Remembering the Terran Trade Authority
For those who don’t know; TTA
I have a very second-hand copy of one of these, bought out of nostalgia, and I’d definitely pick up a couple of the others were they to become available.
This was a fantastic panel, described by the moderator as a tribute to Stewart Cowley, the editor/assembler/writer of the things, with Mr. Cowley and three of the contributing artists as panellists.

The whole TTA thing came out of wondering what happened to the images used on book covers, & noticing that there’s a coherent look to many of them. Cowley, despite having a contract forbidding him from actually writing, couldn’t find a writer who got the idea, so wrote the text himself. This came out when they wanted another book, but after the first one sold 800,000 copies, what were they going to do about it?

The Destruction Of London
I skipped out early on this, as it was basically a talk about six posters I’d already read, by the guy who’d made them, in the (noisy) exhibit/dealer hall. Sadly, the presenter didn’t have a good handle on projection, and every third word was “Ummm”.

Truth in Trash
Is there such a thing as Trash cinema or TV?
Not sure that a conclusion was reached, but a lot of fun was had, and there were some suggestions of things to watch, such as Supernatural, the Sabrina the Teenage Witch live-action series, Vampire Academy, & The Ghost Goes Gear.

Tim Powers’ The Anubis Gates – World Premiere
A stage play of a very complicated story. They went with a minimalist set & combined chorus/stage ninja/bit-part troupe, plus some big screens to capture the parts of the story happening in the aisles, or at the back.
I’d read the book, so I could follow the story; From what the people around me were saying on the way out, it was baffling to those who hadn’t.
Also long.
A shade under three hours long.

Having just worked out that I can do a cut & paste from the nifty con schedule app, I’m going to do the programme items first.

• Fallen London – Recreating London in Games
  They’re taking a very wide stance on ‘games’ here; Anything from an RPG to a LARP to a Board Game to an online thing called Fallen London.
  The take-home, as it were, is that there’s so much stuff in London, in terms of history & mythology, and even geography, that there’s material for almost anything you want to do. Also that people seem to focus on Victorian London more than anything else.

  Something(s) I found myself wandering were;
  Is there a railway-building game based on the Underground? If you go with a Beck-esque schematic to simplify the lines you might be able to use tiles, or maybe wee plastic sticks?

  Alternatively, can you cross London Underground trains with Underground political movements, so that you’re linking positions/policies (Stations) with lines to build your platform?

• British Comics: Influences and Influencers
  Pretty much what it sounds like, with a lot of history of comics in Britain; The arrival of American comics leading to The Eagle, that sort of thing.
  To be honest, a lot of the names went by me unrecognised, and I’d probably be better off finding a book on the subject if I needed to know more.
• Fannish Inquisition
  This is the bit where groups bidding for future cons say their piece and answer questions.
  Kansas City 2016 were big on the BBQ, while Beijing went with ‘we are aliens from the future’ as an approach.
  Further out, 2017 is crowded with four bids, Dublin 2019 looks very organised with colour handouts & a secret bar, and there was nobody official there from NZ2020
• Urban Fantasy: London
  Why is it always the Victorian Era?
  There’s a fair bit of crossover with the games panel, as the same points & issues apply to both.
• The World at Worldcon: Eastern European and Baltic SF/F
  Yeah, …
  This could have been good, but was sandbagged by a panelist who was long-winded, rambling, pedantic, and spoke very halting English. Not a good combination.
  There were a few times when other panelists tried to shut him down, but it didn’t take.
• Sci-Fi London Shorts
  Short films, some of them products of a 48 hour film-making competition.

My con schedule is stored on my phone, thanks to a handy little app, so doing a summary will involve a bit of back-and-forth. Let’s see how it goes, shall we?

