We’re in Munich airport again, this time waiting for a flight to Dublin. We are in Terminal 1 this time, the older one, which is basically all non-Lufthansa flights. I personally find this terminal mostly easier and faster to get through, as some of the gates are no more than ten metres from the security checkpoints.  Those are pretty quick too, with at least four lines operating at a time and four or five entrances to the terminal.  Check-in and security took no more than 15 minutes and now we get to kick back for half an hour before boarding.

I checked out a pair of sunglasses earlier, and think I have finally come up with a decent pair that sits well on my face and looks good.  My nose is crooked, which means that sunglasses mostly look shit on me, but these ones may actually work.  Anna likes them too, which is kind of a pre-requisite.  They’re called “Whisker”, by Oakley, and come in brown with transitions lenses.  They are also bloody expensive, so I’m going to pick up a pair when we get back, possibly over ebay.

My Dad turns fifty on Monday, so we’re having a large party for him.  Last time I was talking to Mum about it, all of my parents siblings were coming (eleven of them including husbands & wives), and potentially some of my numerous cousins.  There are a few surprise visitors too, and some old friends of the family.  Later on Saturday, the rest of Trim have been invited to come and partake of a few bevvies and join in the celebration. All in all it promises to be a fun day, provided the weather holds out.

We’re probably up close to cruising altitude for this leg of the journey, and most of this part of central Germany is covered in cloud.  It was raining earlier in Munich, and well, miserable.  Up here its lovely and sunny though, with a snow-like carpet of cloud far below.  I have U2’s Vertigo Tour Live playing on my MP3 player, with my headphones completely killing the noise of the A320.  We’re bearing 310° and I think I’m gonna veg out with my book for a while.  We were delayed about an hour on the ground and I’m more tired than I expected.  Anna was saying earlier that we should travel only by train next year for holidays, and that sounds just fine right now. I’ll post this later when I get to my parents.

We’re home from Göteborg now, and have a couple of days downtime before we set off for Ireland.  I still haven’t figured out how to spell that city name in the previous sentence, as I have three of them available to me : English, Swedish and German.  Obviously the Swedish would be preferable, but that entails using an extended character which means opening another application.  The straight English “Gothenburg” is an option to counter that, but it doesn’t feel right either. I have the same problems with Munich and München too.

The day before yesterday we were in a theme park called Liseberg, which is apparently the oldest theme park in all of Scandinavia.  We didn’t go on all that many rides to be honest, in part because they were fairly old, and in part because they just didn’t look all that exciting.  I did take a trip on one awesome ride though, called Kanonen (The Cannon).  Its a roller coaster, where you accelerate very fast at first, and then stay there while it goes around the track.  Think about the fastest kick you’ve ever gotten from an airplane taking off.  That doesn’t come close to the acceleration of this ride, it was just incredible.  Zero to sixty in under two seconds.  For all that, it felt completely safe.  We were hurtling around these enormous metal girders in a car made of fibreglass, but the grip the car maintained on the track and the control exerted over the speed were uncanny.  I’ve never felt such a sense of completely in control / completely out of control before.  Awesome stuff indeed.

Anyway, I read earlier on the BBC that there was an accident on one of the rides yesterday. Nobody was killed, but twenty people were seriously injured.  Some were thrown out of a ride, and some were injured when that ride fell about three meters to the ground.  Not cool at all.

Our hotel wasn’t quite what I had been expecting.  It was lovely, and did have a splendid view over the city, but it was probably a luxury hotel ten years ago. Today it was more shabby-chic than luxurious. Still, a pretty good choice all in all.  If we had known we would have looked at staying in that four-masted floating pleasure palace in the harbour.  Its an old barque called the Barken Viking which we had a peek inside while we were there, and it was very nice indeed on the inside. There are only ten ships of this type left in the world.

