Training Log Archive: blairtrewinIn the 1 days ending Dec 4, 2011: |
| « | » |
| » now | ||||
| Su |
Sunday Dec 4, 2011 #
Note
Geneva-Abu Dhabi-Melbourne, arriving in Melbourne about 7.45 Sunday evening, only slightly late. A reasonably painless flight. Etihad obviously haven't yet learnt that you can make some money by charging extra for exit rows because we got on at Abu Dhabi to discover that (on a plane that was about 60% full) all eight exit row seats in our section were unoccupied. Naturally this was a state of affairs which did not persist for long (and I was one of the beneficiaries).
Got to see some new country on the first leg - it's the first time I've crossed Turkey and the Middle East with a window seat in daylight. This area has been on the other side of the big high-pressure system over Europe and has consequently been colder than normal, although still quite dry - Ankara has been below -10 almost every night for the last week and a half, about 10 degrees below normal, and in eastern Turkey above the snowline there are places which have been getting down around -25. Seemed a bit odd to be flying over the length of Iraq, and eventually the Iraq-Iran border, and thinking about all the fighting that has taken place beneath over the last 30 years (in particular we flew straight over the waterway which was the prime subject of eight years of 1980s stalemate and perhaps a million lost lives between Iran and Iraq - of course, in those days we were on Saddam's side).
Returning home I took a seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time decision to use public transport, which gave me a pretty good reminder that I'm not in Switzerland any more. Compare and contrast:
Geneva, 11pm last Sunday night: fly into airport. Get one of several trains per hour to main station. Miss tram by 30 seconds. No problem, there's another one in 5 minutes. Total cost: zero (you get a ticket in the arrivals hall that gives you 90 minutes free travel anywhere in Geneva; for the rest of your stay, at every place I've stayed in in Geneva, a public transport pass for the duration of your stay is part of the deal).
Melbourne, 8pm this Sunday night. Bus to city. Discover trains aren't running between the city and Clifton Hill because of building works. Train to Parliament, bus to Clifton Hill, 30 minutes sitting on platform, train eventually arrives, make it home after close to two hours. Total cost: $19 ($16 of it for the airport-city bus).
We really don't do public infrastructure very well in this country, do we?
Got to see some new country on the first leg - it's the first time I've crossed Turkey and the Middle East with a window seat in daylight. This area has been on the other side of the big high-pressure system over Europe and has consequently been colder than normal, although still quite dry - Ankara has been below -10 almost every night for the last week and a half, about 10 degrees below normal, and in eastern Turkey above the snowline there are places which have been getting down around -25. Seemed a bit odd to be flying over the length of Iraq, and eventually the Iraq-Iran border, and thinking about all the fighting that has taken place beneath over the last 30 years (in particular we flew straight over the waterway which was the prime subject of eight years of 1980s stalemate and perhaps a million lost lives between Iran and Iraq - of course, in those days we were on Saddam's side).
Returning home I took a seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time decision to use public transport, which gave me a pretty good reminder that I'm not in Switzerland any more. Compare and contrast:
Geneva, 11pm last Sunday night: fly into airport. Get one of several trains per hour to main station. Miss tram by 30 seconds. No problem, there's another one in 5 minutes. Total cost: zero (you get a ticket in the arrivals hall that gives you 90 minutes free travel anywhere in Geneva; for the rest of your stay, at every place I've stayed in in Geneva, a public transport pass for the duration of your stay is part of the deal).
Melbourne, 8pm this Sunday night. Bus to city. Discover trains aren't running between the city and Clifton Hill because of building works. Train to Parliament, bus to Clifton Hill, 30 minutes sitting on platform, train eventually arrives, make it home after close to two hours. Total cost: $19 ($16 of it for the airport-city bus).
We really don't do public infrastructure very well in this country, do we?