a new year, a new continent

Europe? Yep. Sweden? Yup, for 6 months. A thank-you is first up. Thanks for work for sending me here (although, I still have to work ;-) but also in being flexible in allowing me to stick around until March so I could attend Lawrence and Michelle's wedding - which was an excellent event. Many best wishes for the future Lo and Shell.

Now I'm in Göteborg (Gothenburg), Sweden, which is approximately 15,000km from Melbourne. The furthest I've been from Australia to date! Realistically its about as far as I can go from Australia without coming back around the other-side of the globe! So, a new continent to visit: Europe.

Taking off from Melbourne I was apprehensive... I had an aisle seat! From my experience on Melbourne-Sydney flights, aisle seats were bad, as the food trolleys hit your arms and legs if they stuck out a little bit. Turns out that's just a Qantas thing, and I didn't get hit at all.

With a 25 hour trip ahead of me I planned to sleep, and sleep a lot. I didn't end up sleeping as much as I thought, maybe only half of the trip. I spent most of the rest of the time writing a document for my family describing how to fix the home network if a server or two died while I'm away!. Thrilling stuff. Gladly I had a business-class flight from Bangkok to København (Copenhagen). As we took off from Bangkok the pilot announced there were snow storms in København at the moment, but "these should clear up by the time we get there". These snow storms have not disappointed. It's been cold and snowy ever since! From København to Göteborg it's only 30 minutes by plane. We were shuffled onto a small-ish McDonald-Douglas MD-81 where the only difference between a business-class and economy-class seat was that you got a croissant for breakfast. We even had to walk across a frozen tarmac to get the flight. Before take-off the plane had to have its' wings de-iced by a special de-icing truck.

Now I'm going to get all fancy and multi-media-ish and have a video in the blog:

That's the landing at Göteborg. It looked very, very cool coming in over the snow. I also was able to take a few photos from the air of what might be considered to be a typical Swedish rural scene:

The snow is amazing. Being an Aussie, I haven't seen snow like this in a city before! Only on mountains and stuff. Of course the locals are ready for spring and are a bit annoyed with this cold snap - they'd already put their coats away for the season. Shops have also put away their winter stock (or sold out), which is a bit frustrating, I was hoping to buy some cold-weather gear here.

Due to the length of my stay I'm staying in a furnished apartment. It's very nice, and the location is great. It's located near the centre of town (approximately CBD to Carlton type distance in Melbourne terms). Göteborg has a wonderful public transport system including an extensive tram network. The town is small enough that there are no suburban trains, just buses and trams. I've got the choice of 5 different tram routes to catch to my place, and even more bus routes. My apartment is on the top story (the 5th) of the building and has a great view down towards a church:

As I'm writing this it's Good Friday holiday here and it's snowing again for the first time since arriving. The view up to the church looks a bit different when covered in snow.

This long weekend I'm heading to Rīga, Latvia, with a few other engineers from Melbourne. The engineers aren't in Göteborg, but I contacted them as I knew they were in Sweden and they already had this trip planned. It should be excellent. The entire centre of Rīga has been world heritage listed by UNESCO as the best example of Art Nouveau architecture. There's also cheap booze :-)

Sweden has a reputation for expensive booze. Now I'm not sure if the Australian dollar is unusually strong against the Swedish Krona, but really the prices are almost comparable to Australia. A pint in the pub on my first night in town was pricey at $10-ish dollars (but then in Melbourne it's not unusual to pay $8 these days). The bottle store was better $24ish for 12 bottles of beer. That's better pricing than Australia where a 6-pack is usually $15. Sweden has a tightly controlled alcohol market. The only way you can buy heavy beer, wine, or spirits is through a government owned chain of outlets called Systembolaget. The government says that "the monopoly is to lower the consumption and the damage alcohol does on the public health". Personally I think this is just crap, they run like a post offices: closing at 6pm on weekdays, 2pm on Saturdays, and not even opening on Sundays. Sure it might lower consumption but now they have to beef-up their customs operations to catch alcohol smugglers!

