!@#$ing drunkards outside...

Yet another early morning reminder of how much I dislike New Zealand and it's people...

I think if I should ever manage to return to living in Finland I'm going to buy our team many rounds of beer. See you guys sometime in the next few decades. :(

Me, travel, and fail

It seems I'm rather prone to running into some kind of fail during my travels. Previously the Icelandic Volcanic ash Cloud, and now a rather strong earthquake has hit Christchurch several days before my flight there.

Airports ftw... yeah...

I've finally made it back to Helsinki although my dislike for airports has probably reached monumental levels by now... Unfortunately I had a lot of bad transfers; most of them about 6 hours. Long enough to be annoying, but too short to get a hotel and some sleep. Next time, I'll plan a multi-stop journey so that I can actually sleep during the ~36+ hour journey. Bill Hicks is right on the money when it comes to children on airplanes.

I didn't take many pictures during my vacation, but here's a good reason to remember to fill out the "stop delivering junk mail" form before leaving for over a month. I also have to replace my house plant. The post office apparently doesn't use any no-junk-mail stickers. Quite fun sorting through that to find the important mails...


I brought back some nice teas from Australia: Indian Spice and Turkish Apple. Which is really just sugar, citric acid, and other flavorings (well, it tastes nice anyway.)

Apparently it must have looked interesting enough for customs to open my suitcase. The tea box was left open, but they were nice enough to not rummage through everything... The resemblance is uncanny though.



Now just to sort out paper-work and other miscellaneous things, then back to the office tomorrow (hopefully not totally jet-lagged.)

Mother Nature's a cold hearted bitch...

Unfortunately due to the EU airspace being closed because of the volcanic ash cloud I wasn't able to make it back to Helsinki; I ended up getting stuck in Hong Kong for a night (which was kind of cool; apart from the exceptionally expensive Airport Hotel.)

Yeah, I was lazy and got the closest place, optimistically thinking this might only last a day or two. Finally I decided to get a flight back to New Zealand rather than stay for an unknown period of time in Hong Kong. I don't even want to think about the number of timezones I've crossed in the course of this fiasco... I'm sure the jet-lag will hit hard.

Finnair are offering a refund for unused tickets (once they get around to processing it) so hopefully I will get at least some of my airfair back.

Oh, and if I never hear the words "final boarding call" or "passengers on flight..." again, it will be far too soon.

Start of my vacation in New Zealand...

After the initial ~35 hours worth of flying and airports (I swear the food gets worse every international flight) and accidentally letting my visa lapse, resulting in a fine from Finnish immigration, I've made it back to New Zealand. (Well, actually a couple of days ago, but I was lazy about updating.)

Fortunately I had an overnight lay-over in Sydney so I was able to get a hotel room for the night, have a shower, and sleep on a real bed. My schedule doesn't look so good on the return flight, though.

I'm having a fairly relaxing vacation so far, with the exception that I'm going to need to have some wisdom teeth removed. The dentist in Helsinki thought they would be fine, but considering pain is the body's way of telling the mind something is wrong, and after seeing the X-ray myself, I'm going with the second opinion. Hopefully this won't ruin my planned trip to Melbourne too much; apparently the recovery time is about a week.

I have been doing a little programming on personal projects, even though I said I wouldn't... :-) The next book that I want to read, Sleepless by Charlie Huston doesn't seem to be available in any bookstores in NZ yet. Perhaps I can pick that up in Melbourne; it's not worth the shipping costs for a single book from Amazon (UK or US) to New Zealand (although to Helsinki from the UK site is quite reasonable.)