Last night at the Brazilian restaurant was a real experience. It was also the first place I’ve eaten that was not part of a chain. It is a gaucho style restaurant and vegetarians need not apply. There is a fairly extensive salad bar in the form of a buffet and we all loaded our plates up with our choices. But the real emphasis is on the meat. Waiters circulate around the restaurant stopping at the tables to offer various samples of meat from long skewers. It is very good quality too. To help them to know when you are ready for more you have a card the size of a drink coaster that can be red or green side up to indicate if you want more.
The choices included sirloin and flag steak, fillet mignon. Bacon wrapped chicken and steak, lamb chops, chicken legs and also some pork and salmon, although I didn’t get round to having the latter 2. I’m not sure if we were even offered salmon.
Like any barbeque where you can have repeated servings it is easy to eat a lot more than you would if you were limited to a single serving but it was excellent. I also had a couple of Mojito cocktails. I think the cost per head is around $50 but it is an entertaining evening and the 4 of us had an enjoyable time. I suspect it wouldn’t be much fun on your own or even as a couple.
It was about 10 when I got back to the hotel and I had to put through a load of washing. This took about 1-½ hours so it was quite a late night.
This morning I woke latish and by the time I’d packed my case it was about 10. I took a quick trip to the supermarket to buy some more of the hair product I use, which is less than half the Australian price here and a book to read on the plane.
Once at the office I prepared an invoice for the month and sorted out the expense claim before revising our working documents with the notes from yesterday. I then drove down to the sub place to pick up lunch and adjusted the expense claim to include that.
It was about 1-30 when we started our final round table discussion, really finalising and clarifying the points already raised and getting some idea of the priorities. The plan is to release a new customer version once these enhancements are completed and some of the more complicated or less well-defined enhancements will have to wait. We already started talking about some new stuff that is definitely not going to happen in the short term.
It was after 4 when I left and the GPS predicted arriving just after 4-30. This turned out to be fairly accurate and with a shuttle bus leaving soon after I’d returned the car it was just before 5 when I checked in. This was an hour be fore the flight time. But the time I’d passed through security and got the gate they were already boarding so being first class I just walked on. It was still a half an hour before we were due to leave and they served us a pre flight drink. We left the terminal right on time but I was surprised to note that it was 25 minutes from then until we actually took off.
We will land in about 40 minutes and I had accidentally pulled the power cord out of the socket during the meeting so the battery is getting low.
It has only been in the last couple of days that I started getting a decent night s sleep which fits in with the rule of thumb that it takes a day per hour of time difference. Now I’m about to reverse the journey. At least this will be in stages rather than in one 30 hour trip like the journey here. Also the last leg from Hong Kong to Perth won’t involve any time change.
It is one of the facets of modern air travel that you can travel so far in such a short time. It takes a while for the reality to sink in and you realise it may be years before you came back to the same place again, if at all.
I am now in my hotel in San Francisco. The flight landed about 8 and I swapped seats so I could sit by the window as we approached the airport. There was fog hanging over the city itself and along parts of the peninsula but not at the airport. There was a bit of a wait before our bags starting coming out. Fortunately mine was about the 8th one so I headed up a couple of flights of stairs, and across the bridge to the air trains. These go in a loop in both directions connecting the terminals, parking lots, BART (train) station and rental place. Both trains left just as I arrived but this gave me a chance to get some warmer clothing out of my bag. I was just wearing a polo top and skorts as it had been 107F in Houston. However it was much cooler here. The easiest thing to do was to grab my Qantas PJs and put them over my existing clothes. There was a queue to get tickets at the vending machine and then it took a while for me to work out how to get a ticket. I hadn’t pushed the note into the slot far enough the first few times. I made it to the train with a couple of minutes to spare and had an uneventful trip to Powell street station. My Google maps print out gave me directions to the hotel from there. It is only a block from Union Square but it is mostly uphill from the station so I was quite hot by the time I arrived.
My room here is somewhat old fashioned, with a wooden chest of drawers and desk. The bathroom is quite tiny but there is a walk in robe that is probably just as big. An incongruously modern LCD TV sits between the 2 doors.
I had not heard from the Mensa lady who was going to show me around so I looked up the contacts on their web site. My first call seemed to indicate I’d got the wrong number but I then called the local president. He confirmed the number was correct and told me of some events on tomorrow. My second attempt at the other number got me someone who at least knew who I was after and got a message to her. She called the hotel number and apologised but she’d been called out of town and wouldn’t be back. Alan, the President, however is contacting other members to see if anybody can meet me during the day. In any case, he will probably take me to the games night from the local Bart station and then back to the station in time for me to get to the airport.
By the time this was sorted it was nearly 11 so I decided against going out for a look around tonight.
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