The rest of Göteborg was really nice. We took a trip out to Elfsborg fortress, which is a small defensive island in the harbour.  The guides there were in period costume and played two characters who were closely linked with the fortress and its use as a defence against the Danes.  We also shopped a fair bit which probably isn’t that unusual for us on holiday, but the biggest shopping mall in all of Sweden was just there…

Our trip here was actually shorter than we had planned.  The airline pilots from Lufthansa City Line were on strike the day we were supposed to travel there.  We didn’t know this until we got to the airport (early in the morning!) and got shuttled to a desk where we could look for alternative transport.  Trains to Göteborg would have taken our whole holiday though, so we elected to fly out the next day instead.  This was the first time I have ever flown without travel insurance, and the damn airplane was delayed by a day.  If my Amex insurance was still active then that delay would have entitled us to take a shopping trip to the tune of about £4,000 to compensate us for the inconvenience.  ::sigh::

We made it to Götheburg today at about midday, after saying Goodbye to Helgi and Emma.  Helgi plays football for Borås, who are currently second in the top league here.  Their unbeaten nine-match winning streak came to an unfortunate a one-nil end yesterday. We were there for it and Helgi won the player of the match however, which means he gets to drive their sponsor’s Porsche Boxer for a few days.  Nice car :-)  I mentioned a while back that I could easily get back into liking football again and this was another point in favour of that.  The stadium we were in was pretty small (I think it seats about twenty or thirty thousand), but the view was awesome.  We were close enough to the players that it was easy (even with my eyesight) to see the expressions on their faces, but far enough away to see the big picture overview of the play. I had fun there, which while not exactly a surprise, was more than I expected.

So Götheburg today was nice.  The weather was warm, with temperatures in the mid twenties, and clear skies. Forecast for tomorrow is for slightly cooler (~20°C), but clear and sunny, which helps.  It rained yesterday in Borås, a lot, and we couldn’t explore the town as much as we would have liked. Still, we did discover that Swedes (Svear in Swedish) have great taste in coffee, and like sweets.  They really like sweets apparently.  We were in a supermarket and about an aisle and a half were taken over by sweets. Liquorice forms the basis for a large quantity of Swedish sweets, and that was evident throughout about fifty percent of the sweet aisle. The coffee shop was also chock full of different pastries too, though there wasn’t time to check them out in detail.  We’ll get to that soon enough.

Right now, we have checked into out hotel and are chilling out for the day.  We’re both pretty tired, so we’re going to just take it easy for a while.  We ate earlier in the Hard Rock Cafe, though that wasn’t a planned decision.  We found ourselves on the Avenyn (actual name is Kungsportsavenyn) which turned out to be far more touristy than we had hoped it was going to be.  So, instead of looking for a restaurant somewhere else (we were hungry!) we just picked Hard Rock Cafe.  We’ll start the cultural tour tomorrow then ;-)

I mentioned in the last post that Anna’s company had bought us a new bike. They had actually commissioned eight hundred and fifty of them (Munich has its 850th birthday this year), and they’re pretty cool bikes.   They were made by a local company who were about to close down due to competition from the larger companies (damn you Raleigh). We took ours home on Saturday and I’ve been out on it a couple of times.  It is actually a lovely ride for a “Town Bike” – seven gears with a fairly large ratio difference from top to bottom, and hub as opposed to derailleur gears. It also has an alternator instead of a dynamo, so power to its comprehensive LED lighting system  is effortless.

It did in all fairness need a fair amount of tightening up, particularly around the stem and brakes.  Still, that’s all done now and it is really nice.  If nothing else, it makes the local Rewe supermarket very accessible. By foot it would take about twenty minutes to walk there, but by bike its more like five or ten so its no big deal at all.

Okay, so its 10:30 and we’re in a small Lufthansa CRJ900 somewhere over Germany. I’m tired, and grumpy and have probably had too much of that shit airport coffee that you get at the gate in Munich. We were supposed to fly out yesterday, but the flight was delayed by a strike. Its probably a good thing though, as Anna picked up some kind of stomach bug over the last few days and is only just getting better now.

Yesterday morning we got up at some silly hour and lugged out heavy baggage to the airport.  It didn’t take too long as the airport is only twenty or twenty five minutes by train from us. It is also a direct train, so we don’t have to go through the hassle of changing three times like we did in London. So we got there and went to check in at the machines and there was a notice that the flight had been cancelled.  Fuck!  So we talked to some attendant who sent us upstairs to a different desk where we queued for about 30 minutes to talk to someone.  While there a film crew came around reporting on the ongoing pilot’s strike that was affecting Lufthansa City Airline.

