at 8am (on a holiday!) to hop on the metro and get to Placa d'Espanya in time to get the 9:49 train to Montserrat. Unfortunately, we left the flat a tad late and were racing the clock to get to the train on time! We literally made it at the last sec - the train doors were practically closing on me as I hopped on board. We made it anyway, and got as far as the base of the mountain where we were to get the cable car up to the monastery. I'd decided on the cable car at the last sec when we were booking the tickets, as I'd taken the funicular he last time I was there, but the flaw in this plan became apparent when I discovered that Sharon was not overly enamoured with heights! We made it up without incident anyway, and went poking around the church and monastery, killing time until this choir recital thingy which we thought was on at 11am but actually wan't until 1pm. While we were waiting, we discovered the particular joys of trying to find kosher food in a restaurant where everything was pretty much meat-based! The recital, when we got it, would have been nice enough in slightly more reverent circumstances, but while it was in the rather impressive-looking church, the church itself was packed with busloads of eastern european tourists who were busy jostling for better positions while all the time ignoring the "no cameras" signs around. Sharon in particular was less than enamoured by this experience. After that tho, we went out hillwalking on the mountain which was more to everyone's taste - even mine, as it was a lot more pleasant than the first time I'd done it, mainly due to not being hungover from drinking 1/3 of a bottle of absinthe the night before!

After we were done, we headed back into town, where we decided we had enough time to go to Parc Guele to see all the Gaudi architecture. Now for those who haven't been there, while the guidebook says that "Lesseps is the nearest metro stop to Parc Guele", what it doesn't say is that by "nearest" it means over 1km away (1250m according to the signposts actually), with the last 400m being uphill. Just what we needed after a long day out on the mountain! After some more lovely healthy exercise, we were in the mood for food, so we headed back down to Port Veil where we went to that all-you-can-eat vegetarian restaurant I'd found on my previous trip (vegetarian being the closest thing to kosher you can get in the land of chorizo and jamon). After that, being a tad weary, it was back to the apartment and pretty much bed (altho we did watch a bit of TV - some crap british cloak-and-dagger spoof which was probably helped in its entertainment value by being dubbed in catalan so we had to guess as to what was going on).

The next day, my last, was spent doing pretty much feck-all. We were a bit tired after all the previous day's walking, climbing etc and were in no real mood to over-exert ourselves in the still 30-degree heat, so it was pretty much spent killing time in shops and stuff while I was waiting to head to the bus station to get my bus back to Girona to go home. When I finally got to the airport, I was most pleasantly surprised to find that we nearly took off on time - as in, we were boarding when we should have been taking off and were wheels up 20mins later. This was a vast improvement on my previous ryanair flight, where the 2 1/2 hour delay on the way out to brussels could have been blamed on the bomb scare in the airport that morning but the 4hr delay on the way back couldn't.

So, a rather pleasant and unexpected holiday! It was good to be back in Barca, and even better to finally meet someone who up til then had only been text on a screen for the previous 10 years!

digi camera

Well, I finally had to give up on getting my digital camera back. I got an email last week from AirTran Lost & Found dept which said:

"I have not received a camera like the one you are describing. If one does happen to come in I will contact you>"

I was going to try to get the money back on my credit card insurance, as it covers items bought on the card for 100 days after purchase, but it turns out that when I checked the date I bought it, it was just over 4 months ago :-( I've contacted the airline about getting reimbursd for the camera one of their light-fingered cleaning staff is now using, but according to their T&C: "Claims for damaged or delayed baggage must be submitted before leaving the airport after arrival.". Technically I did that, I filled in a lost items form, but they'll probably try to say it wasn't a claims form, just a missing items report form.

So, I decided to go into the shops here in dublin to see how much I can get a replacement for anyway, seing as I have a few trips coming up in the next month that I'll need a cam for. In the shops here, the same camera will set me back €419 without memory card, or €70 more than what I paid for both the camera and memory card in Tokyo. I've done a bit of looking around and found it for a better price at www.pixmania.com - camera, 1Gb memory stick and carry case for €390 (incl delivery). Unfortunately the only option for shipping it was DHL, so all I can do is hope it gets here in one piece!

"Getting there is half the fun" - terrorists, hair gel and the dangers of falling asleep on planes.

Waking up to the sound of an alarm clock is never the most pleasant experiences, but it is doubly worse at 5am when you've only gotten to bed at midnight after a lot of beer. But, seeing as I had a 7:30am flight form Milwaukee to Boston, it had to be done.

The first indication that things were slightly out of the normal was the sign by the check-in desk that told us that "Due to new security restrictions, passengers are prohibited from taking any liquids on board the plane". No-one had seen the news or anything (my first thought at 5am was definitely not "let's turn on CNN!"), so we paid it no heed really, until the check-in girl warned me to make sure I went straight to security, as there were long queues. The queue was fairly long, and the first real inkling people got that this wasn't business as usual was the TSA agent walking up and down the qqueue qith teh wheelie-bin telling us to dummp all liquids as they weren't going to be allowed on the plane - water, shampoo, hair gel, toothpaste, you name it, if it wasn't solid at room temp, it went in the bin. There was a good bit of grumbling at this, especially from the guy in front of me who had to bin a $100 dollar bottle of cologne, but we did it anyway, and the queue inched along.

It was only after I was through and wandering past the newsagents stall that I got any idea as to why this was happening - there was a TV on (was Fox News, but if you inore the wavy american flag in the corner and the sensationalist banner headlines, it just about passes for news). So, the brits had broken up this big terrorist ring. The way Fox were spinning it, they'd been pretty much arrested at the airport about to board the planes, so they could blow them all up over the atlantic. Nice to hear when you're just about to board one yourself!

It was only when I'd gotten to Baltimore on my stopover that I realised how much of a kerfuffle the whole thing had caused. The airport was in a panic! I'd been lucky enough to get through security in MLK before things really got mad, but in Baltimore I met ppl who'd speent 2 1/2hrs getting through security and who had missed their flight! I was just lucky that I'd gotten my Baltimore-Boston boarding card in Milwaukee, so I dind't have to brave that again! Was actually easy for me - I got off the plane at gate E8 and strolled over to E5 where I was supposed to take off from again! Had a moment of slight panic when I saw that my plane wasn't up on the departures board, but I asked at the gate and things were OK.

.....And this then is where things went pear-shaped. About half-way between Baltimore and Boston, I remembered that I'd taken my camera out to look thru the pics on the Milwaukee-Baltimore leg of the flight, and hten left it in the seat pocket in front of me. Unfortunately, due to being a tad tired from waking up so early, I fell asleep then, and only woke up when we were landing. So, I grabbed my bag and got off the plane, forgetting about the camera. So, while I was en route to Boston, my camera was en route to Rochester, New York! I went straight up to one of the customer service reps as soon as I landed anyway, and she got onto baltimore, but no sign of it. So, I fille dint he missing itelms form, and left them at it. So, I finally made it to Boston, without any huge big security fuss but without my $400 digital cameral either! :-(

Baseball, a sport designed for beer!

Well, I have now seen my first ever live game of baseball. I don't think I'll be a convert.

After the shenanigans of the night before, it took us a bit of time to become fully human again (soakage and Red Bull was needed!), and so the day was spent in low-key mode, as we knew we'd need our energy for the baseball game that night (the original reason for me to come over to the US!). In the afternoon we went looking at Condos with K's mom (they're buying one), and headed to Miller Stadium around 3ish for tailgating.

For those who haven't been to a baseball game, tailgating is a big BBQ party you have in the parking lot (or as we yuropeens call it, the "car park" :-P ) outside the stadium. Basically, you pull up in a few jeeps/SUV's, unload a BBQ or two and a few kegs of beer, and lay into them. Another friend of mine has been tailgating down in Virginia(?), and they do the normal BBQ thing of steak, burgers, ribs, chicken etc, but Milwaukee had a big German immigrant population, so we had Bratwurst! And Bratwurst is good - got about 3 big fuck-off german sausages in a bun, with Sauerkraut, Ketchup and that piss-weak yellow stuff americans call "mustard"! I also managed to choke down some more beer, and after the first the rest seemed to go down OK again. At the start I knew no-one htere apart from K and her folks, but later on a few of the crowd fomrt eh night before arrived, so that made things less socially awkward for me.

