It doesn't rain, it... well, I don't know

It's Friday, and usually that's great because I'm on my way back to New York to see my family. Well, it's not so simple this week. What a drama. Where do I start?

I was at the hotel last night having dinner when I got a call from one of the people on our project saying that the Partner on the job told everybody from the East Coast to get out of Chicago as soon as possible the next morning. He had heard that there was a snow storm approaching the whole North-East and there were likely to be problems flying home. I checked out the weather forecast and there was nothing major going on and I almost didn't do anything about it, but when the boss lets you see your family a day early, there's no point trying to convince him otherwise. So after dinner, I rang our corporate travel centre, and that's when the fun began.

The travel agent said that there had already been a bunch of cancelled flights (this is 12 hours in advance mind you), so there was absolutely no availability on flights to New York. I already had a 6:30pm confirmed flight, but he said I should get to the airport early in the morning just in case.

We (by we, I mean he) cancelled my flight and booked a different flight on United for 11:00am. That was a good move because it meant I had a confirmed seat to get back home. Just in case, I also had waitlisted reservations on two different American flights. Things were covered.

When I woke up this morning (otherwise known as "the smorning"), I jumped on the net to check whether my United flight would be on time or delayed. I didn't consider option three - cancelled. No problem - they had so many other flights I should be OK, so I checked out of the hotel and headed out to O'Hare airport. I returned the rental car with no problems and went to the United terminal. With United, you've got no choice but to check in yourself at the touch-screens. It told me that not only had my flight been cancelled, but there was absolutely nothing else available today. Would you like to check for tomorrow? Sure, why not? The best it could do was a stand-by ticket at 6:20 am. I asked the lady who was in charge of the machines and she told me to go to ticketing where a real person would help me out. After quarter of an hour of the line not moving, I knew that I was probably wasting my time. Even if I got served, having absolutely no status with United wasn't going to get me anywhere. I cut my losses and went to the American Airlines terminal.

When I got there, it turned out that all of the flights to La Guardia (New York's short and medium haul airport) were cancelled. Because of my Qantas status, I can check-in at the First Class counters. They're the same as the economy counters, but the queues are shorter and the staff are friendlier and happy to spend more time to help out. That's a good thing because I was in a bit of a pickle. Not only had all flights to La Guardia been cancelled, but they also had been to JFK (the international and long-haul airport) and there was a raft of cancellations and waitlisting for Newark (in New Jersey). Thinking outside the box, I asked whether they had anything to White Plains. White Plains is a bit of an obscure airport about 80km north of NYC. There's not too much that goes in an out of there, so I figured it was worth a shot.

Unfortunately, the next two flights were already on a waitlist, but I put my name down for them and got a confirmed seat on the 2pm flight. When you waitlist, your checked luggage goes on the waitlisted flight, so if you end up catching the later one, it's waiting for you at the other end. If you get the earlier one, it gets there early. The aircraft that go to White Plains are pretty small, so getting on the waitlist usually doesn't do you any favours. That was true for this flight. My bag left, but I was waiting. No problems. The next flight got cancelled, so there was just mine left after that. After hanging around the airport for about two and a half hours, they finally cancelled my flight too. It turns out that a plane had run off the end of the runway. I'd already booked a hire car to drive from White Plains, so I cancelled that and started again.

So I went to the counter and started thinking of other options to get home. I tried to fly to LGA (airport closed), JFK (no flights), Philadelphia (no flights), Boston (go home on the train, but flights were all full) and even Islip on Long Island (American doesn't fly there).

The lady even found a flight that went to some hick town in Carolina (she didn't even know whether it was North or South Carolina), but couldn't confirm the flight to New York. I gave that one a miss.

The only thing you could get to on the East Coast was Washington DC. So I made a couple of quick calls; one to Alicia to see if she wanted to meet in DC, and one to Marcel to see if he could put me up for a couple of days. It looked like DC was the only was I was going to be leaving Chicago this weekend, so I took it.

So now I've been at the airport for six and a half hours, and am likely to be here for another six. Because DC is the only thing open, the waitlist is bigger than the capacity of the plane itself, and my confirmed flight doesn't leave until after 8pm.

What a day. This just goes beyond anything I've ever seen. Every now and then, Sydney gets fogged in for a while, but this is huge. I'm sure I'll have a good impromptu holiday, but it's not exactly what I was planning!

Update: The entire East Coast has pretty much closed. The DC flight got cancelled, so now I'm flying to Norfolk, Virginia. It's the only flight on the entire East Coast of the USA, north of Florida, that I could get a confirmed seat on tonight. I've booked another hire car and have a 4 hour drive in ice and sleet ahead of me.