• Climate Catastrophes
  This was done by Jonathan Cowie, who was at Au Contrairé in 2010, and was basically an introduction to Earth Systems Science, specifically the role of life in changing the planet. Kind of interesting, though his answer to the question of “What Can We Do About Climate Change/Global Warming?” was a sobering ‘Go enjoy yourselves; We’ve been warning people for 40 years, and it’s only getting worse’
• Goliath
  An anime-esque War Of The Worlds sequel, where human fighting machines & heat rays are used to do battle with a second Martian invasion.
  Teddy Roosevelt as the Action Secretary of Defense was a nice touch, and the backdrop of WW1 starting & Irish Independence was interesting.
• Experimenting With Comics
  Mostly an artist talking about her own work, with reference to historical art & some of the more unusual approaches to comics.
• Raumpatrouille Orion Fangroup
  ~sigh~
  I’ve seen the movie version of this German SF TV show, where the episodes were cut together & edited into a single narrative, so I was looking forward to finding out more about it.
  Unfortunately, this was the bad sort of fan presentation, where they just want to tell you everything, with little thought given to structure or a coherent narrative in their talk. Clearly, people were fans, but that kind of worked against them.
  I snuck out early, as did another chap who wanted to avoid spoilers.
  this did give me the opportunity to go to …
• Getting London Wrong
  Thor would have needed to change trains to get back to Greenwich. Ben Aaronovich gets multicultural London right. Stop trying to do Cockney if you’ve never heard one.
  Basically, this was a lot of fun.
• No Adolf Inside: The Truth About German Fandom
  This was great. Very funny, covers a lot of German culture in a very short time.
  Wherever seven Germans gather, they’ll form a club. When there are more than ten people in the club, they split into two clubs & bicker.
  It covered Raumpatrouille Orion & the Perry Rhodan series, plus some oddities of German Publishing & the fact that there is no Germany-wide convention, but lots of regional ones instead.

I spent a short period of time at the NZ2020 Bid table, mostly because I helped Maree, who seems to be organising it, carry bags filled with cans of whipped cream. It turns out that these were for the Bid Party that night (I didn’t go: Too crowded, noisy, & annoying), and not as a supply of nitrous to while away the hours on the bid table.

Something I wasn’t expecting was the sudden appearance of blisters, which is making the trip to & from the hotel a little more annoying than I’d like.
On the plus side, there are gems like this in the ExCeL centre.

Badge Pickup, day one; I am so very glad that I wasn’t in this line.

Looking down into the Fan Village.

Looking into the Dealer Hall

Not quite an interior shot of the Dealer Hall, but it’s less dark.

Looking up from the Fan Village, which was effectively a hangout zone, plus bid tables and a cafe/bar.
I have no idea what the Pirate Moose flag is about, and, to be honest, I’m OK with that mystery.

This, I thought, was just kind of neat.

Woke up earlier than I’d like, sadly, and thus Wednesday changed from being an afternoon of tourist stuff into being a day where I picked up my badge & con books, then sort of chillaxed for the rest of the day.

Fran gave me a lift home mid-morning, and I picked up the con stuff a bit after that. Lunch was a couple of surprisingly good sandwiches from Tesco. (Or is it Tescoes? Must check)

I did spot a few people I knew, including Maree from NZ, who was trying to find out where to deliver, or at least stash, a large number of cans of L&P and every meringue they could lay their hands on.
I did get told that they were for the NZ in 2020 bid party, and that I’d be helping, but the conversation moved on before a “Nope; Not gonna happen” could be delivered.
Bid Table in the ‘Fan Village’? Absolutely.
Misc. volunteering for the Con. No trouble, unless you count my complete inability to contact, or be contacted by, anyone who could tell me anything about things I might be willing and able to do. (In the absence of such information, I’ve just been being generally helpful, mostly by telling people where to go. 3:) )
Bid Party, late at night, involving lots of people in a noise & chatter filled environment where I’ll not be able to hear one word in ten? Think I’ll pass. 🙂

Along the way, I took some pictures of the site for Lon Con. To be honest, I’m hazy as to the when of these images, so I’ve made my best guess.

Looking down into the badge pick-up area.
From the look of the crowds, or lack thereof, I’m guessing that this was taken just after I picked up my badge, the day before the con.