We finally managed to make our way into the game, about half an hour after it started, and it became evident nearly as soon as we sat down that what was actually happneing on the pitch was nearly incidental to the whole "baseball experience". It reminded me of the Simpsons episode where Homer goes off the drink, and realises when he goes to a game that baseball really sucks! For every bit like you see on TV where someone actualy hits something, there's a lot of not very much going on. About the only way you could stay 100% interested in the game would be if you're one of them sad anorak types who's seriously into their statistics (batting average etc). Luckily tho, we didnt have to stay sober! I spent a lot of time chatting to Devrah (who was damn cute, but taken), who seemed to only know slightly more about the rules of the game than I did, and about half-way throught the 5th(?) inning we got bored and went down to the gift shop to do some shopping! Unfortunately, she had to take a potty break, and so while I was awaiting for her we had the only home run of the game :-( Whenever the Brewers score a home run, their mascot (Bernie the Brewer), slides down a slide into a giant mug of beer, but we missed that as it happened pretty much directly over our heads.

At the start of the 7th inning, we were treated to the sausage race. Apparently it's a permanent fixture in Miller Park that you have 4 guys dressed as a Bratwurst, an Italian sausage, a French sausage and a Chorizo race each other between 3rd base and home plate. There's nearly a s much excitement about this as the result of the actual game itself! I put my money in the Italian, and surely enough, we had an Azurri victory! Easiest buck I ever made! :-) Next year apparently they'll have a Polish sausage racing as well, so will have to go back to see that.

After the 7th inning, we discovered that one of K's workmates had tickets to get into the VIP lounge at the top of the stadium, so we "borrowed" them and headed on up for a look. Unfortunately they close the bars after the 7th and so we were a few mins late to get any of the fancy (and I'm sure over-priced) drinks there, but at least the view was good. The crowd really only started getting into the game in the last inning, when it was obvious that Milwaukee were going to beat the "old enemy" the Chicago Cubs by 6 to 3 (but don't ask me how they got the scores!). Things sort of wound down from there, as I we couldn't go out mad celebrating due to (a) still being a tad tired form the night before and (b) having to get up at 5am to take my flight to Boston. So, a nice chilled end to a mad few days!

Drinking in Milwaukee

Now, those who know me know that normally I don't drink that "beer" stuff, but I definitely seem to have made up for lost time on this holiday! After we finished up in the state fair (about 3pmish), we went to a few diferent bars to meet a few different friends of K's (and where I discovered Miller High Life, a brand you can't get at home). Eventually, late-ish in the evening, we ended up in this place called the Safe House. Bit of a strange place, it's got a whole spy thing going: all sorts of 07-type decor, and to get in you have to know the secret password. If you don't know the password you have to do somethgin slightly embarassing, like frisk down whatever friend you're with (no, nothing x-rated!), and it's all shown on CCTV inside the bar. Luckily I didn't have to do this, as there's a "secret passageway" entrance from the next door bar which we used to get in (just looks like a bookcase or something from the Safe House side when closed). This place has a few speciality cocktails, like the Spy's Demise, which nearly did for me for the night (or maybe it could have been the 10-odd beers I'd had til that point), and one called the (??) which is HUGE! Is $25 for the one drink, and you get it in a glass the size of a fish bowl, with 4 straws.

Funny thing is, we didn't even have to buy it, was this random chick at the bar, fairly drunk, who didn't know what to order and was looking for some advice. So, once she saw this thing, she got it, and just to make sure she had room for it, she donated her Long Island Iced Tea to me and her friend's Mojito(?) to someone else (Devrah maybe)! Once she heard my accent she was all "omigod, I can't believe you're from Ireland! Go on, say somthing, anything!" and hanging off of me. So, I had a momentary thought of "heh, score", but then she disappeared off to the toilets. According to K, who was in there a few mins later, she was puking her ring up, and was still doing it 5-10 mins later when Devrah went in! She disappeared anyway, so we decided it'd be a shame to let this big-ass drink go to waste (to be fair, we did give her about another 10mins to come back first!)

After the Safe House, we went on to an "Irish" bar called the Co. Clare, which wasn't as bad as a lot of "oirish" bars I've been in - was more a hotel bar that happened to sell Irish drink than anything else. We hit there a few mins before closing time, so didn't manage much out of them, then headed back to Stan's house for munchies (grilled cheese sandwiches!). at some stage somewhere around the Co. Clare we managed to pick up another member of the group (Dave?), who pretty much as soon as we got to Stan's house started schmoozing on Devrah, with a whole "my life has been so hard" sensitive artist line - he was a photographer I think, and pretty much did everything bar ask her if she'd pose for him :-) The night ended soon after that anyway (memories aren't the due to not being used to beer, plus them big fecking cocktails), with the last act being the eating of pasta - with nothing else - in K's place. So, a good night was had by all!

Milwaukee - beer, custard and farm animals

Continuing on the story of my trip.....

Well, after I left Chicago, we headed back down to Katie's place in Milwaukee, arriving in about midnight. The next day, we started the touristy stuff. Now when you think of America and great tourist destinations, Milwaukee (and wisconsin in general) doesn't exactly jump out as a "must go" destination, but it does have one major export - beer! Milwaukee is the home of Miller, one of the better american mass-produced beers (the microbreweries are better but not as well known). Before Miller Time though, breakfast time! For the 2nd time in my trip, my breakfast/brunch consisted of a burger and fries - good eatin'! As well as the burger tho, I was introduced to a delicacy particular to the Milwaukee area - frozen custard. Sounds a bit strange I know, but is like a creamier verions of ice cream, and is damn tasty! I was almost half tempted to go into the place, ask for the owner and try to negotiate the franchise rights for exporting it back home.

After that trip down culinary lane, it was time to start the real business of the day - Beer! We headed over to Miller Valley, and joined the tour. If you;ve done the Guinees tour or any of hte distillery tours sat home, the miller tour isn't really anything special - all you get to see are the warehouse and the bottling plant, none of the actual making of the beer at all. Then again, it's free, and you get free samples at the end, so is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. We also got lucky as well, normally at the end you go to the miller bar for 3 free beers, but on our particular tour there was a marketing dude there who wanted volunteers for some sample taste testing of some new brews. Guess who's hand was nearly the first up! We got beought into this big-ass fancy room, got 6 unlabelled cups of beer and had to rate them each on things like flavour, character (heavy beer, light, medium etc), and a few other things. How bad! I thought after that we'd get some sort of cert saying "official Miller beer tester" or something like that, like you get at the Jameson museum, but all you got were a few glasses (and they were Fosters glasses too - I can get them at home!).

After the Miller tour, we went to Lakeshore breweries - one of the local microbreweries. That was more expensive - $5 as opposed to free, but you got 4 free drinks as opposed to 3, so not too bad (so my outlay up to that point was 10 different brands of beer for $5!). That tour was even less imprssive than the Miller one, but hey, free beer! The rest of that day was Pretty much spent in recovery from all that beer and the cumulative effects of the weekend (brought Katie's dog for a walk down by the lakeshore - excitement!), altho we did find a rather nice mexican restaurant which did killer margaritas! the margaritas are responsibe tho for a rather fetching picture of me riding a 5-foot chili pepper......

The next day was State Fair time! Katie's mom had scored us fre tickets (worth $25 each) to the Wisconsin State Fair, which just so happened to be on while I was there, so never having been to one before, I was all for going! I wasn't sure really what to expect, but was a lot less redneck than I thought it'd be - only a few John Deere baseball caps on show (but a lot to be bought in the stalls), and I only saw one guy with a mullet. It pretty much consisted of a few barns with animals on show in them (cows, pigs, sheep, horses etc), a midway with a ton of amusement rides and the usual kind of stalls where you have to shoot cards, put balls through hoops, burst balloons with darts etc to win prizes (all heavily rigged against you), a few stalls selling t-shirts and various sundry fair-related stuff, and a ton of food stalls. My god, were there a lot of food stalls there! Katie kept pointing out things to me saying "you have to try those", but if I tried them all I'd need to charter a plane of my own to come home on! And, just to wash down all the food, there were also quite a few beer tents as well - it being beer country and all. I was also introduced to two of the redneck phrases du jour - "Get 'er Done!" which apparently comes from some redneck comedian on TV, and "honky-tonk badonk-a-donk", which is apparenlty the big bouncy ass of a C&W-listening woman (as in, you can get women's t-shirts & shorts with "I've a honky-tonk badonk-a-donk" written on them).

