Air Travel

It is quite unbelievable to think that I was in London last weekend this time, getting quite cold, when I'm now sitting in Cape Town after a (half-a-)week's work behind me and dying of heat. In all honesty, this is just not cricket - arriving from 5 or 6 degrees in London to 38 degrees on Wednesday!

I haven't flown through Heathrow for a very long time so I didn't know what an absolutely plainful experience it had become! I really don't understand the security measures which they take in London with the liquids being in seperate plastic bags, etc... Especially as "medical" liquids are excluded from the 100ml upper limit maximum as one can just put the "naughty" liquid (whatever could it be even?!) in a contact lense fluid bottle (mine is 355ml and they let it through) or medicine syrup bottle, etc.

Then, having to basically undress at the scanners is just as silly: putting everything from shoes to hats (belts, jackets, what not) into various plastic bins, with hand luggage, laptops and liquids going in other bins through the scanners while one waits in basically only on'e socks, jeans and shirt to be able to re-dress again (no mean feat in winter with all the coats, etc!).

I think that in future I will try and avoid flying into and out of Heathrow and rather take the Eurotunnel train - it is much more convenient in terms of the station being centrally located and with all the security checks, takes just as long (if not shorter!) than a short distance flight in europe.

The flight itself from London to Frankfurt was quite ok but the long-distance flight from Frankfurt to Cape Town was not very impressive (service-wise)! This was the 4th time that I've flown with Lufthansa and I've now made a conscious decision to avoid ever flying with Lufthansa if it is possible... The air hostesses are actually not only unfriendly but straight out rude! I had a 60+ year old english gentleman (literally and figuratively) sitting next to me who (after the "in-flight entertainment system", if one could could a miniature screen in the front of the cabin that, was down for an hour) asked from the air hostess what is wrong with the system and was told basically to shut up and stop bother her as the more he bothers her the longer it will take to fix (ie, no, sorry sir, we're trying our best, or anything like that).

She later came past again while I was having one of those typical long-haul-flight-chats with the man, leaned into our personal space in the middle of our conversation and, in a very rude manner (nearly child-like) told the man that "see you should just have been patient". Unfortunately for the poor man, he indicated to her that he was busy with a conversation by holding his open and in her direction when when went through a bit of a bump and he touched her without meaning to. The resultant scene was actually extremely embarassing with the air hostess going on about how she wouldn't stand for "dirty old men" to touch her and what not...

Normally I would have intervened but in the current day and age it is actually quite risky to make scenes on planes as one could possibly quite easily be locked up under some stupid terrorist type law for unruly behaviour or something.

Luckily the old man was quite tame and just meekly kept quiet and the air hostess (actually, now that I think of it - it was the "Purser") finally lost her steam.

The rest of the flight was uneventful, the food the normal airline kind (although having dinner at 2:30am SA time and breakfast at 10:00am SA time is a little bit weird) and passed quickly thanks to the help of my drug dealers (med-student friends) who supplied me with a sleeping pill (the only way in which I can catch some shut-eye in the cramped quarters of an economy class seat).

I had a very warm (pun intended!) welcome in Cape Town with Dirk and Judy coming to fetch me at CPT International (dankie julle twee!! ).... Now, but 4 days later it is really hard to think that I was running around in London a week ago this time. All in all I would call the holiday a great success, I had a great time with all my friends all over euope (thanks to all of you who might read this!!!!!!) and have come back to SA revived and refreshed for the next 6 months of work before I head off to Sweden to do my master's degree (August 2007).

This blog will die down now for quite some time again (nobody wants to read boring lawyer stories in any case, even less than boring holiday stories!), maybe only every now and again reporting on my Sweden plans.

Thanks for reading the blog up to now!

Till next time!!!
/hs

For those of you that don't know yet - I won the award of Erkel at our end-of-year office party... Yep, I'm your regular gadget-boy gone lawyer in the day... but just give me half a chance and I'll jump at the chance to play with any gadget around (or, as my one friend puts it - if it has a screen and buttons, heinrich's happy). I mean, look - I even have a blog which I now also keep updated!

Anyway, just couldn't resist posting a blog from mid-air. Yep! You read it! I'm currently somewhere over the bunch of islands in the middle of the Mediterranean (Ligurian according to the map, wherever that is!), cruising at 39'000ft and at 909km/h. Temp outside is -45 degrees C. All while updating my itunes (hey, way not take advantage of the broadband connection while we're at it! For the other IT junkies out there: I'm downloading at 11.2kb/s from the itunes servers whils browsing and listening to streaming audio) and listening to 5FM on streaming audio. Probably it is only I that am impressed with the fact that I can do all of this while flying....

We'll be landing in just over an hour in 809km's time

Laters.

/hs

Ps: I just want to place on record that I also won two other awards at the end of year office party - the "Fast and Furious" award and the "Gunther the barista" award...

Thanks to the very kind assistance of Karin, who did a pre-checkin for me, all the admin stuff went quite fast. I was done with check-in, passport control, security within 15 minutes (with pre-checkin one can skip the queues and go to the business class counter to collect one's boarding pass - what a bonus!!!). Definately the most relaxed way of flying ever!

Now I'm sitting on the plane and writing my last blog from SA for a while. And what a relief it is! The last month (and the last week) was incredibly high pressure at work, so I am looking forward tremendously to this holiday. The only sad thing is that I will miss my family and friends (ja Dirk, ja De Klerk, dis nou julle!) over this next month, of that I'm quite sure. I am of course looking forward to seeing all my european friends (Regi, Louise, Rach, Nik, Sophie, Karin, Claudia, et al) this next month.

Although the seats are quite tight (smaller than SAA it seems, but I might not remember it all too clearly) I think this flight will be quite ok- I had my dealer get me some fixes to while the time (read, my med student friens get me some sleeping pills) and I got (thank you again Karin!) a prebooked aisle seat far away from the toilets. As good as it gets here in cattle class

We'll have to switch our phones off soon, so siging off from the tarmac of CPT.

Sent by Nokia Mobile Mail.