View of the western end of the ExCeL Centre, closest to my hotel.
If I’m right, I would have been standing at the end of the street the hotel was on, at about the point where I was asked for directions to the train a few days ago.
I’m still confident that my “Go until you hit that building, turn left” directions were correct.
The cranes, incidentally, are not real. Thought they were, at first, but a closer look revealed their insidious post-modernism; They’re only there as art pieces, because docks should have cranes.
Not real cranes, just things that look enough like them for a nice view.

View from outside the ExCeL Centre, looking back towards the hotel.
I suspect this photo was taken on a walk to the centre, the more I look at it, as I suspect the white-clad figure with the bag in this shot is the same one who’s in the previous shot, having been overtaken by me on the trudge across the plaza.

This was just a blatant Danger Mouse opportunity; I could not pass it up.

OK, I was trying to riff on the chorus in “Go West” (Pet Shop Boys version), but I’m not sure I got the right letter; Stupid double-vowel structures. 🙁

I was awake from 1am until about 4am, for reasons unknown, which is why there’s a great big brainspew about yesterday’s tourism. It may also explain any trifling incoherency in said brainspew.

I hit the breakfast zone at a bit before 7, and for a while was the only one there; People started drifting in from about 7, so I think I’ve found my time slot for a leisurely morning.

Currently, I’m chillaxing in the lobby on a comfy sofa, watching the heavily-accented people go by. There are a lot of French speakers, or at least what sounds like French from the few words I can pick out, and a solid representation of something which sounds Eastern European.
I cannot work out what the hotel staff converse with each other in; I’m almost hoping it’s some combination of a few things, the language of Hotels, like Taxilingua from Snow Crash.

Chris’ son Grant is going to be collecting me at 10, so I’ve got a little time to kill.
It might be worth doing a spot of planning for tourism things, mostly in terms of “What’s next to this” and “When’s likely to be a quiet time for that”

|o| /o/ |o| \o\ |o| /o/ |o| /o/ |o| \o\ |o|

OK, so there was a slight change in plan when Grant came down with something, so Chris (& Fran, his wife) came out to pick me up instead.

Little towns/villages in Essex look almost too much like what I’d expected them to; Narrow roads, brick buildings right on the edge of the footpath, not quite quaint but within an easy walk of it.

It was a really good day.
Got to meet the menagerie of three dogs, one of whom was very licky, and two cats, who mostly ignored me, in the manner of cats.

We went to Southend Pier & ride the rattly little train to the end, which was quite a lot of fun. Just the idea of a 1.3 mile long pier is kind of awesome, and gives a very different view of the Thames.
The weather did pick up while we were out there, & the degree of change in visibility over very short periods of time was noticeable. Also, as someone who’d walked out & then snuck into the train for the trip back told us, there’s no cover from the wind for most of it, so he didn’t feel like battling the cross-wind for the walk back.
Also the rain.
Such rain.

We got dinner at a carvery place on the way back; Must be the first time in years that I’ve been to one, and it was very nice. I had almost no idea what the chap with the knife was saying thanks to a strong accent from somewhere local, but he seemed to understand me OK.
Still have no idea what the hollow edible possibly pastry-based case thing was; I meant to ask, but forgot.

Mostly, this day was about catching up with Chris, meeting Fran, & talking about all sorts of stuff, often with a gaming bent to it.
The games stash there is both Mighty and Fearsome, and apparently represents only a portion of what has passed through the house over the years.

We played;