So, we wandered around, ate a lot, drank a fair bit, did some of the games etc, and then when we were sick of it all (not to mention stuffed and slightly tipsy), headed out to meet a few of katie's friends.

Lollapalooza

Well, am on day 7 of my 10-day trip here, so is sort of time to catch up on what I've been doing.

After arriving in slightly later than expected on fri evening, myself and my friend Katie headed back down to chicago first thing on sat morning where we met up with Katie's friend Sue (who was hot!) and a few of her friends before heading off to the gig. First off, Lollapalooza was mad! It definitely lives up to its nickname of "Stonerpalooza" - nearly every gig I was at had someone passing the joints or the pipe around! This plus the liter of vodka we snuck in on the saturday in a water bottle made the day very very interesting. Got to see Gnarls Barkley (who was great), The Flaming Lips (who sucked), Queens of the Stone Age (not too bad) and a few other random bands - there were 8 stages and so you'd just wander around until you heard something you liked. Luckily the weather had cooled down to about 80F or so, so I didn't bake too much in the sun. After the concert was over, we headed out to the bars, where I learned the pain of listening to "oirish" music in chicago! :-( Finished up the night around 4am, with me and Katie sleeping in the spare bed in Sue's flat (no, nothign like that, strictly platonic!).

I reckon maybe we overdid it a bit on the saturday as we didn't manage to drag our sorry hungover carcasses to the gig on sunday til abput 3:30pm or so. Then again, seeing as part of the delay was getting a big american-style breakfast in the cafe across from Sue's, I didn't mind so much - a big plate of ham, scrambled eggs, and blueberry pancakes covered in maple syrup sure does help settle the stomach after a big night out! When we finally got there anyway, we did the same wandering around as the day before (but with less vodka), and the only real act I knew all day was Matsiyahu - the Jewish rapper guy I discovered on the web a while back. The main headline of the night was the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who normally rock but whose gig sucked a bit for most of it 'cos they have the new album out and had to play all the as-yet unknown crap off that. The gig was just about starting to get a bit good when we had to leave - me and Katie had to drive all the way back to Milwaukee that night yet so we decided to skip out a bit early and beat the crowd. Manged to get back to cheesehead country in one piece anyway without either of us falling asleep in the jeep (which would have been ok for me but not for her, as she was driving), and there I was, back where I'd arrived 48hrs earlier but with a lot more music (and alcohol!) in me than when I got in!

Miles away from home again

Well, I'm now officially "away from home" again. I'm sitting in a friend's place in Milwaukee, waiting for her to get out of the shower so that we can head off to Lollapalooza. Temp is early 30s out there, so is going to be fun!

Am over in Milwaukee here now, at my friend's gaff. Trip over was a nightmare - I was supposed to a have a 2 1/2hr stoppover in Atlanta, but we took off 2hrs 25min late from Dublin! Landed at 5:30pm, exactly the time I was supposed to be taking off again. So, got put on standby for an 8pm flight, and hit chicago finally at 9:30pm local. Only good thing about that was that because of what happened they bumped me up to 1st class, so it was free mojitos for me the whole flight!! Got to my friend's place here about 11 last night, or about 5am irish time.

So, my trip plans this time around are:

• Today and Tomorrow: Chicago, at Lollapalooza (with possibly some sightseeing)


• Mon-Weds: Touristy thing around Milwaukee, inluding my very first live baseball game (Milwauke Brewers v. Chicago Cubs) and tailgate party on weds night!


• Thurs: Fly to Boston to go see Andrea


• Fri-Sun: Touristy thing around Boston


• Sun: Fly home (arrive 7am monday morning

Dodging bullets

Well, is that time of the year again here, Layoff time! Once again I dodge the bullet - has happneed so mnay times now that I feel like Neo from the Matrix. Wish they'd just get it over with - at this stage I've been here long enough that my severance pkg would amount to close on a year's salary! We did lose a contractor tho, so more work all around! Yay! :-(

gone phishing

It seems that phishing season has started this week. So far today I've gotten multiple mails from NatWest bank, Bank of Scotland, Loyds TSB warning me that they are performing a scheduled software upgrade to improve the quality of services to the bank's customers" and that I need to click on a link to confirm my details. that's very nice of them to warn me, but is kind of strange, seeing as I don't even have an account with any of those banks. I like the way though that they took the effort to put all of the text into an image so that it would defintitely not accidentally trip any spam filters so I'd definitley read it.....

Besides, it's not a software upgrade that I need for my bank account - I sort of somehow managed to break my bank card in 2 places....



Hopefully I can get the new one in the post before I head off!

Sickening

I went to get my post out of the mailbox this morning, and alongside the leaflets for the local gym, 4 star pizza, bills and other assorted junk, I found a leaflet for some local hotel saying "Book your Christmas party now!". For Gods' sake people, it's not even August yet! Is bad enough when the decorations go up the week after Halloween, but July? Jesus!

A bit freaky.....

From yesterday's news:

"July 26, 2006 Irish archaeologists Tuesday heralded the discovery of an ancient book of psalms by a construction worker who spotted something while driving the shovel of his backhoe into a bog.

The approximately 20-page book has been dated to the years 800-1000. Trinity College manuscripts expert Bernard Meehan said it was the first discovery of an Irish early medieval document in two centuries.
..............
The book was found open to a page describing, in Latin script, Psalm 83, in which God hears complaints of other nations' attempts to wipe out the name of Israel."

Psalm 93 starts with

"God, do not be silent; God, be not still and unmoved!
See how your enemies rage; your foes proudly raise their heads.
They conspire against your people, plot against those you protect.
They say, "Come, let us wipe out their nation; let Israel's name be mentioned no more!"""

A bit freaky eh, seeing as what's happening in Lebanon at the moment??

not much surprise here:

You are a Social Moderate (43% permissive) and an... Economic Liberal (30% permissive) You are best described as a: Democrat Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid Also: The OkCupid Dating Persona Test

nine million bicycles - at last.....

Well, I've finally heard that Katie Melua song, "Nine Million Bicycles". If I had a quid for every time someone asked me either while I was there or when I came back, "so are there really 9 million bicycles in beijing then?" What was I supposed to answer, "no there's only 8,995,451 actually, I counted them myself". Grr.......

Am a bit disappointed in this one.......

You Are 66% Evil

You are very evil. And you're too evil to care. Those who love you probably also fear you. A lot.

How Evil Are You?

astrology - invaluable advice or a load of bollox?

I'm not sure how we got onto the topic, but one of my friends here today said that apparenly she was going to meet that special someone today, because her horoscope said so.

Star signs, god love 'em. You can look at 3 horoscopes for the same star sign and see 3 totally differnt things

I'm a Taurus, so I decided to see what I had in store for today.

Astrology.com says:
A certain someone wants you to get a little closer, but you're not sure if you're ready for all the demands an increased sense of intimacy will place upon you.

my.horoscope.com says:
Just what you don't need and didn't ask for – a stressful or unhelpful exchange with either your date, your romantic other, or someone you have your eye on.

the LA times horoscope says:
Tell others what they can do to help you make an even bigger difference in your community.

astrology-online.com says
Your versatile mind and common sense will allow you to come up with various solutions. Your anger may be impossible to contain if you get into debates with family members. Business trips might prove unproductive.

Astrologyzone.com says:
You seem to be mulling over a move, renovation, rental, or even the purchase of a house or condo, but you seem hesitant. You want to act decisively, but you can't quite get the pieces together. Mars, the action planet, is now in your fourth house of home and orbiting very close to Saturn, the planet of caution, during most of the month. This is a hot and cold, stop-and-go combination of planetary energy, so you may feel a bit frustrated that things aren't coming together as quickly as you'd like.

Closer to home, horoscope.co.uk says:
Your mate or partner could have good news to share, and it might involve finances. Even so, you have a choice to make today. Compromise and consideration of others involved are important.

and the Irish Independent says:
Your popularity is set to fly off the Richter Scale! Don’t let it go to your head. Continue to question people’s motivations. Bear in mind that you are wrong some of the time. However, your own judgement is all you have. So you listen to your heart and soul. Take the risk, make the connection, and don’t waste an opportunity just because you didn’t see it coming.

So which one do I go by?