Unlike other countries, there seems to be a tradition here of official planned short-period strikes. It is very well organised and they usually make contingency plans for when it happens, but that wasn’t much help to us.  They were offering train connections to anyone travelling within Germany or to neighbouring countries, where the rail connections are excellent.  Unfortunately for us there wasn’t a quick way to get to Götheburg by train. It would have involved going around the Baltic through Finland and would have taken just too long.  So we organised another flight for this morning and took that instead.

Do you know what the real pain in the ass was?  I cancelled our travel insurance with American Express a couple of months ago when I cancelled our Platinum cards.  In seven years of having that awesome travel policy I have never had to use it.  If we had been covered by it yesterday then we could have gone shopping with our Amex cards to the tune of £2000 EACH and they would have covered everything.  Awesome? Yes. Untimely? Definitely.  Annoying as all hell? Fuck yes.  But hey, we did get some vouchers for very nice Thai food at the restaurant so we took that home with us.

Anna started throwing up late on Sunday evening.  We had been to her company summer party on Saturday and ate and drank a lot (who knew light Weissbier was SO awesome?). We had originally thought that there was something wrong with the food at the party, but I ate some of the same things that she did, and it all seemed to be very well cooked so I don’t think that was it. She has starting to feel better now (we’re in Sweden and its 22:30 now) though, and has eaten some food.

Emma and Helgi (let me know if I have spelled Helgi correctly, and if you don’t want your names published), and their daughter Lillia have all made us feel very welcome and comfortable.  Emma used to go to university with Anna, and now lives here with Helgi, a professional footballer from Iceland that she met years ago.  He plays for a team near Götheburg so they moved here a couple of years ago.  Their place is lovely; its a small hamlet of houses outside the town with nothing to do except enjoy the fresh air and walk around the ground-skiing / walking / roller skating trail through a local forest. 

It was interesting to catch up with them.  For one thing, I thought Helgi was blonde, but he isn’t.  I accurately remembered his face and… him from the one time I met him in the past (at some dimly light UCL party in London a few years back), but somewhere along the way I forgot that he wasn’t blonde.  I don’t know why I thought that he was; maybe some biased opinion I have of Icelander men or something?  Either way he actually has far darker hair than I remember.  Emma has since had a child too, which was pretty interesting as the last time we saw her was in London a couple of years ago when she was pretty heavily pregnant. All change!

Okay, so I’m really tired now and need to get some sleep.  To illustrate that point, I just spelt “some” as “smoe”, so its all going downhill now.  I can’t post this now because they don’t have a wireless connection (though they do have fast broadband, can’t wait to try that out), so I’ll publish tomorrow.

Yesterday we were looking to book some flights to Dublin for my Dad's birthday later in the year.  There are only two carriers flying direct between Munich and Dublin; Aer Lingus and Lufthansa. Unortunately Lufthansa seem to only fly on some days of the week, and we were looking for something more precise than their schedules.  Aer Lingus fly twice a day, and at first glance appear to be cheaper. 

I have to say I find the experience of booking with them to be very irritating. The first thing is that you appear only to be booking for one person, even if you have multiple passengers selected at the front page.  I went back a couple of times to check if that was an error on my part before proceeding, but it obviously was some quirk they thought would make the process more transparent. ie: price per customer rather than total price.  I can almost see how it would make sense, if they hadn't completely fucked it all up later in the process.

The next is that their session time isn't set to be too long, so one has to go fairly quickly through the pages in order to not have the transaction time-out and avoid restarting from scratch. I only had to do this once, but the simple fact that I actually had to go back and restart my transaction again from scratch irritated me no end. By the time I had figured out which dates we were going to fly, how long we were going to go for, and what times of the day we could fly, the process had to be restarted.  Now, I don't know about you, but I rarely know in advance that I want to fly at 19:00 on a Friday.  I typically know the days I want to fly, but there are so many variables when I book flights in advance that I can change my mind significantly.Aer Lingus's web site doesn't want that.  It wants you to know before you load it exactly when you're booking for, and you have no more than a few minutes per page to process those pages.  Also note that there is a LOT of small print to be read.

