03:45 Tue.

29 Aug, 2017

Goodbye Melbourne

Hello Sydney

Tags: end of work, flight, last day, Melbourne, Opera, sydney, Sydney bridge

Sydney , Australia

15 °C

Partly Cloudy

6:18 am

5:36 pm

I have finished my work on Friday evening. It was very interesting and informative conference but very tiring at the same time. Next year Sweden, hopefully! 🙂

In the evening Veronika and I decided to go see a rugby game on an enormous stadium near our hotel. I have never been in a stadium that big, it can accept 55.000 people, but during our visit “only” 48.000 people were present. The game on the other hand was interesting, I guess it would be more fun if we actually new the rules. It seems like some kind of mix between football and baseball.

Enormous stadium with capacity of 55.OOO people.

On Saturday we spent whole day on the Ocean Road and in the evening we had to prepare for our departure. I was pleasantly surprised by the city and it’s citizens. Everyone was incredibly nice to us, the city is relatively clean for it’s size and the architecture in the city center is nice. I still haven’t gotten used to the left side driving yet, but hopefully will soon, we are planning to rent a car later on our trip.

We left for the airport on Sunday 7 AM and arrived in Sydney at noon.

Veronika has some relatives living in Suburbs of Sydney so we are staying at theirs place. The city is enormouse, it took us over 3h to drive from the airport to their house, and we never left the city.

Yesterday we took an opportunity to explore the city, but more on this later as we are already at tge airport again, preparing to go to Cairns in the north for almost 17 days. This time we are traveling extremely light, only 2 backpacks 6kg each. Hopefully we wont freeze up there since we didn’t have space for warm cOpera and Opera and bridve

The flight

and how we almost missed it

Tags: air china, beijing, flight, hk, hong kong

Hong Kong , China

25 °C

Partly Cloudy

5:55 am

6:47 pm

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.

The journey begins

Flight

Day -1 , 147 remain

Tags: beginning, flight, plane, start, venice

Lulea , Sweden

17 °C

Fair

3:45 am

9:25 pm

After few intense weeks of preparations at school and home, the day has come, I’m leaving for 5 months for Lulea, Sweden.

Since I’m studying computer science I’ve decided to create my own blog, where I’ll keep some sort of public diary of life in the north. Sadly I didn’t have time to finish the blog, before I left. I had to wait for 3 weeks to get some stupid signature in my index, or I couldn’t leave, needless to say, I got signature 5 days before I left, after bribing the gate keeper to call me when professor arrived. Anyway at the moment the blog has basic functionality, but still looks ugly. I will try to continue working on it while I’ll be in Sweden.

Back to the trip, I’m currently flying somewhere over Germany with Norwegian and yes, we have internet on the plane, although it’s slow, but still better than nothing. The flight is calm, sadly there are clouds all over the sky so I can’t see any land. Pity I was really looking forward to seeing some EU from the sky.
I left home today at around 5.30 AM with my parents and Veronika. Saying goodbye was a bit more emotional than I expected, I guess I’ll really going to miss my folks, but hey, if everything goes as planned Veronika is going to come and visit me soon.

The flight will take approximately 2.5h, we’ll land at Stockholm ARN from where I’ll leave with train at 6.30pm to Lulea. I’m still not sure how it’ll survive 12h on the train, hopefully no one will try to mug me while I’ll be sleeping. And hopefully there will be Wi-Fi on the airport, otherwise I don’t know what I’ll do for 6 hours.

So much for now, I’ll try to upload one photo for test in this post, although I don’t have high hopes with this internet.

Talk to you soon,
JB