Apparently today I may have an argument with my "significant other" (never mind the fact I don't have one) over my committment issues, or possibly over some good financial news they've just given me, which may have something to do with buying a house (which I'm not looking to do). I'd better not get pissed off about it tho, especially with my family, but it's ok, my verstaile mind will find a way out of the situation and as a result I'll be very popular with everyone. Oh yeah, and I shouldn't go on a business trip either (wasn't going to anyway, my company wouldn't send me across the street these days!).

And there was me thinking I was going to have a boring day!

useful travel guides for iPodders......

Found this link a few mins ago, travel guides for your iPod! They're free as well. unfortunately they're only for iPod Photos so I won't be able to look at them on my poor little mini. ah well, still pretty useful.

cynical? moi?

You Are 68% Cynical

You're a full blown cynic... and probably even skeptical of these results. You have your optimistic moments, but most likely you keep them to yourself.

How Cynical Are You?

hee hee

This could be fun if ppl notice...... :-)

Alcohol is a strange thing.....

I was out last night and decided for a change to stick to shorts (well, the fact we were trying to get my flatmate hideously drunk at her going-away do had somethign to do with it too). Strange thing was tho, I was drinking way more than I'd had the night before, but I wasn't getting as drunk. I was drinking Bacardi Limon before we headed out, then vodka, Jameson whiskey, and aftershock in the nightclub, and then when we gor back to the flat we polished off the rest of the bottle of limoncello and then started on some schnapps type stuff I'd brought back from Austria. So, call it somewhere around a dozen shots. And yet, I was more sober than I had been the night before when I'd only had 4 pints!

So, it seems for me, it's better to drink shots than drink pints!

Men's fashion - shades of gay?

I was just out doing a bit of clothes shopping, and I noticed a bit of a worrying trend in the "in" colors for guys this season. The shops were full of crap in some pretty gay colors. Pink. Lemon. Powder Blue. Light Brown. What the fuck? Either that or white short-sleeved striped shirts - still gay looking, or some seriously flowery looking shirts. And the lads at work were taking the piss out of the Tommy Bahama shirts I got in Beijing! I know when H&M opened here the clothes were pretty much meterosexual, but now it's spread to everwhere else. I suppose it doesn't really matter, I'm not really a fashion type anyway (not young, tall or skinny enough). Still, worrying to see!

I blame David Beckham. he was the one who really kicked off the whole "metrosexual" or JGE ("Just Gay Enough") thing. And speaking of which:

Yup, the England captain has followed in the wife's footsteps and gone and brought out a perfume. I wonder does it come with a little helium bottle so that you can sound like him as well?

The Code

Well, I've seen the Da Vinci code at the second attempt. It's not as bad as all the reviewers make it out to be. It's pretty faithful to the book actually, which is rare enough in a film.

• Tom Hanks didn't do as badly in it as I thought, and Audrey Tatou isn't a bad Sophie (pretty cute too) but there were some unfortunate casting choices. Namely Alfred Milona as the cardinal - maybe it's me, but after Spiderman 2 I had trouble seeing him in this one as anyone but Doc Oc. Paul Bettany has defintely the best role in the film tho, as Silas. Genuinely creepy!


• People are complaining that the plot is very stop-start - of course it is, the book was like that, and they stuck to the book!


• I wonder how long Teabing was waiting for someone to come along and ask about the grail, so that he could show them that wonderful flashy presentation on the Last Supper he'd spent so long working on....


• There were a few gaps in it from the book - like they never bothered explaining why the guy from the bank bothered to drag them off and try to steal the codex. Who was he exactly?


• You'd hate to be in Sophie's shoes at the end of the film. "You're the last living descendant of Christ, you have to continue on the bloodline" - talk about pressure!


• Anyone who has their religious beliefs changed by this film is too weak-willed to deserve them anyway. Run little ones! Don't listen to Tom Cruise, he'll take your soul and give it to the aliens! And your wallet too!

As an aside, I was standing outside the theater waiting to go in, and I was wondering why the odd person going past me was throwing me dirty looks. When I turned around to goin, I realised why - I was standing beside a poster for the new film "United 93", and I happened to be wearing my New York t-shirt! Oops!

Da Vinci vs Bin Laden

Well, I almost got to see the Da Vinci code last night. I went to the cinema at about 7:15, and found out that not only was the 8pm show booked out, but so was hte 8:30 and 9:30 shows. Also, they wouldn't let me book for tonight either, so will have to go earlier tonight. It wasn't a total loss though, there were sone nice earnest christian types outside handing out copies of the Irish Catholic newspaper which had an article saying why the Da Vinci Code was a load of crap (altho in a polite way).

This got me thinking. Here is a film which is basically saying that everything we've believed in for 2,000(ish) years is wrong, and the most extreme reaction is maybe a few people standing outside the cinema with placards, and the Thai film censor cutting the last few mins where they make the "shocking" revelations. And yet, a few months ago a Danish magazine published a few cartoons showing the prophet Mohammed, and muslims all over the world were rioting blockading danish goods and calling for the death of the cartoonist and for some reason every american on the planet (because while you're rioting there's nothing like a chant of "death to the Great Satan" to keep the crowd worked up). So, on one hand you have a film which sticks two fingers up at an entire belief system, and on the other hand you have a few cartoons about a guy in a turban who may or may not be the prophet Mohammed, shown in a slightly unflattering light. The reactions? On one hand, you have a few people standing outside the cinema saying "no, don't go to see this", and on the other you have burning, rioting and killing. Or:

Christian's reaction to film (for fans of Fr. Ted)

Muslim's reaction to cartoons

Does this strike anyone else as being slightly out of proportion? If Islam was a person, it'd be in anger management classes now, or in therapy. What is it about that particular religion that turns people into suicidal nut-jobs? Sure, the cartoons were offensive, but there's thousands of offensive cartoons out there about Jesus, and do you see any of our uber-religions whackos strapping on a semtex vest? Do you think that there are any cinemas going to be torched over this one, or big crowds baying for Dan Brown or Tom Hank's blood? Islam is a religion of over a billion people, but it looks like the inmates have taken over the asylum, or at least the public face of it.

This debate has ben run a million times on a trillion blogs, so I'm not going to go into it again. I have a few possible reasons though why the fundamentalists have been allowed to go so far:

• The Mongols: Back in 1258 the Mongols sacked Baghdad and kiled the Caliph. The Caliph was the direct descendant of Mohammed, and so was the central authority figure in Islam - sort of like the Islamic Pope. With the Caliphate gone, there was no one central figure to lay down the law when extreme sects started sprouting up. Basically they had no-one with the authority to say "I've been speaking to the Big Man, and he's pissed at you. Quit your fool-acting or you're going to hell".
  
• Oil: It's always bee a case with American forign policy that if it were a choice between spreading democracy and preserving the status quo, they've always gone with the staus quo. if the americans weren't so scared of the Saudis and Kuwaitis turning off the oil pumps they would have gone in and bitchsmacked the first guys to go on about he "great Satan" quicker than you can say "Collateral Damage".

¡Campeones!

Força Barça! :-)

the vegetarian crusade?

I found this on El Reg on friday: someone wrote an essay on why being a vegetarian is stupid, and after a few militant veggies complained, the author got their college computer access removed. So much for freedom of speech!

Most of the aricle goes through the reasons that ppl say they became vegetarian, and proceeds to rubbish all of them. The article is pretty tongue-in-cheek, and the only ppl I can see this turning off vegetarianism are the kind of ppl who were never really into it in the first place. Then again, there are always going to be ppl out there who aren't happy unless they're morally outraged about something (a lot of heavily religious ppl fall into this category as well). I always found vegetarian food to be pretty bland and uninspiring, so maybe the lack of excitement in their diet has made these ppl lose their sense of humour as well.

Or maybe it's all about control. People with strong views on stuff always tend to see the world in black and white: "there's my way and then there's the wrong way". So, if anyone looks like they're attacking their views, no matter in how mild a form, that person must be eliminated or neutralised. My attitude is "God save us from fanatics of all shapes and sizes" (of course, instead of "God" you can insert your deity of choice there, I don't care). You have your views on things, and I have mine. We'll make a deal, you don't try to shove your views down my throat and I won't try to change your mind either, or tell you I think your views are full of shit. Does anyone really think that if I'm eating a burger and someone says to me "you know, a cow died to provide you with that meal", that I'm just going to thwack my head with my hand, say "Of course! Why didn't I see this before! How can I have been so wrong all these years?" and go off and never eat meat or wear leather again? I'm more likely to say something to piss of my "veggie evangelist" like "yup, and damn tasty it is too!", or "Really? I'd better make sure its sacrifice wasn't in vain then", and keep eating (or maybe offer them some).

