Note: I wrote this while I was still on the trip, but didn't get around to posting it until now.
I'm taking a few minutes to write about the comical experience I had making a transfer in the Shanghai airport.
If you want to go to China, you have to get a visa in advance. Everyone tells you this, but I didn't really pay much attention because I was only going to be in Shanghai for about 3 hours while I was transferring from one flight to the next.
When I checked in at Incheon, the person looked at my ticket, then at my passport, and said "hey, you don't have a visa for China." I told her that I knew, and was just transferring, and asked if she would make sure that my luggage got checked through to Rome. She was OK with the rest, but said she couldn't check my bags through China - I would have to pick them up and re-check them. "Sorry, but that's China." *shrug*
On the flight to Shanghai, when they passed out customs and immigration forms, I took copies but the flight attendant said I wouldn't need them if I was just transferring, which is what I would have expected. It's also why I was surprised when I got off the plane, and the only way to get to my bags was through immigration. So I hastily filled out the form and went to the "all passports" lane. The lady at the desk flipped through my passport and said "you don't have a visa!" I explained that I was just transferring, which confused her a bit so she picked up a phone. A conversation in Chinese ensued, and then she hung up, took my passport, and said "wait here a minute." Another woman ran up, took my passport, and told me to follow her, so we ran to another desk, where another conversation in Chinese ensued with the man at that desk, and after some rummaging about the desk (a few other uniformed people gathered around, including some police officers) he produced a stamp, stamped my passport, and gave it to me. The crowd disbursed, and I moved on to the next line, which was customs.
Once again I hastily filled out the form, gave the form and passport to the person at this desk, and after a quick perusal of my passport, he said "hey, you don't have a visa." So I flipped through the passport and showed him the stamp, and explained that I was just transferring to another flight. He picked up the phone, another conversation in Chinese ensued, and then he gave everything back and said "OK, you can go on."
On to the airline check-in desks. After some wandering around, I found the Aeroflot desk, waited in line, and when I got to the front I handed the ticket agent my ticket and passport. She flipped through the passport and said "hey, you don't have a visa." *sigh* I showed her the stamp, and she said "huh." She tried to ask the ticket agent sitting to her left about it, but was waved off for a moment, so she set the passport aside and started looking up my ticket. I also gave her my Skymiles (Gold Medallion) card, to make sure that I got miles for the trip. She took it, tried to ask the ticket agent sitting to her right about it, and was once again waved off so she set it aside and kept working.
She eventually printed out a boarding card, but the gate agent to her left, who had wandered over at this point, took it and ripped it up. Huh? There was some conversation in Chinese, then she said "She says you don't have a visa." So ... I showed her the stamp, and she picked up the phone ... another conversation in Chinese; at this point a manager of some sort has shown up, and a large conversation ensues. Finally they agree that the easiest thing to do is to just let me leave, so they print out the boarding pass, but then the ticket agent to the right jumped in and ripped it up, much to the surprise of the half-dozen other people now milling around.
Huh? More Chinese, and attention turns to my Gold Medallion card. A book comes out, and more conversation, and more typing, and then a new boarding card comes out - First Class. Hah! I definitely didn't deserve an upgrade, but wasn't going to complain.
So that's how I'm flying First Class in Aeroflot. It's actually not so bad; I'm in a 767, not a Tupelov (actually I had hoped to get in an Ilyushin Il-96, but no such luck), and the service has been pretty good. Nice food, too. The seats don't have built in video, but they do stretch out flat, and after takeoff the flight attendants brought out little hard-drive based movie players which had the same selection of movies and TV that I would have expected from Video on Demand on any other airline.
So ... Next stop: Rome.
Note: I wrote this while I was still on the trip, but didn't get around to posting it until now.
I wasn't supposed to spend any time in Korea, but my flight out has been canceled. It's cold and nasty here, and Incheon is a fairly small town, but I had the opportunity to walk around and stretch, which was nice, and also had some excellent seafood fried rice. The fried rice in this part of the world is different than what you get in the US, and it's much better. The rice made being stuck here an extra day worthwhile.
Historical note: this was my second round-the-world trip. The first one was for work. This one was using Skyteam's Round The World pass, which - at least until a few months ago - is something I would absolutely recommend. Anyway I'm still the person who posted this.
Note: I wrote this while I was still on the trip, but didn't get around to posting it until now.
I have to admit - I miss the travel. Airports, airplanes, delays, lost luggage, tourists, rental cars and taxis; all worth it if you get to see somewhere new and different.
So this winter, instead of being fiscally responsible, I've abandoned work for a few weeks and am taking a trip westward 'round the world.
I gather that normal people don't do this-my evidence being that my goals for this trip so baffled two travel agents that I ended up buying the plane tickets myself (the SkyMiles travel agency quoted me over $10,000 for the trip - are you kidding?).
My original goals were:
I ended up compromising on the second one, mainly due to the availability of flights and some pickyness regarding destinations.
My first stop was Sydney, which I just left. I'm writing this on my trusty Tablet PC, sitting in seat 44A of a JAL 747-400. I've never flown JAL, and I don't have any points with One World, which is why I'm stuck in coach (most of the rest of the trip is business/first class). It's been a while since I flew coach, and it makes the trip a lot less pleasant. The food is nice though, and the plane isn't too full, so it's not so bad.
Sydney was absolutely wonderful. I only had a week there, and I really want to go back. I haven't been many places where I thought I would like living, but I could definitely live here.
I figured driving on the wrong side of the road would be a challenge, but it wasn't - the only things that I was consistently bad at were turning on the windshield wipers instead of the turn signals, and opening the door instead of pulling up the hand brake. My rental car was a Ford falcon, which was fine but not spectacular. I didn't fit well in it and was always a bit uncomfortable. I took it as for south as the Bega Valley, which had a nice little town and an eerily empty beach. Probably not worth the drive, but that's OK. In the end, I could have done without the car and been just fine. Lessons learned for next time.
