Day 1 - Perth to Europe

Day 1 - Perth to Europe

The appetite has been whet and it's time to start the adventure. I am writing this at the Johann Strauss café at Vienna airport. 

Dear Leb saw me off at Perth airport yesterday and I boarded the flight to Bangkok for the first leg of the journey.

The flight, despite a very tasty lamb and potato meal, wasn't great really, I have to say. I had a window seat but was squashed in by a dear couple that were, shall we say, a little overweight. Consequently I managed to avoid going to the loo until they disappeared from the seats later in the flight. I think they had had enough of a bunch of drunken chaps (you'll never guess their nationality) who were being very loud and stood up in the aisle right by us. I had to turn my music volume really high to block them out. I did feel a bit of a prude and, of course, I like a beer myself, but this was just rude. I feel ashamed of being British when I encounter this kind of thing. The F-ing and blinding is just not acceptable. Not on a plane.

So it was a double relief when we landed at Bangkok's massive modern airport. Everything went very smoothly there. Through immigration, drop the bag off and headed of on the train to the city.

My first little adventure was to find a bar which I'd discovered from www.ratebeer.com. Apparently it's the highest rated bar in Bangkok, so my target was to find it and have a couple of bevies. 

It's always interesting to walk through the streets of busy cities and you get a good feel for them. It was very hot and sweaty and the bar was very difficult to find. Even people who worked on the same street had never heard of it. The Hair of the Dog did have a good selection of beers but I have to admit it wasn't much to shout about. The Canadian guy who ran it wasn't very talkative or friendly considering the effort I'd just made to find the place. Anyway, three very nice Stone IPAs later it was time to find a barber's shop to have a haircut.

The Hair of the Dog has a good selection of beers and a weird pair of dentist lamps

This is another of my odd little habits - having haircuts in different places. The most notable one I had was in Vilnius, I think when I was 49 years old - I'd let my hair grow quite long and even had a beard. My plan was to grow it really long for my 50th birthday and then have it cut really short on the day but I'd not realised how irritating the bear was so, with Laima with me, I decided to shave the beard and have a hair cut. I did grow it again to do the 50th birthday thing, but it wasn't as long as I'd wanted. I also had one in Salvador, in Brazil and another in Memphis Tennessee. 

The hairdresser in Bangkok was called "Ploy". I think she did a really good job for the equivalent of $15. Then it was back to the airport and, despite a massive queue to get through passport control, I got through to the gate nice and early. Time enough for a couple of beers with a nice guy from Melbourne who owns a restaurant chain.

The flight from Bangkok to Vienna was great. I sat next to a  real character, Michael from Denmark, who owns a holiday home in Phuket. He was a bit nervous that the plane only had two engines and, as he thought he'd booked with Lufthansa, expected a massive jet with a captain with "blond hair and blue eyes". A curious thing to say, indeed. To cut a long story short we had a pretty heated discussion about immigration and the problem of assimilating some muslim families into European society. In a nutshell, he wants immigration to stop and for most to be sent back home! I told him that as a son of refugees myself, I didn't think he was thinking it through. After a generation of two most of the immigrants will doubtless be fully integrated into the local society.

Eventually, we did get some sleep and woke up to resume our discussion on other matters such as the Singularity and longevity.

Now, I have another couple of hours to kill here at Vienna airport before getting on my plane to Sofia, Bulgaria where I will, bizarrely, meet up with two chaps in two days from my home town, Kirkby-in-Ashfield.

Apple strudel in Vienna

Aljice,

Vienna Airport