In the interests of free speech (and pissing off militant veggies), the article can be found here.

My god! A Metro for Dublin?

I just saw this in the newspaper:

"WORK is under way on a new €1.5bn underground DART line through the heart of Dublin city centre, it was learned yesterday.

The interconnector rail line, from Docklands to Heuston Station, will quadruple the greater Dublin area's rail service capacity from the current 25m passenger journeys annually to 100m."

It goes on to say:

" The proposed interconnector route will see DART trains from Balbriggan and Howth branch off after Clontarf Road and go underground at Docklands station, where the line will connect with the Luas.

It will continue to Pearse station, connecting with what will be the Maynooth to Bray/Greystones DART.

At St Stephen's Green it is to connect with the Luas and the Metro to the airport before continuing to High Street and Heuston, again linking with Luas, intercity and commuter trains before continuing above ground to Hazelhatch and the Kildare commuter line. "

Apparently there'll be another DART line from the Docklands down to Heuston as well. So, is Dublin transport finally entering the 20th century???

Then again, they're just talking about it at the moment. Looking at how long it took to do the Luas lines and the Dublin Port Tunnel, I'm not optimistic that I'll see this new integrated public transport system in my lifetime. Hell, they were talking this time last year about being close to putting in a new ticketing system in the city center dart stations, where you had to swipe your ticket through as you exited as well as entered, but there;s no sign of that yet either.

expenses for beijing trip

Well, I'm just after trying to put in my expense report for my trip to Beijing. I'm having some problems with it tho - the tool won't let me enter all my expense items. Every time I try to put in the cost of the apartment rental, I get a message saying "Total of expense items exceeds maximum allowed".

I had to put in a helpdesk call to get it sorted, and was a mite surprised when I got back a mail saying the reason this is happening is because in the expense tool there's an automatic $5,000 limit on any expenses for the Ireland office. Thing is, no-one seems to know about this - none of my managers knew, and it isn't documented on the travel policy that there's a limit either. Seems I'm the first one in the Ireland office to hit this limit! It's not often that I get a warm fuzzy feeling of accomplishment around this place, but I have one today! :-)

Coffee

Well, I went and overdid it on the coffee last night. A few of us went out to a Lebanese restaurant, and of course there was Lebanese coffee on the dessert menu. lebanese coffee is pretty uch as strong as Turkish coffee, but has a few spices added to the mix - not as much as Moroccan coffee (mmmm....) but still pretty strong stuff. What was unusual in this restaurnat was that instead of just bringing along the little shot-glasses of coffee, the waiter brought out the cups, then brought out the coffee pot and poured our drinks - and then left the stil half-full pot on the table! In a moment of madness I did a couple of refills. By about 4am last night I was really starting to regret doing that..... The last one was especially bad, was so thick you could actually feel the coffee grounds on your teeth after. Powerful stuff!

Where is eye-raq again?

I found this article today in the Irish Indo:

Iraq . . . isn't that up near Alaska?

MOST American young people can't find Iraq on a map, even though US troops have been there for more than three years, according to a new geographic literacy study released yesterday.

Fewer than four in 10 Americans aged 18-24 in a survey could place Iraq on an unlabeled map of the Middle East, a study conducted for National Geographic found.

Only about one-quarter of respondents could find Iran and Israel on the same map.

While 69pc of young people picked out China on a map of Asia, only about half could find India and Japan and only 12pc correctly located Afghanistan, where the US has troops.

"I'm not sure how important it is that young adults can find Afghanistan on a map. But that is symptomatic of the bigger issue, and that's (US young adults) not having a sense that things around the world really matter," said John Fahey, president of the National Geographic Society.

Half of respondents said it was "absolutely necessary" to know how to read a map, but a large percentage lacked the basic skills.

In general, natural disasters appear to have a limited impact on young Americans' view of the world.

Only 35pc identified Pakistan as the country hit by a catastrophic earthquake last October and 29pc thought it happened in Sri Lanka.

The study was conducted in face-to-face interviews with 510 respondents in the continental United States in late 2005 and early 2006.

Now this is kinda scary. I know there's the old Gulf War (well, Gulf War I) joke about "Our bombs are smarter than the average high school student - at least they can find Baghdad.", but now it's been proven true! So what exactly do they do in geography class then over there? Then again, we're talking about the country whose education system is based in "the three R's" - Reading, Writing and Arithmetic.......

Reinstalling laptop - again

Well, here I go again. Re-installing my laptop to get rid of all the cruft. Let's see how things bloat out this time:

• Clean WinXP install: 2.50Gb


• All drivers added: 2.63Gb


• Service Pack 2 installed: 3.77Gb


• All windows updates added: 4.67Gb


• All my main apps (browser, firewalls, office etc) installed: 6.08Gb

So, once you have all of your crap up to date and installed, a "workable" windows install comes out as nearly three times the size of what you get from putting in your install CD!

I made one slight little boo-boo tho. Was trying to be smart, and burned a winxp CD with winrar and aceFTP on it, so that as soon as the machine was installed I could FTP over to the machine I backed everything up to on, pull over all my stuff and unrar it in one go - no need to go messing with different install CDs. One slight problem - I should have also added the drivers for my ethernet card onto the CD as well, as aceFTP couldn't connect to the non-existent network to get to the machine to pull things over. Ah well, you live and learn I guess...... I got around it using my trusty iPod - I hooked it up to the machine I had me stuff on, transferred over my drivers, hooked it up to the laptop and away I went!

I finally got to the stage of connecting to automatic updates, and even after I have SP2 installed, I get hit with having to add *43* more "critical security updates", plus another 9 optional software and 2 optional hardware updates. I dunno about you, but any company who produces a big-ass service pack to fix all the issues since the OS released, and then has to throw another 43 critical updates on it a year later, still isn't fully embracing the whole "trusted computing" secure-by-design philosphy.....

another year older :-(

Well, there we go. 28 on sunday. Now I'm officially getting old. Last thing I remember birthday-wise is the lads taking the piss out of me for hitting the quarter-century mark, and now 28? What the hell happened there?

So, what do I have to show for myself at the beginning of year number 28? Not as much as I'd like to. The Beijing trip was a great (and very welcome) break in a pattern of pretty much feck-all happening in my life. I'm 7 years in Sun this july - an eternity to be in any computer company - and the way things are going there's not exactly a huge room for advancement (when has there ever been tho?). I may be our senior engineer but it's advancement by attrition not by promotion, all the ppl who were more senior to me (or at the same level as me) upped and left. I've been living in the same apartment since I moved up to dublin as well, and while my flatmates have changed a few times along the way, nothing else really has - the faces change, the place and the situation remain the same. In terms of my love life, well, if I was a racehorse my racing form would mean I'd have been glue a long ago.

So, lots of things to improve on in the coming year!

pulling teeth

I'm down at home in waterford for the long weekend here, so I'm back in dial-up land. Man, it's like pulling teeth! I've gone from a 3Mb broadband connection in my flat in dublin to a 56k modem connection down here - and it never even connects at 56k, most of the time it dials in at about 42k. I've forgotten what it's like to have to wait as much as a couple of minutes for each page to load. Some sites (like vodafone.ie) I even have to turn off images on 'cos otherwise it just takes too damn long! Sometims living in the city does have its advantages......

Windows crashing error - found?

Well, i think I've discovered why my gfx card has been crashing so much. It always seems to crash whenever I'm browsing the web so I decided to do a search on "ATI +mozilla + crash". The first link I saw gave me this (from the mozilla 1.2.1 release notes):

Using ATI video drivers will lead to random crashes on many sites. Mac OS ATI driver versions affected: All (?) Windows ATI driver versions affected: 5.13.1.6118 (Mac OS) Workaround: set your screen to 'Thousands of colors' rather than 'Millions'. (Windows) Possible Workaround: Revert to an older driver (6094?)-- Untested (Bug 101055)

So, looks like I'm suffering from mozilla bug 101055! Sure enough, I installed Opera instead, and for the last two days I've been crash free. I decided to go back to firefox just to try it out, and within 10 minutes had crsahed again!

the hting is, I don't rally like opera. it just seems clunkier than firefox - even with the fact that I don't have all the extensions I've come to take for granted, there are other things like pages definitely don't load as fast and sometimes images don;t load properly. Could be because it's 9.0 beta, but still. One thing I'm definitely not doing is use IExplore! Maybe when IE7 has been out for a while and ppl figure out how to disable all the sneaky stuff MS have put in.....

