Insanely lazy day today, anyone would think I drank too much the day before… in fact I will blame it on work requirements.

What I did do though was plan lots of stuff for the final two days I was in Aus. And I got Pizza…

What a strike of luck! Had been planning on heading over to the MCG today for a look around, when looking into the tour I read something about not getting a full tour on event days so hoped that today wasn’t an event day… But it was, and that’s the luck, Victoria vs Queensland in the final game in the Sheffield Shield. The play was terrible, final day of a four dayer and Victoria were still batting in their first innings, got themselves up to 800 (no idea why) before declaring 500 runs ahead leaving no reason for Queensland to do anything but block out for 60 overs.

Photo show, as I realised I haven’t put many pretty pictures up for a while, here’s the view and excitement on approach:

How incredibly exciting… here’s a picture of my boarding passes. Premium for first half, economy for second half. A big difference!

Some ranting I did whilst flying, I decided not to edit it up and make it make sense, but instead, leave it as written as a mind dump. So read on if you are that bored…

With day one out of the way, we can focus on day two. My first full day in San Francisco. Full day is an accurate way to describe it. Awake at 3 (stupid jetlag), I did a few hours work before heading down for breakfast with the no longer drunk Galbo. Buffet is the best way to do breakfast, two massive platefuls of bacon, sausage, egg and potatoes later I felt quite ill. Will have to have a lie down before I get onto anymore work me thinks.

Popped over to check out the venue for the event on Tues night (today is Monday), was weirded out by the total change in social class on the drive over. Went from Union square, which is an up market shopping district, through an area that looked like absolutely everyone was a scag head. My suspicions proven by a couple of people seemingly openingly doing some stuff I’m sure they shouldn’t be doing on the streets. Passing through this area we got to City Hall, the opera house and the symphony building. How can all this be within a minutes taxi ride from such poverty? I think it was Mr Galbo who was telling me that there is a serious problem in San Fran with poverty, that there really is a divide between the have and the have nots. (A point which I will pick up on more in a later article about a book I’ve just finished).

City Hall was awash with TV crews, because of this I decided that after checking out the venue I would walk the half mile or so back there and have a whack about. The TV crews were all around due to the San Francisco politicians deciding that it was time to allow gay marriages, and that the first one was going to be legalized at 5:01. There is a real back story to this, which I semi picked up watching hours of repeated news in the hotel. Something along the lines of gay marriages previously being legalized, then they changed their minds and cancelled all the marriage (anyone know more on this?). Wondering through I happy snapped pictures on my n95 8gb to my hearts content. Then noticed a guy with a better camera (TV dude) so had a quick natter with him. Later to be quite surprised to see he had donned a tie and was presenting the report for a local news service.

After all this excitement I went back to the hotel to do some more work.

That evening we all decided to pop out for dinner, all being me, Galbo and Cookie Monster aka Pete. We ended up wondering all the way to Polk, around 20 blocks or so up Sutter. We found this little Chinese place, through desperation rather than desire we went in. The food really wasn’t that great, but they had Cobra so pleasure/pain yoghurt advert I guess. After the quick munch we headed over the road to the Blur bar, a wannabee trendy bar which seemed just dark and depressive. Always funny for the bargirl to try and sell you cheap fags too.

Next we popped next door to a bar I don’t remember the name of, something Tavern, you’d think I’d Google research it, but no. A cool upbeat rocky bar with a dj and a pool table. We jumped onto the pool table (to play, not literally jumped on) and stayed there for an hour or so. I dominated Galbo and Cookie, but got beat by a Texan guy who was taking it extremely seriously. Poor Chap, he really was rubbish and if I’d been playing properly, or had played American tables at all recently, I’d of kicked his arse too. He did however get a bit grumpy when I had 2 shots after he potted the white (scratched). Stupid American rules!

Left the Tavern, walked back, and bed, night night and onto day 3.

What a day! All that was required was a simple flight over to the States on Sunday 16th, for a few days work trip to San Francisco. Was it that easy/straight forward? Of course not.

Getting to Terminal 5 was easy, quick and quiet drive, plenty room in car park and no wait for a bus to the terminal. All sounding easy so far. After checking my bag in I wondered off and ridiculously randomly bumped into Dan M and his lady, a school friend who was popping over to New York for a week holiday.