1. Station Master
   This is one of Chris’ games, using cards & a few little tokens, where you build up trains until they’re full and have variable amounts of investment in each train. Carriages are worth points, some carriages are worth negative points, & there’s the opportunity to shaft the other players by sandbagging trains they’ve got an interest in.I’ll admit to being a little confused by the rules as described, but once I saw them in play, no worries at all. It was interesting to watch the growth of ‘dump trains’, as people tried to get rid of the negative cards stinking up their hands.
   Quite fun, and has a bunch of opportunity for the sort of shaft thy neighbour tactics that I’ve seen in games like Fluxx or Groo.
2. Camel Up
   This ones a German Boardgame which Chris thinks will do well this year. It’s a humorous game, which I wasn’t aware the Germans did.
   To qualify that, all of the games which have previously been identified to me as German games have been very complicated & intricate, and often a bit mathematical. Camel Up … Isn’t.
   I thought, based on the box art, that this was Camel Cup, and given that it’s about betting on a camel race, it seemed fair, but we checked and no, it’s Camel Up.
   Basically, camels race around a pyramid, and you bet on them. The pyramid is used as the randomiser/dice shaker, and the whole thing has a fun comic-book look to it.This was a lot of fun; It’s difficult to take a bad bet seriously with graphics like that, which to me at least makes it easier to enjoy the game.
3. Mondo
   Probably another German one, though I’m not certain of that.This one’s about picking up little landscape tiles to build an island, or islands if you grab a lot of water, trying to make sure that the edges match so that the patches of Forest & Grassland & Desert & Water make sense.
   Of course, once you’ve placed a tile, there’s no moving it, and everyone is drawing from the same pile of tiles, and you’re all doing this at the same time.
   Did I mention the ticking countdown timer?

   This was kind of relaxing, like doing a jigsaw puzzle. With a time limit. And competition for the pieces.

Ended up staying up to about 1am, which had some consequences on Wednesday, & I stayed over; Fran & Chris gave me their bed & went with the lounge, at least in part to prevent night-time animal incidents.

Following on from the last post, breakfast eventually happened, once most of the crowd had cleared; All that was left seemed to be a French-speaking group of probably high-school aged girls & some slightly shell-shocked staff. The meal itself was a pretty standard Ibis buffet, with a coffee machine which did Mochas, and rather less room to move around than you’d like when it got crowded.

Post-Breakfast I headed off towards Euston Station, as I’m going to need to get there by 8:00am to catch the train to Dublin, while lugging the bag of doom (kind of regretting not having one with wheels; it’s a bit cumbersome to carry effortlessly, and I have some bruising from slinging it over one shoulder. if I spot a bag-type shop, I’ll see whether they have an appropriate shoulder strap, or something I can repurpose with a couple of carabiners or something), so knowing the way seemed like a good idea.
I’m really enjoying being able to vanish underground & reappear somewhere else using the Underground; It’s like teleporting with white tiles & odd smells. Plus, as a tourist, it’s kind of nice to know that, once I’ve found a station, getting back to the hotel will be comparatively simple, if topologically complex.

Found Euston Station without incident, then hopped a train to visit Forbidden Planet, as suggested by Tanja.
That’s a lot of bookstore.
Could have bought any number of things, but limited myself to a Dresden Files book I didn’t already have, as luggage weight may become an issue after two conventions.

By the pure chance of someone asking me whether she was going the right way for Trafalgar Square, and someone else telling her when I couldn’t, I learned that Trafalgar Square was that-a-way, so I went for a wander, which is how I happened across St. Martin In The Fields.
There was a concert about to start, so I didn’t poke about in the church itself, and instead read the historical bits & looked at the models & pictures.

Trafalgar Square had this;

I met a London Ambassador (help for the tourists, or possibly just the confused & lost) who wasn’t a fan of the Big Blue Rooster, as it detracted from the Gravitas of the square, but would have been OK with a statue of a Pigeon, as long as it wasn’t blue. A more classical pigeon, from a more civilised time.

It started raining, so I hid under a tree & got chatting with one of the other cowerers about the weather, as you do. Turns out there was a short but very powerful rain + wind event yesterday, strong enough to blow a rack of clothes onto him at the entrance to a shop, more or less at the same time as I was at Paddington, which would nicely explain it raining inside the station.

I spotted a map showing the way to the river, then found the Admiralty Arch more or less accidentally, so I wandered through to find St. James’s Park and a somewhat familiar road.

The weather couldn’t decide what it wanted to do on the sun/rain stakes, so walking under trees was quite nice.
Ended up outside Buckingham Palace, watching a couple of (I assume) fantastically bored guards march back & forth in fancy historic uniforms with massive hats, carrying something in the L85 assault rifle line.