Going to download Mozilla 1.7 and see if the smae problem is happening there.

fecking laptop!

Well, I may be back but I didn't leave my laptop's problems behind me. I'm still getting all my display problems: the screen either greys out, goes to a negative image creeping up from the bottom right up, goes completely blank, crashes back to 640x480/16-color resolution or I just get a BSOD related to the ATI drivers. Also, sometimes when I'm playing gams, the machine will just shut down without warning. Naturally as well, all the hard rebooting isn't doing any of my other apps any good - have had to reinstall firefox and bitcomet a few times 'cos they got corrupted after a hard reboot.

It doesn't seem to matter what versions of the ATI drivers I put on, it just keeps on crashing. For a while I thought that one of my firefox tabbrowser extensions was causing some of the havoc, and it does seem like it isn't crashing as much since I got rid of it, but we're still getting crashes. Also, one wierd problem has resurfaced. Before I went to China, I was having some strange errors with the 'e' key not working while I was typing. When I went to China, the problem disappeared. Now that I'm back in Ireland, the problem is back again. Wierd.

Going to do a 'slash-n-burn' on the laptop soon, wipe the entire hard drive and reinstall from scratch. Only prob is, my windows install CD is scratched to shit, and windows is so flakey now that the CD burner won't burn properly - keep getting drinks coasters.

Hopefully that and the gfx thing are software issues, don't fancy sending the laptop back to the shop!

Beijing, the pros and cons

Things I'll miss about Beijing:

• Beijing hot-pot, spicy Szichuan food, and the food in general. Only had one or two bad dishes in 2 months!


• Low prices. Beer for €1, a full 5- or 6-dish meal for maybe €3, a 45-minute taxi ride from one side of the city to the other for €4


• The Metro system - I'm going back to the DART now! :-(


• Being able to stick my hand out on any street at any time and have a taxi within about 30secs.


• Haggling in the marketplaces - it can be surprisingly fun once you get good at it. Rule of thumb, start at about 1/10th of what they do, and if they're not coming down in price fast enough, walk away. The more pissd off the look when you hand over the money, the better the deal you got :-)


• Hot chinese & korean women - seems they keep most of the good-looking ones at home!


• Walking through the hutongs, especially Dazhalan (just south of Tian'anmen) - they're tearing that one down in a few weeks.


• Weds night in Propaganda, my local club. 50 quai (€5) in on the door and all the free cocktails you can drink, plus wall-to-wall hot korean chicks!

Things I won't miss about Beijing

• Being able to talk to maybe 1 in 10 or even sometimes 1 in 20 ppl that you pass on the street


• Having to watch out for every chinese person that come up to you in the street "at random" and starts talking to you in english - they're all trying to scam you in some way


• "looka-looka, special friend price for you" - the pushyness of most of the stall owners in the market places - you take any more than 5 secs to glance at their stuff and they're in your face. SOme of them will actually grab you by the arm and try to drag you into their stall!


• Spitting, everywhere. The women wil be a little bit more ladylike and gob in the nearest bin, but the guys will just hock it up any old where.


• Coming home at the end of a night out with your clothes reekeing of fag smoke. How soon you forget!


• Static shocks. It hasn't rained for so long in Beijing and the air is so dry that you build up a static charge just walking around, and then you get a shock when you go to touch a door handle or something. Was really bad in my apartment - sometimes you could actually see a little electric arc going from my hand to the door!

Catching up a bit - Tokyo.

Well, here I am on the way home, 39,000 feet above the Gulf of Finland, 8hrs into the flight, 2 1/2 to go. Time to catch up on the last few days!

As I've said already, Tokyo was, well, not perhaps as good as it could have been. The fun started in the airport tho, it seems for whatever reason that when you book online with Northwest Airlines, the flight times it gives you are off by about 15mins - I thought I had a 9:20am flight, but when I got to the airport at about 7:30 (plenty of time normally), the board said 9:05. Add to that the long check-in queue and the 3rd degree interrogation I got from the Public Security bureau people and I didn't made it onto the plane with a lot of tome to spare - walked straight from customs through the boarding gate! Maybe it was because the Japan part of the fight I was on was just a layover and the final destination was detroit, but the officials were very paranoid about letting me on - I got frisked twice, got asked loads of questions about what I was doing in china, and they even emptied out my bag and went through it item by item!

Once I got to my hotel in ??, I had an unpleasant realisation: I was suffering from what I called "tourist fatigue" in a previous post, I just didn't really give a damn that I was in japan, and I didn't really care about going out to see any of the touristy things! Tokyo was my 3rd new city in as many weekends, and nearly my 8th weekend in a row of going out doing touristy stuff (I had Paddy's weekend off, but that wasn't exactly relaxing either). I forced myself to go out, but it was more because I was there and I felt I had to rather than because I wanted to. Not a great introduction to a new country!

That night being saturday anyway, I headed out to the club area in Roppongi, which was only a 20min walk from my hotel. It's definitley a different experience to going out back home - most of the bars are in basements or on the 3rd/4th floors of big tall buildings. Also, if you go to the wrong side of the street (which is easy), the streets are full of black guys trying to get you to go into their clubs to see russian girls get their tits (& more) out - massagi, massagi! Now I have a rule of thumb, if you're trying to give me the hard sell to get me to go into your bar, then I definitely ain't going in, and (this is going to sound racist) that goes double if the guy giving the hard sell is black. So, I picked a few non-strip clubs to go into, and it was defintley interestng. Expensive - Y3,000 entry and about Y600 for a beer - but interesting. Japanese women are definitely a lot more liberal than the chinese, and all those rumours you hear about the wierd cosplay outfits are true - my god! I would loved to have taken some pics, but I'd probably have gotten into trouble. Unfortunatley, there was a bit of a language barrier there so I couldn't really chat any of them up (I tried, but failed). Also unfortunately, ppl in Japan tend to go out late, 12-12:30 or so and by the time the place was starting to get really busy and interesting (about 1ish), the day's travel and the 7hrs sleep in the previous 2 days had caught up with me and I had to bow out.

The next morning I checked out of the hotel and moved to the hostel I'd booked for the rest of the trip. I've found before that if you're on your own going somewhere nd you are staying in a hotel, you'll be on your own for the entire trip, which isn't good. If you stay in a hostel tho, you'll always meet up with ppl and end up going out witht hem and stuff. The hostel was in Asakusa, which was billed as the "historic heart of the city" in the blurb on the hostel booking site. Unfortunately I neglected to get me mnap out and see how far from the actual heart of the city the historical heart was - it turned out to be up in the north-west, at the very end of one of the metro lines and pretty much very nearly off my bloody tourist map! Nice area, but about 20mins by metro from Ginza and over 45 from the big shopping areas like Shinjuku or Shibuya.

The next few days I just wandered around at random, not really caring what I saw or did. I didn't even have a guide-book, all I had was a map I'd picked up in the tourist info booth in the airport. if somethign lookd interesting on the map near where I was, then I headed there. Like I said, I'd overloaded on the tourist stuff, so I was like "Hmm, a temple, just like in Beijing or Xian", or "big shopping district, yup, like Shanghai again". Having said that, the shopping areas are damn impressive: you go to Shibuya, Ikebekura, Shinjuku or Ginza after dark and there's so much neon you almost need your shades! Big shiny lights overload!

As I said, I wasn't hugely in tourist mode, so I didn't give a damn really about the usual things like the Meiji Shrine, but it was the little things that interested me there. The vending machines that are on pretty much every street are one - as well as the usual cold drinks, you can get cans of hot coffee out of them! Yes, hot, you put in the money, pop the top of the can, and you're drinking hot coffee, with or without milk (no sugar tho). Another thing was the menus in restaurants. Outside most restaurants they have a glass cabinet, with plastic models of some of the food they're serving inside. And these things look pretty damn realistic! Is a good way to browse the "mneu" before you go in, and handy too. In one restaurant, there wasn't any english menu or one with pictures (my lifesaver in Beijing) and the waiter didn't speak english, so we went out to the front of the place and I pointed to the one I wanted in the window :-) The third strange/quirky thing that got my attention was the tourist iformation maps that were up everywhere. They were very handy, but unlike anywhere else I've ever been, the maps weren't oriented north-to-south but to the direction you were facing when you were reading the map. So, if you were standing facing south-east when you were looking at it, it was oriented with the south-east at the top. Took a fair bit of getting used to!