Second weird thing I noticed was a group of Americans, who had loads of music gear to check in. From a closer inspection they had clearly just played at Download festival and were heading back to the states. Still haven’t been able to work out how they were though, best guesses from pictures on Download website suggests either A Day To Remember or Alesana. Unfortunately neither have a blog which I can link to and see if it was them.

Once my flight gate popped up it was time to stop stalking the emo band and move on. Whilst walking to the gate an Irish chap started chatting at me, so ended up wondering down to the gate with him. Before being interrupted by the Duty Free guy offering us a free cocktail, its 10am, who wants a cocktail at this time? Me! He whipped up some lemon thing with fancy vodka, as you can see his sales pitch worked well on me, I’ve remembered everything about his product. Woops. Strange incident number two, this Irish chap happened to be called Colin too and was seated a row behind me on the plane (admittedly on the other side).

Boarded plane, sat next to a 60 year old Indian lady who didn’t move other than to let the guy by the window out. The guy I’m sure is some form of social media geezer, he had a Firefox Tshirt on and read “The Google Story” book. So it that was you in seat 49J of flight BA285 get in touch.

Landed (yay) as per usual, and got off quick fast to try and get through security nice and quickly. A few more questions than normal and I was through, I blame the flip flops and shorts, now onto luggage claim. As normal, gotta wait around for a few minutes before the bags start flowing around on the conveyor belt. As they started flowing through I started watching out for mine, and watching and watching and watching. After 30 mins and there only being one bag left on the conveyor I gave up. Walked over to the luggage complaints/enquiries desk where a very slow BA employee had been lumbered with everything to deal with. She was very helpful and tracked my luggage, apparently it was on the plane. Not like everyone else’s which had been moved to the flight later that day. After another hour or so they finally found my luggage somewhere out the back, no idea where or why it wasn’t just put on the conveyor but I don’t care. There was nothing missing so I just left the airport for the easy trip to the hotel.

A short limo ride later, yes limo, well normal car with sweets and drinks, I was at the hotel. Quickly checked in and Galbo came down to meet me, this was the extent of his exercise for the day.

Got upstairs to my room on the 29th floor, walk in, and there is some luggage in the room. WTF? Why is there luggage in my room which isn’t mine? Rang reception who explained that the room had already been setup for a guest arriving later that day and that I would have to move. No real big deal, hopped down to the 14th floor which is where I now came to rest. Here’s the view from my window below. I think that pretty much wraps up the day, I am going to do a separate post about the dinner I had in a minute.

Ok I know I’m cheating a little bit by combiningthe two days, but day 5 really does only include landing, getting off plane and driving back to the office. Nothing really of interest! So back to day 4… Day 4 and the final day in NYC. Got up, went for breakfast with Horsy and bossman. Swiftly back upstairs to get on with more work. Rushed around NYC trying to find the Fedex depot, finally found it and made friends with the girl who worked in there! You have to try extra hard to be nice to people when you need perfect strangers to do weird things for you! When reading the last sentence, please remove any sexual innuendos you are thinking of!

Once all this was sorted, it was time to go look at some pubs! My how tough hey? Well yes actually, ended up walking about 6 miles. One place was right by Grand Central Terminal, one the far side of Times Square, and a fair few between. One of which I was more than slightly suspicious of being a strip club. Whilst walking through Times Square, I noticed a gathering in the middle of the road so thought I best find out what was going on. It was live Guitar Hero (computer game) going on. People were putting their name down and going up to play on the massive screen. A funny combination of absolutely useless people and some really good people. After all this excitement I ended up back at the hotel to collect the bags and get a taxi to the airport. Where the carnage basically began…

So what happened at the airport I hear you asking… to be honest, at the airport not a lot. Got checked straight in, got boarding passes, got through security with no problems. Went to duty free, bought some Whiskey and pressies. Boarding was delayed by 10 mins because the plane came in slightly late, but no real problem there. Got on the plane, settled down, it was really quiet on there so Horsy went to sit on the other side of the gangway so we could both spreadout. How conciderate.