Back through the park, with increasingly tired feet, and through a display of WW1 pictures & art, set up for the centenary.
Learned a few things, such as the role of Zeppelins in attacks on England; Don’t think that ever got covered in history classes at school, as it was all trench warfare & Gallipoli.
There was also this;

A bit south, while looking for the underground station, I did manage to take a very London sort of picture.

I’m glad that this sort of thing is so very easy to get to on public transport, as I wasn’t really in the mood to do any wandering around looking at famous buildings; The prospect of a cold drink and putting my feet up appealed more. Fortunately, it’ll be piss-easy to get back there when I do want to read plaques & take obnoxious clock-tower selfies.

I took the gondola back from the O2 / Millennium Dome,

seen here impersonating some form of alien bioconstruction, mostly because I could, and because it’s close to my hotel. Also, Gondola!!

Is it just me, or does the Millennium Dome look like an alien spacecraft which hasn’t really figured out this ‘camouflage’ thing yet, and is going for Circus Tent Meets Construction Crane?

I got a UK SIMcard, so I can now make calls & do that whole mobile Internet thing, at least while I’m in the UK. The whole sales process seemed a bit dodgy, and the store was very much a hole in the wall sort of outlet, but it seems to work, so if there’s a scam there, it’s one that gives me unlimited texts, 500 minutes of call time, and 2GB of data for the next month.
I can live with that, though I did need to do some digging to find my mobile number.
Chris, rightly, laughed at me when I said that I had no idea what my mobile number was; I found out, once I got back to NZ, that it was written on the SIM, but I also found a thing you could ‘dial’ which would tell you the number. Behold!

Thanks to Skippy The Wonder SIM, I was able to contact Chris in Essex, to arrange visiting him tomorrow. I’d been planning to take the train, as it seemed pretty easy from here, with only a couple of connections to make, but he wouldn’t hear of it, and has arranged for his son to come & pick me up instead.
I’m guessing he knows something about that train trip that they don’t mention in the brochures, even if it’s just “That is a long and tedious train journey, they charge like a wounded bull, and it’s much quicker to drive”.

That’s pretty much been my day; Day One in London, and it went well, I think.
Managed to give myself a couple of blisters, which wasn’t really part of the plan, but other than that, a good day.

As seen in Trafalgar Square.
I asked one of the London Ambassador people about it, and she wasn’t a fan; A big bronze pigeon would have been more appropriate in her view.

Breakfast hit an early snag when I got to the lobby & saw the throng of people milling about in the restaurant, talking, allegedly queuing, and generally getting in each others way. There was an actual look of relief on the face of the lady working the maitre d’s desk (is that spelled right? and should it be Madame d’ ?) when I said I had time, and could just come back later.
She suggested 9am, as three were three tour groups clogging up the buffet.

I figured I’d go for a walk, see what the other end of the ExCeL centre looks like, and maybe check out where the other DLR station (Custom House for ExCeL) near here is, in case it’s closer than the one I used (Royal Victoria).

Other plans for today include the non-intensive sort of tourism, so that I can stop at any point if The Jetlags catch up with me;

1. heading out along the route I’ll have to take the day I go to Dublin, so that there are fewer moments of “Where the f*** do I go now?” while carrying the big black bag
2. conveniently, that’ll put me in easy Tubing distance (not sure that’s a real word in this context) of Forbidden Planet, assuming it was the bookstore I was recommend, and not an actual planet.
   I had the same confusion with Planet Of The Apes, as it happens.
   Didn’t pack a book this trip, as I’m half-way through a brick of Stephen Ericsson, and didn’t want to lug the thing the rest of the trip if I finished it on the plane, so a bookstore would work out nicely.
3. from there, I’m thinking of heading riverward, to see whether there’s anything touristy, possibly involving boats. There is, after all, a river there, so it’d be a shame not to look at it, or to see whether I can find the place doing amphibious vehicle tours.

Heathrow Terminal (probably) 3 is, from what I’ve seen, pretty much like any other big chunk of airport.
Go this way if you’re transiting, that way if you aren’t, yes the hallways do go for bloody miles, and here’s a queue to stand in.

