We’re back from our trip to Philippines. It was quite an experience. I’ll write more about it when I get home, but for now you can check some photos in the gallery.
Everybody is still asleep and I cant sleep anymore so I’ve decided I’ll write a bit about the trip.
As said earlier we’ve left Slovenia at around 8ish, on Friday. We took a shuttle to the airport in Vienna. The ride was ok, untill we reached Vienna. For some reason the driver decided to firstly drop off some people in the city center. I still don’t know why he did this, because we were the only ones that were in a hurry or rather had something to catch. One thing led to another, one traffic jam to another and we were starting to be really really late. At one point we actually thought we were already to late and have missed the flight… Anyway we arrived to the airport 5minutes before check-in closed and managed to check-in with minute to spare. Never again am I going with shuttle to the airport again!!!
Soon after we were in the air. The flight was calm with little turbolence. The staff was nice, although I’m not sure they spoke any english at all.
We got 3 meals on the plane, food was better than I thought, or read in reviews of Air China. It depended on what you chose though, but it was ok. Side note here, Veronika’s food was good, I actually chose some weird dishes. The photos of the dishss are in previous post.
First stage of flight, from Vienna to Beijing took around 10h. It was by far the longest flight we ever took. Veronika managed to sleep quite large portion of it, I for some reason, can’t sleep on these things, so I watched some movies, listened to the music, or walked up and down the plane. XD One funny thing, I watched Dumb and dumber to (again) and it was censored quite a lot, looks like chinese take their censorship job quite seriously.
At 6ish am, local time, we have landed in Beijing. I actuakly couldn’t see the city itself because it was covered in smog/dust but the airport was enormous. We were taxing for around 40minutes.
After disembarking, we went through 5 check ups, despite never leaving the airport and being in transfers all the time.
We were thirsty so we bought some water for around 18¥, just to find the same water in store next door for 4¥, and free water 10m further.
After about 2h we had next flight to Hong Kong. I actually managed to sleep whole 3h of flight this time. After arrival, and immigration’s we were in HK, where Jean and Maggiam were already waiting.
We have arrived to Hong Kong today! At around 8am CET time, 1pm local time. It was really great seeing Jean and Maggie after all this time.
Not to make this post to long, sofar we havent seen center yet, but wet by some really high buildings. Everything feels different than in Slovenia. We ate at 2 chinese restaurants (here they are just called restaurants :D), food was great, bit more expensive that I thought it would be.
i’m writing this from phone, so enough of talk. I’ll do a more detailed transcript later when I get home.
Here are some pictures from today that I got on my phone.
And we are off. First stop Vienna airport.
Ok, first thing first, after really long time I finally managed to update some functionalities on blog. Firstly I have separated posts into multiple groups. All posts can now be seen on home page and also in their separate sub-blog (left of gallery). I have also updated weather information, so it now works for multiple different cities, no point in showing weather from Luleå anymore. If you mouse over weather info, the location should be displayed. Lastly I have updated gallery, so it looks a bit better, rearranging photos of different sizes randomly.
So what happened in past few months? Nothing much, I’ve started working on my master’s thesis. I will try to predict some heart diseases, like arrhythmia, few minutes into the future. So far I haven’t managed to do anything ground breaking, but hopefully soon. At work we have started a new project, automated help for elderly, I’m again leading 2 students, so far better than first time =).
And now finally to the interesting news. We (me and Veronika) have finally managed to get some vacation time from work and have booked a trip to Hong Kong to visit Jean and others. We are leaving on Friday 24th and returning on 10th of May. We are really excited, this will be by far the longest trip I have taken, we’re going to be flying there via Beijing for almost 15 hours. To top it off, we (also Jean and Maggie) are going to Philippines for 5 days as well. I’m so excited about everything, but the best part is seeing Jean, Maggie and others again after almost year and a half, half a world away.
Let this be for now. I will try to post a bit from abroad with quick updates, but expect extensive posts with lots of pictures when we return home.