Next we hear the Pilot come over the PA system, telling us the bad news that there is a delay in getting a spot on the runway, there would be approximately an hours delay before we could take off. This was of course disappointing, not as disappointing as when the Pilot came on again about 20 mins later to say that one (of two) runways had been closed. Meaning there were 80 planes queued waiting to take off, and the same amount in the air waiting to land, approximately 2 hour wait. I guess it goes without saying that the ones waiting to land get a slight priority over us. I kinda feel that this was my fault, there was a point whislt waiting at the airport where I thought to myself: “I don’t know why people always complain about punctuality of flights, I’ve never had any problems”. The cabin crew put the inflight entertainment on early an fed us drinks earlier than normal so wasn’t too bad. I did notice a couple of things though which got me thinking. First off I thought it was weird that the runway ran over the top of a road with public cars on. A tunnel underneath a runway with aeroplanes on? I’ll go around thanks! We also had to taxi past the Americans Airlines terminal, I wonder if they were delayed as well, conspiracy theory states that they will have been flying all their flights out on time to make other airlines look inferior!

We finally got our spot to take off, we taxi’ed to the end of the runway where it was possible to look back along where we’d come from. Strange to see a line of 15 planes (majority of them big transatlantic planes like ours) lined up. Like you would expect to see in car form queuing for a car park or something similar. Taking the Britains love of queuing to another level! Other than few problems with the inflight entertainment there is little else exciting which happened. Had a little kip on the plane, but no where near long enough to not be totally jet lagged today 🙁

More pictures to come asap!

What’s happened today then, I only have ten mins to write this or “today” will no longer be accurate.

Was up again stupidly early, I blame Visser for the this as he Twittered, which sms alerted me. As the timezones are screwy it woke me up. Started working around 6, got angry at my alarm for going off at 9, suggesting I should be just waking up. Whereas I’d been at it for hours already.

Donut for breakfast, then we popped (Horsy cantered) down to Dunkin again for smoothies and stuff… Busy day working after this, nothing really interesting! Watched the Liverpool game on my TV in my room, great result! Wont say tooo much about it.

Tonight, I went out on my own, walked down to Times Square where I was meeting up with Giggedy and the mate he was travelling with. Quick beer in the ESPNzone bar, then onto Hard Rock Cafe for dinner! Great food, had a Beef Brisket (yes I had to ask the waitress wtf that meant), was very very nice! Popped into a recommended Irish bar after this for a final pint and a rather oversized Tanqueray 10. Wondered back on my own (slightly hesitant) but was fine. Strange that here they collect rubbish in the evening. Meaning that the only vehicles around were taxis and bin men.

Lazy strikes, not got time to post a special post about pictures from day 2. I will update the facebook album here asap.

What have I got up to today then… weird night sleep, woke up after about 2 hours of sleep, then from there on in I was kinda awake and kinda asleep. That dozey state where you don’t know what state you are in!

At around 7 I gave up and got up and started working… breakfast via room service at 9ish, American breakfast to be exact. Eggs bacon Roast potatoes, go figure. Bad cup of tea! Pretty much straight after breakfast we had to run over to Smartfusion offices to collect some devices for work, this was cool, again got to see some more of NYC. Taxi back got lost, when we said we wanted 70 Park Avenue, he tried to take us to 70th and Park Ave. This is approximately 40 blocks away from where we wanted to be. The guy got to about 58th before Horsey realised and turned him around. Strangly only added about 2 quid to the fare.

Work in the room all afternoon, broken up by a trip to Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts. My first Mocha, not bad to be honest! Tasted of hot chocolate, and I didn’t need to fall asleep all afternoon. I will probably need another couple tomorrow to stop this again though.

Evening, chilled out from around 7-7.30, watched some Fam Guy, call it a break! Then back to work, got a call that the bosses were expecting me in the bar to talk business (instead of meeting up with a mate for drinks). Sat there talking business until they threw us out at 11. Went upstairs, bath, work, now sat in bed writing this before passing out and sleep! Can’t wait!

Gunna watch some of the Conan O’Brian show and fall asleep, pictures of today tomorrow, not so many today. But will bulk it out with some room pictures!

Ciao