Anyway, it's Easter time, and sure these days you might be forgiven for thinking that Jesus was fluffy bunny that broke all biological rules to pop out a chocolate egg before being resurrected for a another public holiday (that makes sense right? :-) but here in Sweden, it's even more confusing. It still has little to do with Christian beliefs (*phew*). Children dress as witches because in Sweden witches flew off on broomsticks to dance with the devil at Blåkulla around this time of year. Nice eh? So now we have witches, broomsticks, chocolate, bunnies, eggs. But wait, there's more: they also add a liberal dose of brightly coloured feathers and cook heaps of marzipan. Yum Yum.

Did someone say Easter is a time for sober reflection? Not around me they didn't. *grin*

Oh yeah, better chalk up beer number 1 in the Swedish leg of the beer challenge. Well there was another one, but the photo didn't turn out well. I'll just have to drink that one again. Good times.

on my way home

I'm on my way home now, writing this on the plane. Hopefully I can find some free Internet access in Sydney airport to upload it! I'm transiting via Sydney so that I could come home. Mark and I were "wait listed" on our flights back to Melbourne on Saturday. So we pestered the travel agent about it. As it turns out, the end of school holidays causes busy times for airlines (who would have thought?!). We couldn't get flights on Saturday, nor Sunday, nor Monday. Since we had finished our part of the project, we could leave early. So we tried for a flight on Friday - unsuccessfully. Finally the travel agent said there was one seat left for Thursday, otherwise we could transit via Sydney or Adelaide. Mark was the one on the phone, so he wisely took the one seat on the direct flight! And hence, I'm on my way to Sydney.

With the changes to airport safety regulations, this transit has unfortunately put a dent in my planned alcoholic purchases. Carry on liquids are now restricted to 100-millilitres, ruling 1-litre bottles right out! You can still buy duty-free alcohol, and take it on board so long as you have a direct flight, and don't transit anywhere. The theory being that the alcohol goes directly from the duty-free store to the plane. If you transit however, then you may have the opportunity to turn your lovely gin or whisky into a plastic explosive. Bah humbug.

I've got a plan though. I bought one bottle of "getting around the restrictions" experimental gin. When I arrive in Sydney, I have to collect my check-in luggage and clear customs. Once I have the check-in luggage, I add the aforementioned bottle of gin, and the check it back in for the domestic flight. This way it's not in my carry-on luggage any more, and therefore not subject to restriction. Should work, but then I'm not gambling more than one bottle on it!

The duty-free industry must be screaming about this. When I went to make $150 worth of purchases, they found out I was transiting in Australia. They had to put it all back on the shelves. There must be a better way...

Some people out there in blog-land might want to see what I travelled 7,700 kilometres for. The photo below shows the "GGSN", this is what I've been installing. Fairly nondescript really. Normally it wouldn't even have that big yellow light turned on! In fact, in its final configuration it will not have two of the cables shown up the top connected either. It will however, gain one more orange fibre optic cable.

This beige and blue box makes the Internet work on mobiles phones. I'm listening to Nick Cave at the moment, and to take a lyric I just heard completely out of context... "we are magicians".

Compare my box with the box that Mark had to install (below). Heaps more cables and flashing lights on his! Essentially does the same thing however: cooperates with my box to make the Internet work on mobile phones. It looks more impressive with the extra cables and lights though.

I've crossed back over the equator, and dinner is about to be served. Time to wrap up this post. I'll be home in around 12-hours. : )

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Postscript #1. I'm at Sydney now. Observations:

1. Internet access is free
2. etickets are awesome - offers earlier flights by default!
3. The airport itself is stupid!! Three totally separate terminals?!

Postscript #2. As it turns out the Singaporeans don't know the restrictions like they think they do. There aren't any restrictions for liquids on domestic flights - so it would have been okay to buy drinks anyway.