Getting into the country was pretty simple, and a shorter procedure than the one at LAX; Then again, I think they’re actively looking to catch you out at LAX*, whereas all they wanted to know here was “On Holiday?”, so the line moved pretty quickly.
(* in 2013, the border control person asked me who I knew in Indianapolis, which kind of baffled me as a question. presumably my incoherent listing of a few names was enough to convince her that I wasn’t lying)

Baggage claim, conveniently, had my bag nice & obvious on the conveyor by the time I got there, and the crowds had died down enough that getting to it was easy; I’ve had times when the crowds are so packed that you can’t get to your bag, even when you can see it.

Following the signs led me to the Heathrow Express, which, conveniently, arrived at the platform pretty much at the same time I did, for a very quick transition to comfy seating & complimentary wifi. They have ticket-selling people who seem to have experience in dealing with the tired, jetlagged & confused, which made that process a whole lot easier.

Paddington Station is enormous.
Not in the same way as, say, Chicago, which had these enormous echoing halls you walk through to get to the trains; Paddington has a huge covered space, with a glass & iron arched roof, and it’s filled with trains & people & stuff.
A chap on the Heathrow Express platform saw me reading the signs, chuckled at my comment about getting my bearings, and pointed me at the end of the station where I could get an OysterCard. It took me a while to find the Transport For London … Not really a kiosk or store; It was a window in the wall of the access to the underground, but they were nice enough to explain the basic idea (Tag On at the first station, Tag Off at the last one, so much like the TransPerth system. Or perhaps TransPerth is much like Oyster?) and tell me that the card can be topped-up. (there’s a note about it printed on the little card wallet, so presumably there’s a decent number of people confusing them for being multi-trip ticket equivalents?)

I’d printed out the instructions on how to get to the WorldCon venue from their website, which included a very helpful annotated tube map. Unfortunately, the closure of access from Paddington to the Bakerloo Line meant that I had to engage with understanding the network slightly earlier than I’d planned, though signs pointing me towards taking the Hammersmith & City to get to the Bakerloo line at Baker St. eventually made me realise that I could do just that, and since Baker Street was a point of change on the route to the venue anyway, it’d all be OK.
It did take a while to find the appropriate platform, but I’ll be taking the blame for that myself, as I don’t think I paid enough attention to the signs. Got there eventually by reversing course along the Heathrow Express terminal, where I’d seen a “Bakerloo via Hammersmith & City” sign, which led me to the right place.

Wow, those platforms are narrow.
The above ground piers at Paddington were pretty big, presumably because of the number of people using them & the fact that they weren’t dug out, whereas the platforms on the underground kind of required that people stand against the wall to make it easier for others to get past. So, basically, manners.

Once on the tube network, it was all pretty simple, and I met a couple of other WorldCon attendees, Bob & Brigitte from California, standing waiting for the Docklands Light Rail at Canning Town; They’d already asked someone which train they needed, and while I’d figured it out from the helpful schematics, it was nice to hear someone confirm it.

Once I got to the appropriate station, I didn’t know which direction to go in to get to the hotel, so I climbed a set of stairs and looked for water, which worked surprisingly well, and the walk to the Ibis was uneventful.
There are a number of real estate agencies around here, which seems odd to me, and a few convenience stores or mini-supermarkets, which will be very convenient.

Hotel room at the Ibis London ExCeL Docklands is actually a bit nicer than I was expecting, with both working and quiet air conditioning (It’s a bit muggy here, especially on the Underground), and an unusually long breakfast-serving period starting at 4am for the early-riser set (which will be useful on the day I catch a train to Dublin, as I’ll have to get across the city during a weekday morning with a bag, so an early start seems like a good idea), free wifi, and a surprisingly comfy bed.

