(Please note: this was all written last week. Or on the weekend. Or something. Oh, I don't know anymore. Anyway I hadn't been to the East Coast Blogmeet yet.)
Through the miracles of modern blogging, you may or may not see this part two before you see the first or even second parts of part one. You see, I’ve donated part one to Zoe who is rather busy with her not-exactly-top-secret project that may or may not have something to do with writing a literary magnum opus. So over at her place, you’ll see part one (in two parts, part one part one and part one part two) in two parts, said parts of which each may, in part, precede this part two.
At least, that’s my understanding of how it’s going to work.
EDIT: actually, part one part one and part one part two are already posted here, too. It's all very confusing really.
So – having spectacularly failed to update any of you my actual time at The Great Big Genome Centre That Isn’t Terribly Close To Anywhere In Particular™, I find myself on a plane.
Again.
It’s different this time though… one of those spiffy Airbus things with the back-of-seat, on-demand entertainment systems. You know, the kind where you irritate the person in front of you by punching the touchscreen to select your menu choices, flipping through all of the options just in case there might be something slightly better than Music and Lyrics, featuring that same baffled British actor as was in the movie you avoided watching crossing the Atlantic in the opposite direction, three days ago.
As I write this, I’m actually watching some concert video of Coldplay, live in Canada. And I can say this: they’re not as crap as I’d always suspected. So now you know. But the other options are just too dismal to itemize here.
Other things I have learned during this trip:
1) The pied wagtail is a very handsome little black and white bird that runs around on the ground in an endearing manner.
2) There is no free wireless internet in Heathrow airport, despite the prevalence of unsecured wireless networks. You connect, and are immediately presented with one of several screens describing in agonizing detail the various and assorted ways in which one might pay for internet access. Faced with this, the coin-operated terminals in the “overflow seating area” of Terminal 3 look positively democratic.
3) A cab from that Genome Centre to Heathrow is over 100 UK pounds. I have now set a new record, far surpassing the $60 US I spent getting from Phoenix Sky Harbor airport to Scottsdale.
4) Coldplay songs all kind of sound the same.
And I’m now on my way to a certain East Coast Airport where I shall, if all goes well, meet legendary Blogger, Theatre Person, Photographer, and Performer Of Many Choral Works™ Dawn, unless our plans completely fail. Either way, I’ll doubtless tell you all about it some time later, possibly appearing either before, during or after this post, part one of part one, part two of part one, or maybe just not at all if I can’t get the timing right.
It’s very complicated to be me.
Showing posts with label airlines. Show all posts
Showing posts with label airlines. Show all posts
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
And here we are again, in transit
You can read this over at Zoe's blog as well, but her waffle-powered Belgian computer has messed up all the coding and the links and all that. So you get it here, too.
Part I
I was on a plane. Again.
Fortunately, I slept through most of both movies (two movies? I guess it’s been a while since I flew trans-Atlantic. Such opulence!). Since the first was Eragon, which, truth be told, was an epic, not terribly well written, but nevertheless eminently readable book turned into a rather dreadful movie with a peculiarly muppet-like dragon, and the second was that Bridget Jones donkey with Colin Firth looking all manly and Rene Zelwegger doing her usual squinty acty thing, all references to a suitably baffled and annoying Hugh Grant incorporated by implication, I can’t say that I’m really upset.* It beats my usual experience of wanting to watch the movie and finding the sound to be completely shot, which, believe me, happens a lot more frequently to me, personally, than you might imagine.
Surprisingly enough, the airplane breakfast was quite tasty, a curiously flavourless fruit plate notwithstanding. Bewilderingly, the salt and pepper paper sachets were accompanied by a second set of plastic containers, these in the shape of miniature hockey pucks. The pepper had a slogan in Canada's Other Official Language™; something about “hockey being everything”. The salt, anachronistically, simply said “Have A Nice Day”. I was surprised by the AirCanadaOmelette, which was quite edible and came with some rather nice potatoes and a dollop of zingy but not-too-hot salsa. Believe me, it far surpassed the now-legendary Particularly Nasty Omelette™ that Mrs. Ricardipus and I had the dubious pleasure of consuming on a British West Indies Airlines flight to Antigua, circa 1991. A picture taken on that vacation is here; there is, thank goodness, no corresponding picture of the omelette in question. Bleeeeurgh is the only appriate [Author’s note – amusing typo left stet] descriptor that I can think of right now.
Bug spray on the plane, ground crabs the size of antelopes, everybody trying to sell you everything constantly, and airplanes that Air Canada saw fit to de-commission and sell to the suckers at BWIA, made up the rest of that vacation. Enough said, I believe, on that topic.
*That, my friends, may just be the longest sentence I’ve ever written.
Part II tomorrow.
Part I
I was on a plane. Again.
Fortunately, I slept through most of both movies (two movies? I guess it’s been a while since I flew trans-Atlantic. Such opulence!). Since the first was Eragon, which, truth be told, was an epic, not terribly well written, but nevertheless eminently readable book turned into a rather dreadful movie with a peculiarly muppet-like dragon, and the second was that Bridget Jones donkey with Colin Firth looking all manly and Rene Zelwegger doing her usual squinty acty thing, all references to a suitably baffled and annoying Hugh Grant incorporated by implication, I can’t say that I’m really upset.* It beats my usual experience of wanting to watch the movie and finding the sound to be completely shot, which, believe me, happens a lot more frequently to me, personally, than you might imagine.
Surprisingly enough, the airplane breakfast was quite tasty, a curiously flavourless fruit plate notwithstanding. Bewilderingly, the salt and pepper paper sachets were accompanied by a second set of plastic containers, these in the shape of miniature hockey pucks. The pepper had a slogan in Canada's Other Official Language™; something about “hockey being everything”. The salt, anachronistically, simply said “Have A Nice Day”. I was surprised by the AirCanadaOmelette, which was quite edible and came with some rather nice potatoes and a dollop of zingy but not-too-hot salsa. Believe me, it far surpassed the now-legendary Particularly Nasty Omelette™ that Mrs. Ricardipus and I had the dubious pleasure of consuming on a British West Indies Airlines flight to Antigua, circa 1991. A picture taken on that vacation is here; there is, thank goodness, no corresponding picture of the omelette in question. Bleeeeurgh is the only appriate [Author’s note – amusing typo left stet] descriptor that I can think of right now.
Bug spray on the plane, ground crabs the size of antelopes, everybody trying to sell you everything constantly, and airplanes that Air Canada saw fit to de-commission and sell to the suckers at BWIA, made up the rest of that vacation. Enough said, I believe, on that topic.
*That, my friends, may just be the longest sentence I’ve ever written.
Part II tomorrow.
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