Month: September 2005

The joys of passport control.

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I got home at 1am last night. I am le tired.

Luton sucks ass as an airport. Customs control has to qualify as a lower level of hell. It's always the same. Since I don't have an EU passport, I have to go to the special queue with the rest of the foreigner scum (as we're treated).

Two fully loaded 737 planes landed at the same time. That's a few hundred people. There were maybe 20 people in front of me in that queue. The rest, EU nationals, in their separate queue WERE ALL PROCESSED BEFORE I REACHED THE FRONT OF THE LINE!!! In the half hour I was waiting, I was hot, was lugging my laptop and other carry-on luggage, had a screaming baby bawling right behind me, a jerk that kept hitting me with his bag in front of me, my feet hurt because of all the blisters on them and I needed to pee.

There was only one customs agent checking passport for non-EU residents. He shall henceforth be known as Mr. Efficiency. He was reading every page of each passport. When all the EU residents were processed, the four other agents started processing the people in my queue, so that started going a bit faster. Sod's law being in full force though, when it was close to my turn, another plane landed so we were forced to wait on Mr Efficiency again. Grrr. Finally, I'm at the head of the line and what should happen? Two security guards come up and start chatting with Mr. Efficiency. At this point, all that was needed to make this the lowest level of hell would have been that his tea break was due and he'd just get up and go. Finally, it was my turn.

It's always the same, and this is the most frustrating bit. The chat with Mr. Efficiency and his brethren always goes something like this:

Mr. E: Where did you travel from?
Me: Geneva
Mr. E: Where are you going in the UK?
Me: Cambridge
Mr. E: Do you work in the UK?
Me: yes.
Mr. E: *stamp* NEXT!

30 seconds of fun for 30 minutes of waiting in line.

Joy.

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Sign me up!

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A DIET recommending you eat 100g of chocolate a day and drink red wine, which will add six years to your life. Scientists in Australia and The Netherlands have come up with a diet they claim will cut a person's risk of heart disease by 78 per cent. And the good news is, you'll want to be on it.

The diet focuses on seven foods that have been proven to reduce cholesterol and blood pressure. It involves daily consumption of 150ml of red wine, which has been found to cut heart disease risk by 32 per cent. Chocaholics line up, because you have to consume 100g of dark chocolate per day, an amount the scientists calculate will reduce blood pressure.

You have to eat four meals of fish each week (each 114g), which is said to reduce your heart disease risk by 14 per cent. The diet also includes a daily total of 400g of fruit and vegetables, also proven to cut blood pressure, and 68g of almonds to cut cholesterol. You also have to consume 2.7g of garlic per day to reduce your cholesterol levels.

In a paper published in the British Medical Journal, scientists claim that if all these foods are combined in a diet they will lower the risk of heart disease by 78 per cent. The research shows men who stuck to this diet would gain an extra .6 years of life and have an extra nine years free from heart disease. Women would gain an extra 4.8 years of life and have an extra eight years without heart disease.

The proponents, including Anna Peeters from Monash University, claim the only adverse effects from the diet would be body odour from the garlic and raised mercury levels if more than the recommended amount of fish was eaten each week. But they don't calculate whether it will help you lose weight. And they warn that extra alcohol above that prescribed by the diet could reduce the effectiveness of the diet.

They say you can add extra ingredients to the diet to boost its effectiveness, including olive oil, soy beans, tomatoes, oat bran, cereals, nuts, tea and chickpeas.

Link: http://www.news.com.au/story/print/0,10119,16514149,00.html

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Drinking is bad and I shall avoid it henceforth

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Nothing makes you bond with your coworkers better than closing two bars with them. The first little pub chucked us out at midnight but were kind enough to direct us to an irish pub, where we were politely asked to leave at 2am. We lurched our way back to the hotel where, instead of going to bed, we found that the night manager opened the bar for us (and didn't charge us for it!!). In a word, well three, we got pissed. This is bad. This is establishing precedent and will have to be rectified. Attending conferences hungover isn't productive and worse of all, it isn't fun. I'm getting too old for this shit (and the people who are with me are in fact older and in worse shape, which is also an incentive to break the pattern now). The conference ends in a few hours, when I will slowly make my way back to the lakefront for some last pictures (no, not the topless beach… pervs) and then slowly mosey back to the airport to wait for my flight.

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Things I've discovered from Geneva

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1. There's dogshit everywhere on the sidewalks. The Swiss have been badly influenced by the French. Le poo. Literally.

2. Campeed blister bandages work quite well but they melt if your feet get warm enough after two hours of walking in the hot sun. Picking wax out of your socks is a really nice way to spend the evening.

3. The morning session of the meeting lasted 3 hours. The content of what was said can be distilled down to a very simple powerpoint slide. The consensus is that “we're going to do it”, but the *it* part still needs to be defined properly. Joy.

4. Walking around a topless beach with a camera might not be the brightest thing I've ever done.

5. The chairs in the conference hall add strength to Sod's Meeting Law that stipulates that the comfort of a chair is inversely proportional to the length of time you spend in it.

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A painful end to a decent trip

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…or why it's sometimes annoying to travel with other people.

Yesterday was a painful, annoying, tiring day. The conference ended at 4pm but my flight was only at 9:50, so we had a few hours to kill. The plan was to leave the bags at the hotel, wander around the viktualenmarkt, then head to the airport. I had planned to browse he duty-free shop for a few things. Of course, things didn't work that way.

Things started ok, but my foot started playing up rather quickly. I knew I had a blister, but it was only when I got home that I was actually able to inspect the damage. Not good. More later. The market was really nice, but I got annoyed when the guys decided to stop at a little shop that sold a bunch of foodstuffs. Everything smelled wonderful and looked great but I couldn't eat anything of it, which was really frustrating (in case you're thinking I was just being paranoid, the stall specialized in selling spicy exotic fare, and had peppers and garlic hanging everywhere. Ya, no). By that point, I'd been eating crap for 4 days and I was fed up. I thought we would have had a decent dinner somewhere, not have a picnic in the friggin parc where I couldn't eat jack shit. I was less than impressed. Also, by that point, I was steadily limping.

So the people I'm whit are faffing around in the parc and declaring that their food is excellent, while I'm just twiddling my thumbs and getting hungry and hot and grumpy. In retrospect, I should have just left then and there and gone to the airport on my own. Blergh. So anyway, they finally get off their duffs and we head off to the airport. To make a long story short, we got there 20 minutes before check-in closed, and every store and duty free was closed. I was fucking pissed. That whole afternoon was a bust for me. I was hot, tired, hungry and generally ready to commit homicide. I just wanted to go home.

So fast forward to a nondescript flight that I slept through, baggage claim and uneventful passport control and a 45 minute ride home. My foot, but that point, was a constant throb. I have a raw blister the size of a 10p coin. The epidermis is completely gone, with raw dermis open to the elements. Nice. I'm going to be limping for a while I reckon. I'm staying in today because I'm exhausted and – since I worked through a weekend and a bank holiday – I'm not even slightly feeling guilty about it.

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