(this entry written in a steakhouse at Helsinki airport…yeah, I know, even with redundancy on my mobile internet and I couldn’t get the laptop to dialup…the rest of the trip later, once I’m caught up with the rest of everything)
Helsinki airport, where I rather foolishly arrived early expecting there to be some kind of entertainment available.
It has been an interesting couple of days. I started out with good intentions of staying on Tokyo time, but circumstances conspired against that.
Ground zero – devastation
The checkin at Narita was crude, the electronic systems had collapsed leaving the desk staff phoning through the names of all checkers and writing their names and destinations on blank destination labels. Japan doesn’t work without the support systems, we had been rescheduled to take off 10 minutes early, while the machines were working, but once they’d expired that was no longer viable. We left half an hour late, wondering if we’d ever see our luggage again.
At the gate I met Jari and someone else whose name I forget, who were returning to Tampere on the same flight.
Fear of bad air
The flight itself was not very busy – I had a central row of four seats to myself while Jari had a row of three next to the window. Shame I wasn’t feeling tired enough to want to stretch out and go to sleep. But I hate that being woken up by turbulence thing anyway – we hit a whole bunch of bad air over the Urals so I wouldn’t have been out for that long anyway.
Still, I spent the time wisely, I made a dent in the remaining 150 pages of London Orbital. That road is my life, there are so many parallels, it feels like home. Howcome I never thought to walk it? Only another 40 pages to go now, too many for a quick just-finishing-off session, but too few for the flight to Osaka. I’m hoping to be able to swap before I get on to the connecting flight to Haneda, in the mean time I’ll learn more about the power of babel.
Landing felt a little precarious too, we kept lurching during the final approach, I was amused by the woman next to me (by the other window from Jari) reaching for the safety sheet when we were around 100 ft from touchdown, its too late now nothing you can read in the next 20 seconds can save you.
Lagging
It was 4pm by the time I arrived at the hotel, and there were works going on, I’d been put into a newly decorated room while they were working on the floors above and below. There are times when the sound of drills works, when you’ve just come off a nine hour flight is not one of them, I want those sounds to be under my control, like that I can turn them off if they’re not working.
The problem with flying west is that you wake up at stupid oclock in the morning, before anything sensible is awake. Downstairs they’d set up a grab’n’go coffee and croisant table for those guests who really had to be checking out at 6am, letting them feed their caffeine needs. I grabbed and stayed. Waiting for breakfast to open. Dead time, waiting for Timo to collect me, he’d got a car while he was over ‘cos he doesn’t like those small planes to Tampere, hes a well built guy.
Disappointing dash
He was running late having hit traffic. His car was a recent model Primera, with a tardis-like console in the centre of the dash, covered in buttons that did nothing, there was no map, no phone, no time travel. The machine made my Laguna look primitive, how can I live without colour screens and optically adjusted instrumentation? I feel a need for serious ICE in my life. A need for a car to put it in.
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