Bank Holiday Weekend

Lara had the pleasure of my company for much of the Bank Holiday weekend; on Saturday we went to watch some of the cricket at Littlewick Green, followed by a visit to Anton and Becca's; on Sunday we went shopping in Wycombe. Well, we went round the shops but we didn't buy much. It turned into a bit of a pub crawl really, as first Lara needed her lunch (so we went to our local), then later I needed my lunch (so we went to a pub in the town centre) then on the way home Lara needed her tea, so the only convenient place where we could sit was, you guessed it, back in our local!

While watching that Britain From Above programme on BBC, Olga and I decided we'd like to go and see Oxford, as it formed part of the programme we had recorded from the weekend before. It's silly that it's only a 30 minute drive and we've not been, so we went on Monday afternoon. Funnily enough, we stopped in a pub near the centre so Lara could have her lunch (we would have had ours too if they'd been serving anything more than toasties), then we tried a restaurant for our lunch but they were so busy it would have taken all afternoon to get our food, so we left after being seated. How very un-English!
After trying a couple of other pubs that were too busy or too small (those 17th century architects just didn't have even maclaren buggies in mind) we tried The King's Arms, and it was perfect. Enough room for us, and they even had a high chair; Lara should have been dozing but after being in her fifth pub in just over 24 hours, she was determined to enjoy it, so she happily entertained herself in the high chair, being coo-ed at by Russian tourists; it's fun to encourage Olga to earwig on conversations that other people think can't be understood. We learnt that this group's hotel was nice but they couldn't quite work out if they would be served at their table by a waitress or if they had to order from the bar.
After out lunch we wandered past more colleges, and had ice-cream in the grounds of Christ Church College, and Lara had her tea. I know! NOT in a pub. Although to be honest we had been aiming for the Head of the River pub a few hundred metres further down the road, but decided to sit in the park instead for a change.

There are a couple of photos from Oxford in the New Photos bit on the left of the blog.

Lara's trip to Bournemouth

Better late than never, here's a video and some photos from Lara's day trip to the seaside a few weeks ago:

grrrr

I just spent half an hour typing a new blog entry on the pda just for the thing to freeze up and lose the whole post. It was a work of genius about busy days at work (today), nice wine and fillet steak (£16 & £5.50 respectively), men sitting around on street corners or working in oil companies pressing buttons in lifts (i hope there is more to life, or it's a means to an end). Also my placemat at breakfast told me I'm in Zemalek (or Zemelak?) which is on Gezira island in the middle of the Nile.
Other than that, it's job done other than a brief pop into the office on the way to the airport tomorrow.
Night all...

Don't panic!!

I didn't kill anyone!
This trip has been a strange one; on many of my trips, especially to Cairo, the travel & hotel arrangements have been perfect and the work itself has been challenging, but thia one is quite the opposite. The job has gone perfectly, to the extent that i've pretty much finished after 2 days and tomorrow is really just about waiting for the users' feedback when they start using the new software (hopefully all good). It's gone so well that I tried moving my flight forward by 24 hours this afternoon, to 5pm tomorrow. I know I would be asking fo a headache when it came to checking out of this hotel a day early, then potentially dashing through traffic at the last minute to the airport... But it would mean I got home to Olga and Lara sooner. However, BMI intervened by telling me that tomorrow's flight is full anyway. I'd even bought a flexible ticket, learning from my Houston nightmare, but to no avail.
So, I've got a hopefully quiet full day in the office tomorrow then an evening and half-day to fill. I should try to do something cultural, but I'm not sure I could be bothered with the effort of using taxis, and I'm too far out to walk anywhere, at least in the midday sun anyway. Mad dogs and Englishmen and all that! At least I think I'm too far out, I'm not sure where I am to be honest. For Anton's benefit, who knows Cairo, i'm on the west bank, north of the Cairo Tower, in Mohandiseen I reckon. Anyway, at this moment I'm in the hotel bar enjoying a heineken and not paying the hotel's fee for internet, so Olga and I have been limited to phone calls rahther than the skype webcam chats I enjoyed in Houston with her and Lara - and Lara did seem to react to my voice and face when we did that, which was great. OK, time to stop looking like a geek.....

Cairo, where do I begin?!?

Oh my god, what a nightmare. I'll try to sum it up in one sentence for now.. Plane hour late,no alcohol on the 4.5 hour flight, no-one to meet me as expected, but found him later, no reservation for me in hotel, or in next hotel... I'm writing this at about 2am in the café in hotel #3 waiting for my soup and already on my 2nd stella. Not the jolly trip I was expecting so far. It's a 90 minute commute in cairo traffic tomorrow to get to the office, too. More updates tomorrow maybe, if I've calmed down. For the first time on a business trip I nearly lost my temper tonight!