Out of the way

I forgot just how much I hate the flight to Australia - it has been a long while since I have done it (well, over six months, which is the longest gap since 1999). It just goes on and on, and sitting squeezed into the back of a jumbo with people who also don't quite fitis not really a fun way to spend 24 hours.

Qantas does a more or less direct flight from London - a quick stopover in Singapore - to Sydney. You have to get out, but then you have to turn around and join the security queue again - there is basically time to go to the toilet, have a cigarette or buy a drink or something, and that's it. No real unwind and decompress.

I came from Madrid - a horribly early taxi to get a flight to London, hanging around there, and in all the door-to-door time (from Miel's door to opening a door in a backpackers' place in Sydney) was a little over 32 hours. A french working week, by the time you add coffee breaks

So I slept in patches, watched bits of video, listened to some music on horrible scratchy headphones that killed it, burned through a bit of email, and finished a couple of books.

Number 52 - the nominal number of books to read - was Che Guevara's "Motorcycle Diaries". Actually, it turns out that a lot of the trip didn't involve a motorcycle at all (and a fair bit of the trip that did involved falling off it...) but it was an interesting book to read. It doesn't give such a huge insight into the places they went (He went with a friend), but it gives quite a big insight into a young medical student who postponed his final year to the never never and took off on an adventure. Although essentially hitch-hiking around South America with no money is quite an adventure, it turned out not to b his last, nor, probably, his most interesting or exciting. But without reading diaries of his later life it at least gives some interesting clues as to how he might have thought about them.

Number 53 was a bit of a cop out. It is a book, but not one with much narrative. It's called singrish, and is a look at Singapore English as spoken, in a similar vein to "Let's Talk Strine", the great book by the surprisingly little-known linguist Afferbeck Lauder (I think I wrote the names right, but I don't know). I don't have it with me, so I forget the author's name but the illustrations are by Miel. I don't think that is my Miel though, even though she gave me the book. As well as a bunch of serious stuff abut expressions used, and some poking fun at the local accent, there is a fair bit of tourist information - how to go shopping, and so on. Actually, it mostly boils down to how to go shopping...

Time to get back onto the streets of Sydney. If anyone reads this, and is in Sydney, give me a yell. Or catch up with me at the Web Directions South conference.