a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
It was a short trip to California this week, but I was still glad when it was time to jump into my little Prius compact car and drive south to Sacramento airport. Man! but there was so little air traffic at the airport : all of three planes in sight at the twenty or so gates at Terminal B. One from Southwest Airlines, and two from Alaska Airlines.
I traveled to Sacramento airport on Tuesday, and drove out to Chico, an hour and forty minutes to its north.
Our project is winding down. We are bringing our last group of users into the system that we had built for them. We’re also steering clear of the Bay Area this week. Air fare and hotel prices are through the roof with the upcoming Superbowl 50 that is hosted by Santa Clara.at the south end of the Bay.
P.S. Hillary Clinton won the Democratic caucus in Iowa with a razor-thin 49.9% share of the votes, over 49.6% for Bernie Sanders.
I’m home, with all my ‘belonging’ !
I made it into Seattle-Tacoma airport at 5 pm local time.
(So I arrived at 5 pm in Seattle on Saturday after departing at 9.45 pm on Saturday in Tokyo, the result of flying east across the International Dateline. I got the 24 hrs back that I lost when I traveled out in the opposite direction).
My connection in Vancouver was again a little tight, but once more it helped that Canadian customs and baggage claim there were very efficient. Vancouver airport actually does Canadian arrival and USA entry processing right there, so that Vancouver-Seattle passengers do not have to go through United States customs upon arrival in Seattle.
I arrived at my fancy hotel on Friday night. (Decided I need to ‘upgrade’ my hotel that I had coming in. The Prince Sakura Tower Hotel is a special ‘autograph collection’ Marriott Hotel, and I used Marriott Points so that I did not have to pay $400 for a night’s stay!). I packed it in today, spending most of the time I had in Akihabara and Shinjuku, and now I am at Haneda airport waiting for my flight to Vancouver.
I’m in Hong Kong, waiting for my flight to Tokyo. We got pushed back from the gate at Perth airport just about at midnight, and arrived in Hong Kong shortly after 7 am this morning. Happy New Year!
We stopped at Cottesloe Beach today for coffee and a bite to eat before we went down to the beach for a quick swim.
Cottesloe Beach is where Prince Charles got accosted and kissed on the cheek by admirer and model Jane Priest in 1979.
Prince Charles returned there this November for a beachside barbecue for his 67th birthday celebration, and as part of a 12-day visit to Australia and New Zealand.
(The celebrations came to an abrupt end after an unexpected thunderstorm sent guests running for cover as they sung him happy birthday, reported the website WAtoday, here).
Here are pictures from my random walk around Perth downtown on Tuesday. The train ride from Bull Creek Station here in the southern burbs to the Perth downtown station is just 11 minutes.
We got up early on Monday morning to take the ferry to Rottnest Island, and spent most of the day there on Salmon Beach. It was another sweltering day in Perth (41 °C/ 105 °F) but a good ten degrees Celsius cooler on the island.
We drove down to the seaside city of Mandurah (say ‘MAN-duh-rah’) on Saturday (the day after Christmas, called ‘Boxing Day’ here), about an hour’s drive south of Perth. The Peel-Harvey estuary is heavily used for recreational boating and fishing. It is now mostly salt-water, after the construction in 1994 of a channel that let seawater push in with the tides. Still, the estuary is home to the blue swimmer crab, the western king prawn and fish such as black bream and cobbler, and is even visited occasionally by dolphins.
We went to the Perth Zoo on Christmas Day, and here are my favorite pictures.
The Bell Tower is touted as Perth’s top tourist attraction (think: Seattle’s Space Needle), and so I had to go check it out. The surrounding area is still a major construction zone though : the $400 million Perth waterfront redevelopment project has been three years in the making and is now at least two years behind schedule. (Mmm. Seems very similar to the Bertha tunnel boring machine & waterfront development project’s delays in Seattle!).
My brother and I made a jaunt into downtown Perth with the Transperth* train on Wednesday. Downtown is a mix of old and new buildings, with the tallest ones belonging to the giant multinational mining companies such as Rio Tinto Group and BHP Billiton. (Iron ore is the country’s largest export earner, and lost 43 per cent in market price this year as low-cost miners such as Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton pressed ahead with production to defend their market share).
*Part of the Perth public transportation network of trains, buses and ferries.
We visited a local beach called South Beach on Tuesday, and I went in for a dip in the Atlantic Ocean (the water temperature was very pleasant). The beach is south of the city of Perth, in Fremantle.
I traveled due south from Hong Kong for 7 hours to arrive in Perth late on Monday night. It is warm here : last night is was 27 °C (80 °F) at the late hour of 11 pm.
I made it into Hong Kong airport late on Sunday night. My layover is so long (16 hours!) that I could leave the airport to go to the Novotel Citygate hotel nearby for some sleep before the fourth and final segment of my travels to Perth, Australia.
Here are more pictures of my Tokyo experience from Friday and Saturday.
My Marriott Courtyard hotel is tucked into the 4th floor of a building just outside the upscale shopping area of Tokyo, the Ginza district. Here are some pictures of my walkabout there last night.
My flight to Tokyo went without incident, and the airline staff were super helpful and friendly. It was 7.30 pm Tokyo time when we had arrived, and commuters were still leaving the office, so the monorail train from Haneda airport got crowded a few stops down. But that got me to the nearest metro station, and I could get to Tokyo Station from there. (My Marriott Courtyard hotel is close to Tokyo Station). Of course, the station is very big, so I could not find the hotel immediately. Tired and with two bags in tow, I went for Plan B : got into a taxi to take me there. The cabby’s English was poor (and my Japanese non-existent), but I could tell he was taking me to the wrong Courtyard (there is one in Ginza as well) .. so I just called the right Courtyard Hotel and asked them to give him directions .. and hey! I have a bed to sleep in.
Alaska Airlines made me sweat a little by being 30 mins late with the short hop up to Vancouver. (Can we leave already? How about NOW?). Our Bombardier arrived late, and then there was a snafu with transmitting the load balancing numbers to the pilot. (It was printed and brought out to the plane). But the Canadian customs process and baggage claim was very efficient (they have scanning machines now for the customs declaration for US passport holders), and I even had a little time to spare to catch my flight out to Tokyo.
Today was my last workday
for 2015. I am heading out on my end-of-year trip in the morning : down south to the Land of Oz (Australia). It is going to start with a short hop up to Vancouver to catch a flight to Tokyo. I will spend two days there before continuing on to Perth with a stop in Hong Kong.