I've been ok all day, but right now, I'm just fed up.

Another update: They've just called for volunteers to get off the aircraft because it's been weight restricted. Great. I doubt I'll ever get there.

Final update: I made it. It was a long and tiring drive, but I got to DC in one piece. I didn't have my luggage, because that went to DC on one of the earlier flights. I went out to the airport this morning and I actually found my luggage. I was hoping to find it there, but after yesterday's disaster, anything could have happened. So now, I'm still not home, but I got somewhere to sleep and I have my luggage. If I ever have to go through that again, it will be too soon.

Yeah, that's what I said. EGG.

There are some things that Americans do very well. Pizza, New York, steak, big cars, everything on demand. There are some things that Americans really don't do well. Hamburgers fall squarely into this category.

When we got here, we expected the usual mass-produced McDonald's-style hamburgers - you know, flavourless pickle-infested stuff. What I didn't expect was how badly one-off hamburgers are done here. Burger with the lot? Forget it. A lot of what?

I'll talk you through the hamburger process. Firstly, when you order a hamburger, you need to decide how you want it done (as in steak). I found out the hard way to just order it Medium. The first time I did this, I ordered Medium-Rare, just the same way I have my steak. Bad move. It came back half-cooked, oozing blood all through the bun; absolutely disgusting. Note to self - burgers are medium; always.

The second trick is that if you want it with chips, don't ask for it with chips. Ask for fries. Here, fries doesn't mean those thin, salt-coated things you get at McDonald's. Fried just means chips, as in they're fried. I made the mistake of ordering steak and chips at a restaurant. He asked "Are you sure?" Sure I'm sure. So out comes a plate with a nicely cooked steak and an emptied packet of chips on the plate next to it. Now I know why he asked if I was sure that I wanted chips with my steak. Note to self - chips don't go with steak. They come from packets in vending machines.

The third trick is forget beetroot. They don't even call it beetroot here; it's beet. Don't even bother asking for it. It's not worth the effort. There's one place in Manhattan that does beetroot on a burger, but that's an Australian restaurant, so it doesn't count. Note to self - beetroot belongs in an obscure part of a supermarket, not in a US burger place.

The final trick is to ask for egg on your burger. I've done this a few times now. What is completely normal in Australia is as foreign here as eating raw fish with long sticks. Every single time I ask for egg on my burger, they ask, "Are you sure?" or "Did you say egg?" Well of course I'm sure, and yeah, that's what I said: egg. I wouldn't have asked for it otherwise. They must thing I'm messing with their minds. The good thing about egg (unlike beetroot) is that everywhere has eggs, so if you push your point, they'll always be happy to oblige. Even better, having egg on a burger is such a "foreign delicacy" here, that you usually don't get charged for it because they don't have an "ADD EGG" button on their registers; that's what a good tip covers.

The locals are always fascinated when a burger comes out (usually served open-faced) with a giant fried egg sitting on top of it. They watch in morbid fascination to see if this guy who ordered egg with his burger is actually going to eat it. Hell yeah, I'm going to eat it. Watch me. And they usually do. I'm often asked, "Is that how they have it in England?" (anyone here that speaks English without an irritating American accent has to be from England of course). Sometimes they're genuinely interested to know how it adds to the flavour of the burger. Some even decide to try it some time. I'm sure they're humouring me for a better tip, but you never know, they might do themselves a favour.

Note to self - nothing beats a good old Aussie Burger with The Lot from a dodgy Fish and Chip shop.

Achtung! Sprechen sie Deutsch?

And then there was Germany! I made it in one piece, having about three hours sleep on the plane. Business Class in Lufthansa was great, as was the A330 we flew on. If you have the need to burn a lot of cash and get to Germany, Lufthansa Business is the way to do it. They had lie-flat beds which were about 6 feet long, so space and comfort wasn't a problem. The service was excellent, and the food was great. I even slept so well (once I finally got to sleep), that I missed the breakfast service. I asked them if they wouldn't mind grabbing a bite for me (knowing I had a long day ahead), and they put on the whole show, just for me. I had a choice of what I wanted, and they specially served it for me. Sometimes, flying Economy just doesn't cut it. Had I done this trip in Economy with the notice and timeframes I had, I wouldn't have gotten through the day.

And what a day it was. I met the client people at the hotel we were staying at at 8am to go to the meeting site for a 9 o'clock start. Apparently, all the European Ministers of Defense were meeting at the hotel that day, so I went through a metal detector and my bags through an x-ray just to get into the hotel itself. The meeting itself started at 9am (3am New York time) and was still going after 7pm. I can't go into detail, but it's fair to say that I'm no clearer now as to why I was there than I was before I left Chicago.

