Houston, we have a conference

A bit of a day of firsts for me, yesterday (or at least, the past 36 hours or so, thinking in terms of days is challenging at the moment). Getting into the Virgin Atlantic lounge was one, all lovely and great and all but somehow not quite the land of dreams I'd hoped for. Perhaps, because we only had about 30 minutes in there, I didn't really get the full effect. That said, it was a damn sight better than the alternative, fast track security and free wine and all.

Second on my list was actually flying Virgin, which it sort of surprises me I've not done before for some reason. Although the promised upgrade to Upper Class didn't materialise, I was in Premium Economy, which is better than it sounds. I spent most of the flight in the bar being force-fed red Bordeaux by the barman.

Third was actually being late for a flight. I know how anal this sounds, but this is something I just. don't. do, and haring through Newark airport trying to negotiate the (irritatingly chatty) immigration and customs people, pick my bags up, re-check in, go through security AGAIN (this time with the plebs) and get to the gate isn't really my idea of fun. Travelling's mental enough without that sort of stress, and to top it all we proceeded to spend the next hour on the tarmac. Fortunately, for some reason I was in first class, which meant there was a lovely lady on hand to make sure my wine glass didn't get empty. So much so that I had to pretend to be asleep so she'd stop.

So after all this, we got into Houston at about midnight-ish, which as far as my body was concerned was 0600. Getting a good 6 hours' sleep meant today's been reasonably ok, but I'm not sure how tonight's going to be - a networking cocktail thing followed by a dinner we're hosting for some people or other. I'm currently wearing a pink striped shirt with a frankly enormous collar, which I'm rather enjoying - most Merkins are so excruciatingly dull and conservative with what they wear that I'm standing out as if I was wearing a clown suit.

Fortunately we're taking cabs everywhere. I don't imagine they like pink shirt-wearers here, it's still very much a moustache and cowboy hat sort of place*. Over lunch, I was introduced to the various forms of the contraction 'y'all': 'y'all' refers to one person. 'All y'all' refers to more than one person.  And, dear god, 'y'all's' means 'your'.

Needless to say, my accent has moved into the sort of RP register of which Laurence Olivier would have been proud. I might even start drinking tea.

 

*yes, the irony hasn't gone unnoticed. The Village People are probably seen as 'good hard-workin' decent men, 'cept for that injun' by those who remember them.

Sore head, busy week ahead...

I am physically destroyed. We went to a wedding reception last night, which was brilliant, danced like fools and drank like bigger fools, and wore a lovely new suit which I'd bought the previous week at Ted Baker as part of a horrifying splurge of clothes-buying. Tremendous event it was, both bride and groom looking superb and very happy indeed.

But this morning was a bit of a challenge. In fact, the whole day has been, and I'm a little concerned about the impact this is going to have on the week to come. You see, I found out on Tuesday afternoon that I'm being sent over to Houston (yep, the one in Texas) for a week to attend a conference over there. I'm flying out on Sunday afternoon, back on Friday morning, mental schedule in between and hopefully I won't have to present.

Now, today should be the day on which I print out all the stuff I'll need in order to get onto flights and into hotels etc, and although I'm fairly sure I've done all I need, I'm also acutely aware that I turn into a bit of an idiot whilst hungover so I'm bound to have forgotten something crucial. Ah, well.

So there we are, little me representing my company's retail function to lots of Merkins. It's either going to be REALLY REALLY GREAT or horrible, and I've decided to shoot for the former. If there's interweb access at the Houston Holiday Inn Express (I know), I'll see if I can squeeze out a blog entry or two whilst I'm there. Wish me luck...

Australia, New Zealand, funeral

So, moving on from the events in my last post, here we are in Auckland, following a few days in Surfer's Paradise in Australia with the Kiwi's parents. The flight over was a bit of a trial, 10 hours from Heathrow to LA, several hours in transit in LA whilst they do all the immigration nonsense, fingerprinting and photographing and such, even though we don't actually want to enter their daft country, including the comedy questionnaire which I might write more about in another post.

Next, 11 or 12 hours over to Auckland, then a couple of hours wait before a 3.5 hour trip over to Brisbane, where Mr Kiwi met us to drive us down to Surfer's. Fortunately my wonderful girl had upgraded us to business class for this leg, so we spent the time stretching out in their first class seats, drinking all sorts of nice stuff and eating as well as you can on a flight, I reckon. Being in front of the engines makes the whole thing a lot less stressful: quieter and, I reckon, less vibration. We checked out the price of the full trip in business, and it would have cost about three times the price, possibly not entirely worth it even so...

Anyway, superb couple of days in Surfer's, beach, pool, restaurant, boat sort of stuff, we treated to the best the place had to offer by the folks and shook off the tiredness of the journey and the pallor of London in a few days. We arrived in Auckland yesterday afternoon and met up with a few friends, tonight we'll be seeing a whole lot more of them after spending the day researching places to live in this city. We'll be moving here within the year, so this is an essential bit of orientation for us both, as I've only ever spent a couple of days here and she's not lived here in seven years.

Paul's funeral is at 0020 tomorrow morning NZ time (1120 Thursday GMT). It's slowly been sinking in over the past few days, has thrown a lot of things into sharp relief for me. I'll be sure to take a moment whilst it's all going on - it's still hard to find any words to make sense of this.

More on our travels when I get the chance - we're rarely in one place for that long but some of our places advertise wi-fi so I'll do what I can.

Prague 2

Home again, and I can't say I'm sorry to be back - Prague was great and we had a great time, but it's charm was somewhat lost on me I think. Perhaps it was the enormous crowds of shambling octogenarian American tourists (which put me in mind of the Night of the Living Dead for some reason), I'm really not sure. I'm not the world's biggest dumpling fan, either.

This is coming out sounding less charitable than I mean it to - we did have a storming night on Saturday night (bar - restaurant - bar - bar - bar - bar - bar), which was a mighty success by anyone's standards. The smarter bars in Prague really seem to know how to treat you; cigars arriving with proper ashtrays, lighting splints and cutters, malt whisky with water and ice on the side, should you wish to interfere with your drink. Martinis were pretty damn good and they even sold absinthe properly, with the flaming spoon of sugar to swirl into it.

That was all in one bar. We got out for about a tenner each. Amazing. On the whole I'd say it's a great place for a weekend; go for the nightlife, go for the more expensive looking places and don't bother sightseeing unless you particularly fancy gaining first hand evidence to back up your creeping prejudice against the colonial elderly.

As you can imagine, I'm still a bit sleepy. Work is increasingly mental as we're speeding up towards the end of this four-week sprint (still on the Irish project), building a business model and an organisational blueprint for our client. It's all new to me, but I'm learning fast, I think. I hope so, anyway. Two weeks to go...

The picture is the door handle on the inside of our amazing apartment, by the way. What a find...