So, Tokyo. Nice place, just a shame about my timing on going there, I'm sure I would have appreciated it more if I'd gone there directly rather than at the tail end of a longer trip.

Home at last!

Well, I made it home safe and sound anyway. What a trip back! My last day was fairly hectic, I went down to Dazhalan hutong to do a final bit of shopping and then went out for lunch with Dermot, one of the Irish guys. "Lunch" turned into drinks down in Huahai, and I only got back to my apartment at about 6pm, with still all of my stuff to pack, and no tine for one last trip down to the Silk Market. Got everything squared away eventually, nad went straight out to a bar in the Kerry Center to met Mina, the english chick I'd met at the Paddy's day ball. The bar was a fairly swanky place - low lighting, minimalist dcor, liv jazz band in the cornr, full of people in suits networking like a mad thing (loads of swapping business cards) - and 50 kuai beers! Normally the kind of place I'd avoid like the plague, but Mina is a corporat headhunter so she moves through that sort of environment like a fish through water - seemed to know everyone in the bar. She managed to score me a few free drinks off the bar manager so I'm not complaining! After a while Dermott and Fionn turned up, and seeing as they felt as out of place there as I did, we headed off down to Sanlitun to meet Peter and Sylvia, the Austrians I'd gone skiiing with before. We stayed ther a while, tehn ended up back in my usual haunt, Propaganda. As usual with Propaganda, I ended up getting to bed at 3am.

Three hours later, my alarm went off and I had to get up and get ready to lave for good. Things started off badly enough, as I was supposed to drop the keys of the apartment off with the gate guard who'd hand them into the agency later on. Thing is, no-one had told her, and she didn't speak any english, so it took 25min and the help of a few passers-by to get the point across. So, I got tot he airport a bit later than planned, but still a good bit before the normal check-in time, so I could be first in the queue and get away with the overweight luggage.

Or so the plan went anyway. Thing is, when I got there, I got stuck behind a greoup of fecking belgians who seemed to be trying to book their connecting flights from hathrow to brussles at the check-in counter, and who were all at least 7-8kg overweight with their bags. The check-in girl wasn't the most efficient either - I timed her at 15min to check in a group of 3 ppl! So, despite starting to queue at 7:45 for a 10:20 flight, I only got to the counter at about 9:15 - after having only had 8 ppl in the queue ahead of me! Miracle of miracles, my bags squeaked in under the limit - 22.5Kg. Good job they didn't check the weight of my carry-on bag, which I reckon was another 11kg or so!

I managed to get through customs and security with the minimum of hassle (a lot less than when I was going to Japan actually), and the 11hr flight passed like all 11hr flights do - slowly. Unfortunately we hit headwinds on the way over and arrived 15mins late, which meant we lost our gate slot and had to park on the tarmac at heathrow and get bussed into the terminal. The buses took another 10mins to get to us, so by the time I hit the terminal 4 building I had an hour to get to my gate at Terminal 1. Now, while the shortest distance between any two points is supposed to be a straight line, there is no such thing as the shortest distance betwen two points in Heathrow airport, and I just about got to my gate just as they were calling my row number to board - talk about tight timing!

So, finally after another hour and a half flight I was back on Irish soil at last. Unfortunately, I hit the arrivals hall at 5:20, which put me too late to get to Heuston to catch the 6:25 Waterford train (the airport to heuston station in an hour during rus hour on the friday of a bank holiday? Fuggdaboutit!). So, I hopped on the 6:30 Rapid Express bus instead. The word "rapid" in "Rapid Express" seems to come from the same place as the same word in the DART's name, to go the 120-odd miles from the airport to Waterford, it took 1/3 of the tiem that it took to fly the 9,000-odd mils form Beijing to London! Then again, I suppose the 777 didn't have to stop in every pissant little village along the way either. So, at 10pm I got off the bus at last, and by 10:30 I was home, or 23 1/2 hours after my alarm went off to start me on the journey.

Dai Jian Bai Jing!

Well, here we go. It's 6:30am, and I'm just about ready to leave for the airport. Is the 4th time in as many weekends that I've been to Beijing airport, but this tme I'm not coming back. It's a bit sad to be leaving, but also good to go home. Is going to be some culture shock when I get back! I'm a bit tired tho, my going-away party went on until 3am, so hopefully I'll be able to get some sleep on the plane. Next stop, Waterford! (well, via London and and Dublin that is........)

Last day in beijing!

Well, here we are, my last day in China. I have a lot to do today - pack the bags, tidy up the apartment, go out do a final bit of shopping, then head out and start saying my goodbyes. Busy busy busy!

My 2nd last night in Beijing turned out to be a bit of a quiet one tho. I got in from that airport about 10:30pm, and rang around to see who'd be on for going out for one or two. Strangely enough, no-one took me up on the offer! Ah well, hopefully tonight will turn out different.

THis time otmorrow, I'll be just getting on the plane home.....

Rain

Well, when I left Beijing it had rained there once sonce I got there, and only for about an hour or so. I've defintely made up for it here now! It started raining yesterday about lunchtime, and hasn’t really stopped since. Was really heavy earlier today, but is still drizzling most of the time. I guess it's good in a way tho, it's acclimatizing me to the weather I'll be going back home to! 　

Akihabara

Well, to quote Martin Luther King: "I have been to the mountain-top, and I have seen the promised land". If you mention the name "Akihabara" to a computer geek, chances are the response will be similar to if you mentioned "Mecca" to a Muslim. Akihabara is the techy toy district in a country famous for its techy toys. If you're into computer gadgets, chances are it went on sale here well before you even heard of it.

So, what's it like? Well, from all the talk about it you'd expect it to be a cross between Blade Runner and the Jetsons, with everyone whizzing around on theor own private hover transporters and talking into star-trek type tricorders. Well, it's not, it's just a few streets with a load of techy shops on them - you'll see more neon in Shibuya or Shinjuku. The shops themselves tho are mad, most would be 7-8 floors, with laptops and phones on the first floor, cameras on the 2nd, big-ass HDTVs on the third, DVDs on the 4th, games on the 5th etc - and a big-ass collection of japanese manga/porn in the basement. Some shops vary the mix a bit, but that's the general pattern. Then there are shops which just do comics, or models, all that wierd crap the japanese just love. You see some of that stuff maybe in places like Forbidden Planet back home, but that'd be less than 1/10th the quantity & quality in any one of these stores - and there are plenty of stores. I'd love to have taken some pics to show what they're like, but surprisingly, they have a "no photos" policy in most of the shops....

I've said here before that if my friend Louise ever went to the Silk market or the Pearl Market in Beijing, you'd need a SWAT team and a stick of dynamite to get her out again. Well, this would go double for Vicky in Akihabara, and her fiancee Mick would be no help in shifting her out of it 'cos he'd probably be in the store next door! :-) About the only thing that would limit the average geek's spending spree here is the how much space is left in their credit card account and what the luggage allowance is on the flight home. I wasn't really there to shop, and I was soooo tempted on more than one occasion just to say "what the hell" and break out the plastic!

Having said that, I was disappointed in my #1 search when I was there. The one thing I came here with big hopes of getting is a shiny new mobile phone. Well, I hit one big snag in that regard - all the phones here use CDMA, while back home we use GSM, two totally different and incompatible networks. So, I could buy a phone here, but I couldn't use it at home. Also, the quality of the phones here isn't all that great, looks-wise. They may have all these fancy network features under the hood but on the outside they tend to be all clam-shells with fairly clunky cases. Not what I had in mind at all! There are some GSM phones, but they're pretty much the same samsung, motorola and nokia crap you can get back home - no point really. I can actually get a better (usable) selection in Beijing!

I did however pick myself up a nice shiney (well, black case) Sony Cyber-shot DSC-9T camera! Well, I couldn't come home empty handed now could I? :-)

Tokyo

Well,　here I am, in another country where I can't speak the lingo. 8 weeks of building　up my (really basic) chinese skills, and now I'm back to not understanding a word. I have a total of two words of japanese "Konichiwa" and "Arigato" - at least they're useful anyway!