There are a lot of professional street performers (everybody says "like mimes?" No, not like mimes. Not like mimes at all.) in Sydney, and some of them are quite good. There's also a very useful ferry service, which was new and interesting to me.
One thing that generally surprises me during international travel is the fact that wherever I go, the same restaurant and shopping chains are there; TGI Friday's and Kentucky Fried Chicken are especially common. Not so in Sydney. The only American restaurant chains I remember seeing are MC Donald's, Hungry Jack's (only tangentially a US chain), and Krispy Kreme. I liked that at first, and ate very well the whole time I was in Sydney, but later on I wondered what the deal with that is. Not that everybody has to have American food chains, but how come Australia has so few?
Another thing that surprised me was the lack of steak restaurants (and Fosters beer for that matter). Restaurants serving steak that I went to served very polite and balanced portions, and were generally delicious. I blame Outback Steakhouse for the preconception that Australians are beer swilling carnivores, though it's possible that the rough, meat-heavy steakhouse is more common in other parts of Australia, like Perth. An interesting note about Sydney is that if you appear intoxicated, bars and restaurants are not allowed to serve you drinks. I didn't find this out firsthand-they make sure to point it out. I'm just saying.
At any rate, Sydney was really fun and I had enough missed opportunities that I really want to go back, for at least a couple of weeks, to cover more things.
Next stop: Rome.
It was discouraging to hear Barack Obama's recent comments on the space program. When asked about his plan to cut funding on the Constellation program in order to pay for proposed education initiatives, USA Today quoted him as saying "We're not going to have the engineers and the scientists to continue space exploration if we don't have kids who are able to read, write and compute." That attitude is discouraging because the space program can have such a positive impact on our nation, including its educational system, if given the chance.
NASA's missions after Apollo would have been useful, if relatively uninspiring, had they been integrated into a long-term goal of exploration. Programs such as Skylab, the STS, and the ISS have provided a platform to learn lessons useful in long-term space exploration, but we haven't done a good job of exploiting them, because we haven't had a long-term plan for exploration. This has been NASA's downfall, and this is why otherwise intelligent people like President Obama fail to see the value in manned exploration.
There are a lot of reasons to support the space program, in particular manned spaceflight. Detractors tend to ask "what has the HSF program done for me recently? Ever?" ... and it's a good question. The problem is that people are looking for results in the wrong places. Everyone thinks that NASA should be giving us flying cars, and amazing new materials, and perpetual motion machines - but while we've gotten some amazing things out of the space program, its biggest impact was social.
It's safe to say that Apollo program had more to do with national pride than anything else, and that has a lot to do with its quick demise after the first few moon landings. Apollo was a product of the space race, and once we had "won" the race, there was no reason to keep running - or so we thought.
The Apollo program made us proud to be Americans and other countries proud to be our friends, and it also inspired a generation of students to become engineers, and a generation of engineers to transform science fiction into everyday life. So many of the things we take for granted today - computers, telecommunications, the internet, and so on - were created by a generation of engineers inspired by our space program. But now, after a few decades of relatively boring feats, the inspiration is gone - and with it the well-deserved pride and respect that Apollo brought to us. Students who want to become engineers and work at the cutting edge could do better in India, or Russia, or China. The thought of this would be laughable (if not offensive) 30 years ago, but in this world that we've created, we're no longer the innovators - we're consumers of innovations from what was once considered a backwards corner of the world.
A focused manned space program with seemingly insurmountable challenges won't bring us flying cars. But it will bring us national pride, and the collective inspiration that will motivate Americans to help themselves - a younger generation inspired to do better, and an older generation inspired to support them by buying American products, and encouraging American businesses. This will have a bigger impact on our youngest generation than any education program our political system will allow. Manned space exploration can represent a positive, peaceful struggle for humanity, not for America - but by undertaking this struggle, America can achieve greatness and, more importantly, the respect that we've lost in the last decade.
Well, I'm back. The site has been down for about a month now (also 12v.org and amanijabril.com, sorry) but stuff (except for 12v.org and amanijabril.com, sorry again) is back. The server hardware all survived the move, and I had DSL waiting for me when it got here, but I decided that if it was going to be down for a week, it could be down for a bit longer so I could upgrade the OS on the server. So I took the opportunity to upgrade peachtree linux to use more recent things, like udev, gcc-4.2.2, glibc-2.6.1, and whatnot. Took a long time! In the end it was basically a worthless exercise, but it was really gratifying to make things work.
Anyway I have a lot to talk about, but mainly I'm just posting to make sure I have permissions set right. More later!
My car has been registered in Texas for just over a week now, and I'm already getting scam junk mail from these assholes. Giving away my personal information is probably the most efficient thing that Texas has done for me since I moved here.
Note: 13 years later, I still miss all of these things about Atlanta, and many more. Cactus Car Wash (the one on Ponce) is still there but it's called something else now. I've grown to hate Houston, and Texas, much more in the last decade.
So I've lived in Houston for a couple of months now, and am finally starting to find my way around. While I still don't think of Houston as home, I definitely feel somewhat settled in (when Clio and my furniture get here, the illusion will be mostly complete).
But there are a few things that Atlanta really did better than Houston:
Don't get me wrong - there are plenty of nice things about Houston (such as NASA). They've just fallen a bit short on details.
If anybody watches NASA TV (anybody?), particularly ISS Mission Coverage (*crickets*), there was a bit about scheduled TVIS maintenance. TVIS is something I work on at NASA/ESCG, and Friday I sat on console at the MER to help out with the maintenance tasks. So when the commentator talks about "the experts on the ground," that's me! Who knew?