The journey to Cristina
Thursday, August 17th - actually did most of my packing the night before. Left work at 16:00 (an hour early) so I'd have two hours for final packing. Took the car across the street to the mechanic and left the key in their mailbox, they'll fix it up while I'm gone so it can get the roadworthy certificate.
Actually was all packed about half an hour early so spent half an hour pondering if I'd forgotten anything. Naturally didn't think of the thing i ended up forgetting.
18:30 set out on foot to walk the mile or so to the train station to catch the last train of the day to Melbourne
19:13 train arrives. Nice and peaceful journey. When the conductor came by and i was going to buy a ticket, he could only accept cash ($10), which i actually had none on me at all, so he just shrugged and said it was okay.
21:07 arrive southern cross, the main station in Melbourne (there's actually a station called main and maybe it once was but ironically now it carries the name but is not the main anymore. Ten minutes later caught a metro train headed north. Rode that for a half hour (was able to pay this on my Melbourne transit card) to a station called Gowron or Gowrie some such Klingon name. Walked half an hour further north to my hotel. Since i have to be at the airport at 6:30 and live three hours away i had decided to stay in a hotel nearby. All the hotels closer to the airport than ten minutes were over $200 a night. This one just 11 minutes away was $140, more expensive than any of our hotels in Colombia (one of which is five stars!) and looked like a prison cell:
Friday, August 18th, 06:00 - woke up to messages from Cristina that they'd just had a 6.1 magnitude earthquake in Colombia (she arrived the 16th and was staying with cousins). She had been concerned about earthquakes before the trip and i'd been telling her the danger from earthquakes was overblown, and here she immediately experienced a very strong one! She said she was very afraid. There was only one death from the earthquake -- a 26 year old Venezuelan woman who had also only arrived in Bogota the day before panicked and jumped out of a 7th floor window to her death.
06:30 - uber arrived within two minutes of calling it. $25ish dollars for the 11 minute ride to the airport. Uber has a new function where you can schedule ahead, I'd looked at it the night before but it costs twice as much, such sauce! Anyway my driver was a nice Iranian fellow who said he's been in Australia ten years. I took him to be about fiftyish but when i asked what he did in Iran before coming here he said he was a student (studying Persian language) so maybe I misjudged his age in the dark.
As i walked into the airport i realized what I'd forgotten and it was a real face-palmer -- as ALWAYS i forgot one of the _four_ travel pillows i already have and had to buy a fifth one. They're outrageously overpriced at the airport ($34) but do make trying to sleep on the plain a lot more practicable.
Flight originally scheduled to depart 9:30 didn't depart until 10:47. Apparently a lot of passengers were freaking out about their connections because the head flight attendant went on the announcement system several times mentioning that there are 151 passengers with connections so none of them are alone in their situation and United will reschedule their onward flights if they miss them. With a 3.5 hours layover in LAX myself i wasn't terribly concerned.
My seat neighbour inexplicably disappeared an hour into the flight and never reappeared.
In Flight Movie Reviews:
Total Recall - hadn't seen this Schwarzenegger classic so i thought I'd give it a go. Other than a bit of campiness inherent in 80s movies i felt like it was pretty good. Schwarzenegger is/was a fun action star. One big difference i noticed compared to modern action movies is it had random civilians dying in crossfire all over the place. That really doesn't happen in modern movies. Altogether a solid B+
Wick series - I'd been hearing a lot about this series so i thought I'd give it a go. It indeed is kind of fun for an action movie. Lots of big well choreographed fight scenes. And somehow no bystanders were ever injured! In fact frequently fighters get murdered right in front of crowds and people just keep walking around them as normal. Plot is kind of dumb, it seems literally like every fifth person in the world is part of an _extremely_ regimented guild of assassins, but hey it is what it is, which is a vehicle for lots and lots of fighting. I give it a B in general for dumb plot, but if you're literally just looking for lots of fighting it's an A for that.