When I got back to the hotel, exhausted, they'd already checked me in and taken my bags up to the room - fantastic. I met up with the client people who were staying at the same hotel and we found a place called Paulaner, which is the name of a beer brewed in Munich (or München as us locals call it). They brought out these enormous steins of beer, which would have easily been bigger than a litre each. I guess that when you ask for a really big beer in Germany, you get a really big beer!

The beer was great - who could have known that the Germans make good beer? Actually, as a side note, the beer all trip was fantastic; I hope to get back to that later. I ordered schnitzel (as you do), and out came the best schnitzel I'd ever had. Who could have known that the Germans do German food so well? After that, we called it a night. Tomorrow would be Saturday and we had a meeting teed up with at the site for Saturday afternoon to go through some things. Yuk.

To cut a long story short, the meeting got cancelled, but I only found out at about lunchtime, so there wasn't much opportunity to get out and do things. It didn't turn out too bad anyway, because I'd only slept about 10 hours in the last 50, so I had a great sleep. Once I knew my day was free, I jumped in the hire car and hit the road. My target was Cologne (Köln to the locals). I was still pretty tired though, so after about 100km, I had a look at my travel guide and settled on Bonn, which was closer.

Bonn used to be the capital of Western Germany and was where Mozart was born. It was quite a nice city, but I didn't venture too far. I parked the car, but didn't know what the name of the street was, or even the general direction in reference to the centre of the city. It was raining and quite cold, about 4 degrees, and very windy; not pleasant at all. I wandered around the middle of Bonn for a while, which was very pleasant and certainly very European, with the cobbled plaza blocked off to traffic. I made a mental note of which shops were where and which turns I made so I could get back to the car. Even if I found somebody who spoke English, I wouldn't have been able to ask them how to get back to it. After about an hour of wandering, the camera was getting wet (so was I), so I headed back in the direction I'd figured out. As it turns out, I was out by 90 degrees and only luckily picked it up because I looked down a side street and saw the same series of shops I had walked past earlier. Lucky I saw it, because I'd still be there looking for my car now if I hadn't.

Driving in Germany's every bit as good as anyone ever said it was. The roads are wide, open and easy to drive. Contrary to popular belief, there are sections of the autobahn with speed limits, but these are usually 130, and only in the areas where there are on- or off-ramps. Apart from that, all bets are off. There's no speed limit, so I was sitting on about 140. That seemed to be about the average speed of the slower lanes. In the left hand lanes (they drive on the other side to Australia), the speed's a lot higher. On plenty of occasions, I was cruising along and the faster cars would pass by at least another 60 kph. There are a few things the Germans do well. Two of those things are making fast cars and fast roads. It was incredible to see the traffic flowing so smoothly, both forwards and between lanes. All the drivers were quite courteous and very aware of the other cars around them. I've done some reading since, and apparently the German autobahn is no less safe than regular highways. Having seen how well they're built, I can understand why. I think we need the autobahn in Australia.

Saturday night was spent doing some work with a guy from the client. Believe it - working on Saturday night is no fun. We did some on Sunday as well. We managed to catch up for lunch on Sunday and he went back to finish some things he had going while I had a little time to check out Wiesbaden. I went for a bit of a drive and found a small village about 50km away and took a few photos. Germany is such a nice place, at least the bit I saw was. The people from the client site we were at were mainly expat Americans and Brits, some of whom had been there for a long time (like 15 years). They seemed to think that life in Wiesbaden was pretty nice. I can see how it would be.

We were due back at the client site on Monday, but due to a series of errors and misunderstandings, we didn't go. However, we didn't actually confirm this until about 1pm. In the meantime, I was sitting in the hotel room waiting for some direction on what we were supposed to be doing. Once I knew I had some free time, I decided I'd have another shot at Köln, except I wasnt' up for another 200km each way trip on the autobahn. You want a fast trip in Germany? I give you the ICE. The Inter City Express is one of the fastest trains in the world, hitting 300 kph on some sections of track. Fortunately for me, those sections of track were between Wiesbaden and Köln. I walked down to the station and finally found a ticket machine (all self-service), but it was all in German. There was a very helpful man who worked for Deutsche Bahn (the German rail company), but he didn't speak any English. I got to the machine 3 minutes before the train was scheduled to leave. All he could do was shake his head, point at the clock and point at the train. Something must have changed because all of a sudden he decided to start madly punching buttons on the machine which looked like a ticket to Köln. He motioned for me to pay for it (29.00 Euro), so I got out the Amex and put it in. It didn't seem to be doing anything, but after what seemed to be an eternity, it finally spat out a ticket. I then looked around to find that my new friend had disappeared. That wasn't good. So I got my ticket and receipt and ran to the train; it was right on departure time. As I got to the train, I found that my German friend had actually held the train for me. These trains are like the Japanese Shinkansen. They're never late, no matter what. Well, this one was late - for me. I jumped onto the closest carriage as the conductors' whistles were going and my friend was madly explaining something to me and pointing to the ticket. I'll never know what he said, but it seemed pretty important.