I have to pay (preferably in advance) for my luggage to go on the hold.  I discovered that only after I had gone sufficiently far into the process that it was just too much hassle to quit, and I had no backup plan anyway as they fly the most regularly on our route. It is a fairly large amount too - €18 per bag for a return flight.

After entering my credit card details and getting the transaction processed, I was presented with a further page telling me that I had to pay for seats. What.The.Fuck. Seriously... think about that for a minute.  Why would they go to the hassle (and expense for them) of running two transactions against my credit card for the same flight? Never mind the fact that I had just paid €400 for flights, now I have to pay for my seats too? What if I had said "no"?  Surely there's a cause for someone suing them for bait and switch sales practices?

So, my words of advice to you are these.  Aer Lingus has gone completely mad.  They used to be an airline I liked to fly with, and would chose over others if I had the chance, but no longer. Enough is enough.  Next time we get to say a warm and fuzzy "Fuck you, Aer Lingus". Next time we're flying Lufthansa (if it actually is Lufthansa and not an Aer Lingus codeshare).

It looks like I didn't have a chance to post while I was here, and this is the first time I've gotten to a PC since getting out of the office.  I'm not going to post much either, but we're having a brilliant time.  We've been to Anna's dig, King City, San Luis Obispo, LA, Santa Barbara, Monterey and now San Francisco, and there's just too much to talk about.  I'll get a decent post done as soon as I get back to London.  We've also picked up the images from LA and Santa Barbara, and they're great.  Anna had her photos developed today too... all eight rolls of them ;-)  Anyway, gotta run...

Made it, and in style too.  BA upgraded me even though I didn't ask them for it.  I looked at the queues in Heathrow to checkin, and said "Fuck-it, I'm going to check in at the automatic machines".  So I did, and discovered when I had gotten to the gate that I had been bumped to business class, which was cool.  One of the flight attendants on the plane turns out to have been from Passage, where I grew up, and has since moved to Crosshaven, which is just five miles down the road from where I lived.  The flight took us over Salt Lake City and Las Vegas, and I picked up some great photos of those.  I'll stick them on the web when I get home. Right now, I'm in our office in Los Angeles, getting some mail done while my contact is on a conference call.  It's been a productive morning so far.  After I get out of here, I'm going to San Luis Obispo, where I will meet Anna in the morning.  Can't wait :-)))

There's always a shit side to travelling, and this is it:  Its 05:30, and I've been up for half and hour already.  The cab is coming to pick me up at 6 and take me to the airport.  Ouch.

You know what?  I'm beginning to think running this blog on a managed server with .Net is actually a bad thing.  Now, I don't know if there's something I'm doing wrong, but sometimes it takes an age to show pages.  It might be that the caching isn't behaving as I thought it should, or it might be that the server needs to reload the compiled code or something, but its beginning to piss me off.  Its bad enough that I have to admit I miss the old ASP / VB Script days when everything simply loaded.  Unfortunately, I've changd this blog so damn much that that isn't an option anymore, without going back to scratch and doing it all over again.  There are bits on this page that get re-used over and over again, like the buttons on the left and the top and bottom bits.  They're the same on each page, so I broke them out into components.  The only thing that changes is the "content" that you're looking at now.  I though at the time that this was a great idea, and it certainly helped me understand asp.net more, but now I'm not so sure.  Maybe I'll take a look at it again when I get back from holidays.

I'm off to California on Wednesday, for a meeting with some of our technical folks, and then two weeks of holidays.  I'm hooking up with Anna at her mission on Friday morning, though I have to take a seven hour bus ride to get there, one day after a twelve hour flight from London.  Ouch.  Anyway, I'm just about all packed, though I have to get some clothes dried and ironed yet, and I'm crap at ironing.  Two shirts took me nearly half an hour earlier, so I gave up and got some lunch.  I'll probably not post from California, but should have some good photos when I get back to post.  Oh, I still have to fix the damn photo album module...