Landed after 13.5 hours at LAX. at 7:35 am August 18th, ie three hours before i left (but 00:35 Melbourne time the 19th), to learn that Cristina had experienced another earthquake, presumably an aftershock. And southern California was facing its first ever tropical storm warning. So i got right out of there?
Actually got through passport control and baggage in LAX very quickly, took off again at 10:23 (03:23 origin time)
Three hours later at Houston just enough time to make the connection (just over an hour). It was 93f and i was still wearing all my Melbourne layers so on the interterminal bus and our plane before it took off i was roasting.
My strangely good luck at having a vacant seat next to me all the time failed me this time and i was seated next to a guy who wasn't particularly fat or anything but just seemed to think nothing of not only taking the arm rest between us but letting his arm invade my airspace a bit, even if it meant being in contact with my arm he was undeterred, ugh.
This flight had the Banshees of Inversherin so i was able to finally finish it, though i think i reviewed it last time.
Watched another action movie called Operation Fortune. I had liked Jason Statham way back in the Transporter but in this one he was more along the lines of just boring hyper-macho guy. Been hanging out with Vin Diesel too much perhaps. But Audrey Plaza was in this movie too and i love her craziness. Altogether the movie was alright, i give it a B
Arrived in Bogota on time. Cristina was coming with a taxi so i awaited her in the baggage claim so i wasn't just waiting outside. Didn't realize my half hour of free internet from the airport had expired as i was waiting so i turned on my US phone to active the $10 a day service while abroad, was then alarmed to discover i had missed calls from Cristina from ten minutes earlier. Scampered out and met her outside at the top of an escalator. I wanted to run up to her but that would have been difficult with my luggage so i arrived as many steps ahead of my luggage as i could get without letting go of it, as if straining against something holding me back. It had been 3 years, 11 months, 12 days, 9 hours and 25 minutes since we had last been together.
Our taxi driver was actually a friend of Cristina's cousin. It took maybe 45 minutes to get to our hotel. When we arrived there it had been 43 hours and 42 minutes since I'd left my house.
And we've had many fun adventures since then but I'll save that for another entry!
[originally posted August 20th]
Actually was all packed about half an hour early so spent half an hour pondering if I'd forgotten anything. Naturally didn't think of the thing i ended up forgetting.
18:30 set out on foot to walk the mile or so to the train station to catch the last train of the day to Melbourne
19:13 train arrives. Nice and peaceful journey. When the conductor came by and i was going to buy a ticket, he could only accept cash ($10), which i actually had none on me at all, so he just shrugged and said it was okay.
21:07 arrive southern cross, the main station in Melbourne (there's actually a station called main and maybe it once was but ironically now it carries the name but is not the main anymore. Ten minutes later caught a metro train headed north. Rode that for a half hour (was able to pay this on my Melbourne transit card) to a station called Gowron or Gowrie some such Klingon name. Walked half an hour further north to my hotel. Since i have to be at the airport at 6:30 and live three hours away i had decided to stay in a hotel nearby. All the hotels closer to the airport than ten minutes were over $200 a night. This one just 11 minutes away was $140, more expensive than any of our hotels in Colombia (one of which is five stars!) and looked like a prison cell:
Friday, August 18th, 06:00 - woke up to messages from Cristina that they'd just had a 6.1 magnitude earthquake in Colombia (she arrived the 16th and was staying with cousins). She had been concerned about earthquakes before the trip and i'd been telling her the danger from earthquakes was overblown, and here she immediately experienced a very strong one! She said she was very afraid. There was only one death from the earthquake -- a 26 year old Venezuelan woman who had also only arrived in Bogota the day before panicked and jumped out of a 7th floor window to her death.
06:30 - uber arrived within two minutes of calling it. $25ish dollars for the 11 minute ride to the airport. Uber has a new function where you can schedule ahead, I'd looked at it the night before but it costs twice as much, such sauce! Anyway my driver was a nice Iranian fellow who said he's been in Australia ten years. I took him to be about fiftyish but when i asked what he did in Iran before coming here he said he was a student (studying Persian language) so maybe I misjudged his age in the dark.
