Artistic merit is one thing but the photos on here have to somehow epitomise the day, and as my journey home occupied the whole of the first ten and a half hours of 4/11/19, this was what had to be shown. It gets the ‘very early monring’ photo count up a notch, as well. Shot taken out of my window seat at 44K on the Jeddah – Frankfurt leg of my trek.
Our last day in Iceland was supposed to end around, oh, say 9am? And we were due home in Hebden Bridge by 2pm.
As you can see from this, this didn’t happen. In fact, we did not leave the airport until 9.30pm, after a litany of farce that I do not wish to begin to recount. Thus, another two hours after this take-off time was promised to us.
You can’t completely see the flight number to identify the budget carrier who inflicted this joke upon us (with no informational updates); let me just say they wear orange. A shame because otherwise this has been an excellent week in Iceland, if you get to visit it I highly recommend it.
Yes, I’m going away again. The North European Monsoon missed out 2018 but it has hit on time, and wetly, this year. I wasn’t the only one here today happy to be heading out somewhere away from it. (No endorsement of airline implied. Other budget providers are available.)
The departure lounge is a kind of limbo state. You’ve sort of left the country, the real world, behind, but you’re not yet at your final destination or even properly travelling yet. Time stops behaving as it does out there. A beer at 8.20 on a Sunday morning is quite tolerated. But there’s nothing really to do: the system may as well suck some more money out of you while you wait. I would like to see libraries, cinemas and gyms in departure lounges. But I doubt it’ll ever happen.
So begins the long journey home. Allowing for the time difference, some 28 hours elapsed door to door, between leaving the office in Melbourne city centre at about noon (Eastern Australian time) on Monday and getting back home on what was Tuesday morning UK time, but felt like late afternoon to the body clock. This first shot of two was taken only an hour or so into it all. There is a strange levitaty quality about the bag, don’t you think?
And another picture of Zagreb’s transport infrastructure to mark the end of this week here — the airport being a considerably more modern construction than the railway station. An impressive space, in fact. It’s been a good week and I will probably be back at some point next year.
Travelling north again, away from the warmth and sun of England in the springtime, and back to the Arctic. I may or may not have looked as happy about this as this fellow passenger did today. Or maybe he just busted the photographer and was expressing his feelings.
And so, after two days of photographing monuments — and, y’know, doing a bit of work — I head home again. My colleague and I were wondering how these pigeons got into the Sheremetyevo airport buildings, but maybe they don’t even bother leaving; I should imagine there is more than enough here to feed and shelter them, rather like that Tom Hanks character in The Terminal. Warmer than a Moscow winter, anyway.
Black-and-white photos of one’s day seems to be a trend on Facebook at the moment, so who am I not to follow a trend. Anyway this one just looked better in monochrome, as they tend to do if the photographer has screwed up the white balance somehow. In transit again…. an airport bar on a Sunday morning is not going to be the most dynamic place, we are all waiting there for something or other.
I was supposed to be flying to St Malo in France today, for the ECIL conference (which in past years has been responsible for the appearance of Dubrovnik, Tallinn and Prague on the blog). However, what you see here is the aftermath of the reason why I have only thus far made it as far as Guernsey in the Channel Islands. There I was meant to change planes, but we ended up departing five hours late from Manchester as, when the first plane began pushing back away from gate 21, its wingtip managed to spear the catering van you see here in the centre. So off we passengers all toddled and returned to the terminal, while (count ’em) eighteen people, including a whole slew of hi-vis and two fully armed coppers stood around doing not very much that could be seen as productive. Nice to see so many people gainfully employed by such a cockup. So that’s me in France 24 hours later than scheduled then — just as well I wasn’t down to do my keynote speech on Monday morning.