Tokyo is, well, nice. I know I don't sound enthusiastic here, but this is my third city in as many weekends, and my 8th weekend in a row doing the tourist thing. I think I'm suffering from "Tourist Fatigue". I'm sure if I was getting here fresh off the boat (so to speak) I'd be having a ball, but I've been on the go too long. The fact also that I haven't had a load of sleep in the last few days might be a factor as well. So, I'm walking around, pretty much at random not caring whether I see everything or not. I don't even have a guide book, just a map!

That's not to say that I'm not doing the tourist thing, I've been fairly busy. yesterday I managed the Tokyo Tower, Shinjuku & Rappongi despite not getting settled in the hotel until 5pm, and today I got in the Meiji Shrine, Ginza, the Imperial Gardens and Ikebekura. So, not just sitting on my ass!

Anyway, more when I get back to Beijing.

Last day in beijing office!

Wow, where did the time go? I'm on my last day in the Beijing office already! It doesn't feel like two months have passed at all, but this time tomorrow I'll be in Tokyo and this time next week I'll be on the plane home to Ireland.

It's been a bit of a whirlwind two months. I definitely haven't been sitting on my ass here anyway - reckon on average I've been going out doing stuff two out of every three days/nights I've been here (if not maybe a bit more), which isn't too bad a ratio, especially considering all that inconvenient "work" stuff that keeps getting in the way! It's been a bit tiring though, especially the last week. I think I've been out every night since maybe just after I came back from Shanghai 2 weeks ago, and it doesn't look like it'll be stopping any time soon either. I think the next time I'll get a good full night's sleep will be when I get back home! I definitely didn't get it last night anyway. Went out with some of the irish guys for wha probably will be my last visit to the local nightclub (Propaganda, in Wudaokou) and ended up getting in at about 6am! Reckon that's the latest night yet, but not by much.

At least I don't have to worry too much about rushing to get my project done before I leave now. it seems that at some stage over the last few weeks while I've been busting my ass to get it finished for today, working until 7, 7:30 or even pm, the managers decided that there was still too many legal issues to be resolved with the code and so they bumped out the schedule untilt he end of the next quarter in June. Only problem is, they sort of forgot to tell us, the engineers who were actually workign on it (I mean, why would we want to know something as trivial as that?). We knew we weren't going to get everything done by tht iem I left, but we thought we had to have a large section of it finished and released. Now we don't! I love the way Sun works sometimes......

rain!

It's raining here. First time I've seen rain in 2 months! it's not exactly up to the standard of what we get back home, but water defintely is falling fomr the sky. it seems some of the locals aren't quite sure what to do with it, there's been a few "working form home today because of the weather" emails gone out, and a few of them pulled out of my going-away lunch 'cos they said they felt a little sick didn't want to catch cold on the way to the restaurnat. Wimps!

What I am more worried about here is the traffic. I know the way back home that if it hasn't rained for a few weeks the roads get a bit slick and a bit dodgy to drive on. Well, after 3 months without rain here, I shudder to think the amount of slicks we'll get on the roads. It's not like the locals are the safest drivers in the world either...... Will be extra-careful crossing the roads here today!

getting my bags home

I was just looking on the BA website and I reckon I'm going to have a lot of fun with getting my bags home. Apparenlty the weight allowance for non-US international flights with BA is 23kg per passenger, with a penalty of £30 per kilo for overweight bags. This is a bit steep compared to going to the US, where you get to have 32Kg per bag (not per passenger), and get charged £60 per overweight bag (not per kilo). Looks like I may have to lie at the airport, say I'm going to LA or NY, and then once I get through the gate, hop on the correct flight! :-)

One option which I hope may pan out is if I use the automated check-in, when I was flying out here and used that with Are Lingus they never checked teh weight, they just tagged the bags and shoved them on through.

Xi'an

Well, I think I made a tactical error in my weekend travel plans. As I said last weekend, I probably gave myself too much time in Shanghai, and this weekend I didn't give myself enough time in Xi'an.

The trip definitely started off better than Shanghai - for one the plane took off on time so I got in around teh tiem I should have, and then I discovered that China Northwest Airlines ran a minibus service from the airport to town for Y25, so I dind't have to worry about getting fleeced by taxi drivers. the bus drops you in the heart of the city, right beside the Drum Tower, so all I had to do then was a 5-min walk down to the south gate to my hostel! I was booked in and back out on the street for a bit of a wander by 8:30pm, by which point the week before I hadn't even boarded the plane in Beijing!

Again, compared to last week where Shanghai didn't leave me with much of a good first impression, Xi'an was the opposite. Where Shanghai had been dead, Xi'an was buzzing! I went out to see what the South Gate (nan men) looked like by night, and it was pretty impressive.


Lots of people around, even at 10pm!

I wandered around a bit then, up to the Drum & Bell towers, up around the Muslim Quarter, and then managed to find a restaurant which had an english menu. I decided to see if Xi'an hotpot was as good as Beijing hot-pot, and it's pretty close all right. After stuffing my face on semi-identifiable meats, I left the restaurant intent on more sightseeing, but by that stage a dust storm had blown up. Within a few mins it was blowing pretty string, and ppl were scurrying for whatever cover they could find. Nasty stuff dust storms, gets in your eyes, your mouth, up your nose, so I decided at that stage to call it a night and go back to the hostel.

Next morning I was up bright and early (ish), and decided to head and see the Terracotta Warriors. I decided to decline the Y165 tour that the hostel was running and instead went for the slightly cheaper option of taking the locla bus for Y8 return! As I've done so many times in Beijing tho, I misunderstimated teh distance between the south gate and thetrain station, and what looked an easy stroll on the map turned into a 45min hike. I eventually got there anyway, and after literally having to fight my way onto the 306 bus out to Bingmayong I made it out to the museum by about 11am.

The first thing that struck me about the museum was that they could have put the car park about 500m closer to the museum entrance than they did, but i guess what would mean the tourists would have less distance to run the gauntlet of souveneir hawkers and freelance tour guides (Y150 for an hour's tour apparently), and you have to support local enterprise I guess. he second thing that struck me was that you come a liong wayt o see not very much, as in the first pit I went into (pit 2) they stll hadn't uncovered the roofs of most of the chambers holding the figures, so all you could see was a few trenched dug in the dirt and a few fragments of figurines. I'm sure it'll be impressive enough in a few years when thy aactually dig all the guys out tho.

And then I got to Pit 1, and the real deal.

There's apparenly over 6,000 in the main chamber, and they reckon they could find at least up to 10,000 when they dig them all out. What got me was tho that rather than taking the easy way out, having 1 or two moulds and churning out 6,000 near-identical figures, it looks like every figure has different facial features and expressions, and are slightly differnt sizes, just like a real army would have. Now that's attention to detail!

After soaking in the sights for awhile, I headed back to Xian city where I had a lot to do and not mcu time to do it in. So, after already been walking around all morning, I went to see the drum tower, the bell tower, the mosque (walked by but didn't go in, not that impressive apparently), the Forest of Stelaes museum, and the market place by the south gate. After that, not being content with the paltry amount of exercise I'd gotten, I went up on the city walls, where you can hire a bike and ride along the top of the wall around the whole city! So, i did just that, and did the 14km round trip in about 70mins. The wall is damn inpressive, about 12m high and 15m at the top - you could stick a road along the top if you wanted to.
It was 700-year-old paving stones tho, and on the high nelly bike I had it was definitely a teeth-rattling ride!

After that, I decided enough was enough for one day so headed out to get some food from the street vendors. I don't know what I had, but it was tasty and one of the deep-fried things I had on skewers could have been chicken. I had every intention then of heading out to see the Xi'an nightlife, but when I hit the hostel I got chatting to a few other travellers and ended up drinking beer and playing pool in the hostel bar until 1:30am.

Four hours later I was up and about again, to check out and get to the airport for my 8:30am flight (which is what I get for choosing cost over convenience). I'd been a bit wary of how to get back to the airport, as I'd heard stori aboutt eh Xi'an taxi drivers offering you what seems like a reasonablly cheap price to get there, but then stopping the taxi half-way out the motorway and threatening to dump you htere if you don't pay at last double. Luckily, the same bus I'd gotten into town started its return trips at 6am so I was spared discovering if that were true. Things passed uneventfully and I was back in my flat in Wudaokou by 10:30, or about the time I'd be waking up normally!

So, Xi'an, lovely place, so much to see and do that I only covered less than half. Anohter place to add to my list of "must see" next time I come back to china!