When I got to Köln, I went to the information booth and they explained that I had a return ticket back to Wiesbaden, and they even gave me a list of the times the trains left. Very handy. I wandered around for a while and had the chance to take some nice photos. The light wasn't very good, so I'm not entirely sure they'll turn out too well, but I tried. I also managed to convince the US team that I was wasting my time in Germany and should go back to Chicago a day early. From Köln, I changed my flights (or at least my great PA did) and I was set to head back 'home'.

The train ride back was uneventful, and we arrived back into Wiesbaden exactly on time at around 8pm. I had some Chinese for dinner and went back to the hotel. From there, it was a pretty easy matter of having a good sleep, checking out, filling up the car and getting back to Chicago. I managed that without too much drama. I ordered a hire car with GPS which was a godsend. What on earth did people do before satellite navigation? Oh yeah, memories of driving in Holland come flooding back now. That's another story, and totally pre-dates this blog.


I flew with American Airlines to Chicago (again in Business). They also had the lie-flat beds, although it didn't quite have the finesse that the Lufthansa flight did. Unfortunately, I'm kind of stuck with American because I get Qantas points which will come in handy some day. Also, it was a 767-300 which just wasn't quite as nice as the A330. It was a daytime flight, so we were over northern Canada for quite a while. Wow - there's a lot of snow and not a lot of people up that way. So, here I am in Chicago absolutely exhausted. I'll just have a feed and collapse in bed.

I'm dreading tomorrow - back to work. A long, crazy day, I'm sure.

Busy, busy, busy.

I've been pulled into a new job with work at the moment. Again, it's in Chicago, and again, it's actually outside Chicago, which means a lot of traveling, and not much of actually seeing the US. It's a full-on job, with 12 hour days being pretty standard. Not only is it not in my area of expertise, it's not anything I've ever done before. That's good from the perspective of broadening my experience, but it would be nice to actually get in and do what I flew half way around the world to do. I'm assured that's coming.

One of the cool things about working in the Chicago area is the winter weather. It's by no means pleasant to be in, but they got some serious snow this year in exactly the same way that New York didn't. The first day I was on site (Monday), it snowed outside all day. It was pretty cool to be doing what we were doing, but at the same time feeling like we were on holidays in a chalet at some ski resort. That's my fantasy anyway, and I'm sticking to it. They had a meeting which hadn't been covered in Germany, so with 26 hours' notice, I was on a plane to Germany. This meant booking flights, getting back to the hotel in Lincolnshire, Illinois to check out, getting to the airport back to New York to get my passport and to repack for a week and a half trip and hit the airport. Things are pretty tight. I assume there's a really good reason I'm going, but the project team has been so frantic, I'm not actually sure why I'm going.

On the positive side though, company policy is to fly Business Class for all travel outside the US, Canada and Mexico, so Business Class it is. I'm flying Lufthansa to Frankfurt, landing at 6am. I have to meet up with the client in Wiesbaden at 8am, so I'm hoping things go according to schedule. If I'm delayed in any part of the trip, the wheels are going to fall off very quickly.

Gong He Fat Choi (新年好)

Last weekend saw in the Chinese New Year. Actually, Chinese New Year itself was a week before, but the parade through Chinatown came a week later - don't know why. So we bundled ourselves up and popped on the D Train (Kyan's favourite) and headed into Chinatown. We saw parts of the festival, but there were too many people, and being New York, inconsiderate people, to see it properly. So we didn't get to see much of the parade, but there were plenty of festivities to keep us amused. At least, Alicia and I amused, Kyan slept through the whole lot.

The best thing about the Chinese is that they like things that go bang. So we got ourselves some big things that go bang! They launched streamers about three storeys into the air.

For lunch, we found a restaurant called the New Big Wang. Apparently, it's not just a name, but a condition of entry. Luckily, I passed and got us in for a feed which, as always in Chinatown, was tasty, plentiful and cheap. Chinatown's always good for a visit, especially so at this time of the year. Best of all, it's the quickest thing to get to in Manhattan from home, so I can see us going there a lot more. I think it's going to be disappointing when we move back to Brisbane to not have things like that anymore.