As i walked into the airport i realized what I'd forgotten and it was a real face-palmer -- as ALWAYS i forgot one of the _four_ travel pillows i already have and had to buy a fifth one. They're outrageously overpriced at the airport ($34) but do make trying to sleep on the plain a lot more practicable.
Flight originally scheduled to depart 9:30 didn't depart until 10:47. Apparently a lot of passengers were freaking out about their connections because the head flight attendant went on the announcement system several times mentioning that there are 151 passengers with connections so none of them are alone in their situation and United will reschedule their onward flights if they miss them. With a 3.5 hours layover in LAX myself i wasn't terribly concerned.
My seat neighbour inexplicably disappeared an hour into the flight and never reappeared.
In Flight Movie Reviews:
Total Recall - hadn't seen this Schwarzenegger classic so i thought I'd give it a go. Other than a bit of campiness inherent in 80s movies i felt like it was pretty good. Schwarzenegger is/was a fun action star. One big difference i noticed compared to modern action movies is it had random civilians dying in crossfire all over the place. That really doesn't happen in modern movies. Altogether a solid B+
Wick series - I'd been hearing a lot about this series so i thought I'd give it a go. It indeed is kind of fun for an action movie. Lots of big well choreographed fight scenes. And somehow no bystanders were ever injured! In fact frequently fighters get murdered right in front of crowds and people just keep walking around them as normal. Plot is kind of dumb, it seems literally like every fifth person in the world is part of an _extremely_ regimented guild of assassins, but hey it is what it is, which is a vehicle for lots and lots of fighting. I give it a B in general for dumb plot, but if you're literally just looking for lots of fighting it's an A for that.
Landed after 13.5 hours at LAX. at 7:35 am August 18th, ie three hours before i left (but 00:35 Melbourne time the 19th), to learn that Cristina had experienced another earthquake, presumably an aftershock. And southern California was facing its first ever tropical storm warning. So i got right out of there?
Actually got through passport control and baggage in LAX very quickly, took off again at 10:23 (03:23 origin time)
Three hours later at Houston just enough time to make the connection (just over an hour). It was 93f and i was still wearing all my Melbourne layers so on the interterminal bus and our plane before it took off i was roasting.
My strangely good luck at having a vacant seat next to me all the time failed me this time and i was seated next to a guy who wasn't particularly fat or anything but just seemed to think nothing of not only taking the arm rest between us but letting his arm invade my airspace a bit, even if it meant being in contact with my arm he was undeterred, ugh.
This flight had the Banshees of Inversherin so i was able to finally finish it, though i think i reviewed it last time.
Watched another action movie called Operation Fortune. I had liked Jason Statham way back in the Transporter but in this one he was more along the lines of just boring hyper-macho guy. Been hanging out with Vin Diesel too much perhaps. But Audrey Plaza was in this movie too and i love her craziness. Altogether the movie was alright, i give it a B
Arrived in Bogota on time. Cristina was coming with a taxi so i awaited her in the baggage claim so i wasn't just waiting outside. Didn't realize my half hour of free internet from the airport had expired as i was waiting so i turned on my US phone to active the $10 a day service while abroad, was then alarmed to discover i had missed calls from Cristina from ten minutes earlier. Scampered out and met her outside at the top of an escalator. I wanted to run up to her but that would have been difficult with my luggage so i arrived as many steps ahead of my luggage as i could get without letting go of it, as if straining against something holding me back. It had been 3 years, 11 months, 12 days, 9 hours and 25 minutes since we had last been together.
Our taxi driver was actually a friend of Cristina's cousin. It took maybe 45 minutes to get to our hotel. When we arrived there it had been 43 hours and 42 minutes since I'd left my house.
And we've had many fun adventures since then but I'll save that for another entry!
[originally posted August 20th]