I figured that, after showering, I was probably going to fall asleep for hours, so I wandered out first to grab a bottle of water and at least look at the ExCeL Centre; Ended up being asked for directions to the train station by a group of somewhat lost Welsh girls, who weren’t sure where they were in relation to anything else. I decided not to tell them just how little local knowledge I had, pointed them towards the closest DLR station (according to the map, at least, and it looked a bit easier to find than the one I’d used; “Go that way until you hit the building, turn left, go that way until you hit a railway line”), and they left proclaiming that I was a ‘Lovely Man’.
Amusingly, to me at least, they were a mix of Asian & African looking people, all with strong Welsh accents.

Eventually a shower happened, followed by going to sleep at about 6:30pm when I realised that I couldn’t keep a coherent train of thought going, even internally; Random fragments of other stuff kept interfering.
I had planned to only take an hour-long nap, but that … didn’t happen.
Can’t even remember for sure whether the alarm I set went off; I think it did, but I don’t remember getting up to turn it off, just the ‘having gotten up’ part.

Getting to the æroport was fairly uneventful, and the Airbus (bus going to airport, not plane at airport) was pulling up as I got to the stop, which was very convenient.
As a result, I got to the airport VASTLY early, so I’m killing time, as it were. The people of Emirates were nice enough to open their check-in counters for all the days flights, so I am, at least, not lugging all of my luggage around.

I next see my luggage in London (I hope), a good number of hours from now.
Somewhere north of 30 hours, in fact.

— time passes —

This is a very nice aircraft; The walnut trim around the windows & on the wee handle for the blind is particularly classy.

In-flight entertainment includes cameras in the nose & up on the tail, to show where we’re going, a camera looking down, to see where we are (while waiting for push-away, I was having trouble working out what the hatch shown on-screen was. I think it was the roof of the plane moving vehicle, based on how it moved around, and a bunch of movies, including Snowpiercer, which I’ve been wanting to see.

Currently flying over cloud & ocean.

— tick tock tick tock —

OK, I’ve watched all but the last 20 minutes of Snowpiercer, which was … violent. Also good, and very odd.
I’ll watch the rest on the next leg, as we’ve been transferred off the plane at Sydney for a crew change, and presumably to get more passengers.
I’m not complaining if we don’t get more passengers; I had a three-seat row to myself for the Auckland to Sydney bit, so I’m hoping that’ll continue for Sydney-Dubai.

— tic tic tic tic —

Yeah, not so much on the row-to-myself front.
Also, Sydney to Dubai is a long-ass flight. I knew it’d be a bunch of hours, but hadn’t realised just what that’d be like as the second flight of a journey.
I did finish watching Snowpiercer, and watched Frozen, and a chunk of Captain America 2, and probably slept for a while.

Dubai Airport is very big.
Bloody enormous, in fact.
Not enough seating near the gates though.
Getting between the different concourses was pretty simple, and there’s a little train, though I can see it being a nightmare if you had a tight timeframe between flights.

— more time passes —

As I’d hoped, the daytime flight gave me the chance to Ooh & Ahh over interesting scenery, as seen from very high up. Figuring out where the hell the plane was took some doing at times, and demonstrates that I probably should have looked up where the borders are, or put a map on my phone or something.

The Emirates planes are very nice, and cabin crew seemed to spend the entire time handing people things. Hot towels. Meals. Bringing around a tray of drinks in the middle of a 14-hour flight. That sort of thing.
It might just be me being too fat, but the bathrooms seem really small, even for an aircraft toilet.
On the other hand, they do sell duty-free items on the plane. Not run into that before.
Also, quite a range of TV & Movies. They even had episodes of “Taxi” on the Auckland to Dubai bit.

I think, were I to do this flight route again, I’d break my trip in Dubai.
A 19:45 trip, broken with a stop in Australia, is long, but it’s OK.
Add on another 7:30 trip immediately after that, and it’s a hideous length of time to spend on a plane. I get a four-hour Dubai stop on the way back, so I’ll have to take better advantage of the delights of DBX. Buy Starbucks, perhaps?

— ding ding —

Arrival in London was delayed by about a half-hour, all of which was spent in well-lit cloud, so the cameras showed nothing. Nice views of houses & the like on final approach to the runway.