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sometimes security it seems to be too efficent. Told to be at the airport 3 hrs ahead of my flight, it took only 15 min to get boarding passes, and another 10 to get thru security. Marrissa looked sorry to see me leave. I could have turned up an hour later without any ill effects.

Anchorage, Tokyo, Osaka, Taipei. Cathy Pacific seems to like flying.over or near major cities. All of the above are impressive cities. Flying such a route over Japan also means that we got an amazing aerial view of Mt. Fuji. When you are flying at 10900m, and a mountain protrudes well up into the sky, you just know it is BIG.

So now I'm in HK airput after my flight from YVR. Arrived gate 70, and i will be departing via gate 62 in about 2 hours. l wandered around the airport for a while, taking in the sights. It does seem that the airport has 802.11b wireless, but I can't connect to it. Some weird security system is in place. I wandered about, looking for various things, such as an Internet café and the price for a Gameboy Advance for Mike. Nothing of the former to be found, but I did find a jewelery store by the name of CyberSun 24/7. Yup, you heard right, a 24 hour jewelery store. Not even the W.H. Smith news vendors were open that much. The GBA I found on special for HK$ 888.

If somebody wants to trace any Hong Kong airport wireless, here are some details:
DNS Server: 218.102.23.228
Gateway, DHCP Server: 210.177.174.52
Netmask: 0xFF000000
All IP adresses allocated seemed to be in 210.177.174.0/26.

One thing that did confound me was the signal strength. Nowhere in the airport was it less than 95%! I roamed all over the airport, and it is a BIG airport.

5 and 1/2 hours into the flight. Passing over Sri Lanka, almost directly over Columbo, then on in a south western bearing, until we were south of the tip of India (Nagercoil), and east of the Maldives we hit some minor turbulence. Or if you want to judge by the actions of one of the atttendants, the baddest turbulence out there. I was waiting to go to the washroom at the time, and he just chased me back to my seat. I later heard the purser chastising him for something else so I would assume he was just a little gung-ho. 25 minutes further into the flight we passed directly over Malë, Maldives confirming my earlier observation abut this airline. Along with several others, I snuck to the washroom when the attendant wasn't looking. Looking back at the in-flight map, it seems we passed directly over Bangkok as well.

Passing the equator soon. It's a pity that airlines don't have Neptune parties. I've crossed the equator at least 10 times in my life, without a single party.

Given that it's 12:28am in south africa i'm going to try and get some more sleep now.

Slept some. Passed over the island of Victoria while sleeping according to Greg. From the map it looks like we are going to fly in via the Madasgarian (i forgot the real name) channel. The floght info says 3h25min left. Greg is leaning on my shoulder to try and sleep. He is unsucessful.

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Durban now. took a shower at my paternal grandfathers flat (known as an apartment in north america). that was the key thing i wanted after my long flight. then went to my paternal grandmothers flat, where we were stay for the first night. had lunch there. greg was a lot more tired than me, so he took a nap while i went with my grandmother shopping for grocercies. Prices here have increased a lot. R10 for a 2L coke bottle! bought chicken, veges, deoderant (since my prefferred deo is readily available here) and cheap razor blades (since i forgot my razor).



a short foray on my grandparents: first on my fathers side, there is a really long story, to be told later. the end result being, when my father, the youngest of 4 children, was 5 years old, his father (Percy) seperated from his wife (Mary), and in short ordr got a second wife (Gwen) Mary later remarried as well to Gaffer. Similar events happened on my maternal side but I am not a clear about them. After my maternal grandparents, Wilfred and Barbera, broke up, they also both remarried, Wilfred to Olga and Barbera to George. This took place when my mother was a teenager. Now inside my lifespan, all of these grandparents have been alive. Gramppa George and Gaffer have passed away since I have known them. With this plethora of grandparents, one needs something unique o call them, as if you attend an event that has two or more of them in attendance, it gets very confusing. On my father's side, Percy and Gwen are Granddad and Nana. Mary and Gaffer are Mary-granny and Gaffer. On my mothers side, Wifred and Olga are Gramppa and Olga, collectivelly called East London grandpaents because of where there live. Barbera and George are Granny (also referred to as Pietermaritizburg-Granny or London-Granny, depending on where she is living avthe time) and Gramppa-George. With this many grandparents, my extended family is very large. More on this large family tree later.



while here, if you convert costs to thier canadian equivilent, they seem to be very cheap, but when you compare it to local earnings you see that people here are struggling. the government proclais that the country's economy is booming, but the newspapers tell a different story. perhaps the government is only looking at africa in their comparaisions, i don't know, but they certainly aren't right.



after shopping, i took a nap as well before eating inner and going to bed because of exhaustion. in bed and asleep by 21h30 must be the earliest i've been to bed in many years.



my grandmother futzies around a lot, noisily, at all hours of the night. so that woke me up a few times during the night. one of the most annoying things about jet lag caused by travelling from north america to africa is the way you wake up incredibly early. 6/7 am early. Had breakast and lunch with my grandmother as well as fixed her ceiling fan. she gave greg and i each R50 as christmas gifts.



my grandmother also wanted to give me my 21st birhday gift ahead of time. turning 21 is like the coming of age in south africa, e

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Fixed up my grandmother's ceiling fan, and got picked up by my grandfather. Fixed, well tried wthout ucess, to fix his kitchen light. After that, we watched a comedy-documentary my grandfather had recorded from satellite TV, Jamie Uys's "Beautiful People". I can wholeheartedly recomend it for watching. Later my parents arrived, and we all went va Mary-granny to visit her before heading down to the timeshare at the waterfront. The timeshare unit we were suposed to have had apparently been flooded, so my father was instead shown two other units. One of them was a real dive near an elevator shaft so it was noisy and the other one seemed to be ok. We unpacked the car and carted everything up to the unit only to find that it didn't have a shower. My father had explictly requested a unit with a shower, so we marhed back to the front desk to remedy the situation. We were then shown a much better unit that we are presently in. This whole building has a very long story. In my grandparents day it was a hotel for fairly lengthy stays. Of the folk that lived here, there were eventully a lot of older folk so the place was turned into an old age home. In the last 15 years since the old folk have passed on, the building was been converted to a timeshare. You can still see some relics of how it was a hotel and later an old age home.



After moving our stuff in, we went out again, stopping at a corner shop to get some groceries, and then going to a resturant to get some dinner. Our waiter was somebody I went to senior elementary and high school with, so I caught up with him on some of the happenings. After dinner came back to the timeshare andslept very soundly.