From Russia, With Love

..or if not 'love', at least some sort of warm and fuzzy feeling. Here I am in Moscow, and you know what? It has made a good impression on me so far.

The day didn't start off brilliantly. I got to work to park the car while I'm in Russia only to find myself trapped in the car park for 20 minutes. We have a cunning key-card entry system for our work car park you see, and I managed to drive in when someone else was leaving. Once parked I found that my card didn't work, so I couldn't get out. It's just as well it wasn't a weekend or I could have died of thirst, or hypothermia or something. Madness. Anyway, eventually someone came in to the car park so I could get out and walk to the station, where conveniently I hadn't quite missed my train.

I experienced another of life's firsts at Heathrow when I was paged over the PA. It was all quite exciting. I left to queue for checking-in and went to find out what it was all about. About half an hour later I had discovered that it was just a request from some of our guys in Russia to pick up some mains adapters which, while not massively exciting, was at least one of the few things it is possible to do at Heathrow airport. Plus I now know how it feels to be all important by getting paged - the reality is that the airport staff don't really know who to phone or what's going on. This is an interesting insight into the way airports operate in itself.

The flight to Moscow was uneventful. Some Russian girl has sat in my seat but it was a good excuse to strike-up conversation. She was clearly reckless as she continued to use her mp3 player during takeoff/landing despite being told off several times. This would have made her sexy and exciting if she was good looking, but since she wasn't it just made her appear a bit lippy. Still, there are worse people to sit next to. The film on the plane was 'Firewall', which was actually quite good. I have decided that Chloe from '24' (who co-stars in it) can actually be attractive. I'm not sure what they do to her in '24' to stop this, because in that she's just annoying.

Moscow airport is like many in the east. As soon as you're through passport control your ears are assaulted by a thousand minicab drivers all asking you if you want a taxi. Thankfully mine was all ordered in advance so it was just a case of finding my name on a sign. This done, it was an hour's cruise into Moscow. First impressions of Moscow are good - it's nice and green with lots of parks and trees, the traffic doesn't seem to be insane, and we drove right past the Kremlin and other landmarks, which is nice. It feels a bit like London in some ways, what with the bridges over the river and the seat of government right on the river bank. It looks clean and they seem to have made a real effort with interesting public art, nice flags on the bridges, and so on. Hopefully I will be able to get a few photos to illustrate these points.

My hotel is ok. The room is nothing special, but there is a good selection of restaurants and very posh shops downstairs. I went to the 'Russian' restaurant for dinner and it was very good, although very quiet. Afterwards I met up with a colleague for a drink in the bar and we talked about work. Hopefully it will all go ok tomorrow...

Another night of music theory

...or to be more accurate, another night where I should be doing some music work, but I've managed to faff about until 8pm so far. My first minor panic involved not being able to find my MOT etc. to get my tax disc tomorrow. I eventually decided that it must have gone into the recycling and resigned myself to an 80 quid fine and a load of hassle. However, it turned out that it was in my work bag all along, so I had a beer to calm myself down. Time has somehow slipped away further since then. Once I get this blog entry done though... yes.. that's when I'll start on cramming four weeks of work into the remaining 4 days before my assignment is due in. I work (best) under pressure.

Anyway, what has been happening? Mostly work. Last week I was in London for a work training thing. I went down on Saturday for drinking and fun at the Seymour Place Salon and a good time was had by all. There was some competitive 'Taboo!' and I met my first right-wing Australians. Afterwards we retired to the pub and watched Finland win the Eurovision Song Contest, much as I'd hoped they would (but in one of the way that you hope for something that you know is impossible). Fantastic. After the pub we went back and talked nonsense until the early hours.

On Sunday morning it was raining a lot, but that didn't stop us visiting almost every eatery in the area trying to decide where to have breakfast. Eventually we ended-up in the planned choice, Providores, on Marylebone High Street. The Turkish poached eggs were excellent. A casual day of lounging around followed, but we managed to get some geekiness in there with a trip to Maplins on Edgeware Road.

On Monday I get to the Radisson Edwardian hotel in Heathrow nice and early for my week long training course. It was interesting and actually useful, plus the hotel had top food. We got the level of drinking down to a level I could cope with this time too - it was quite hardcore on the last training course! The hotel itself was massive and seemed to be a corporate favourite. Our merry band was small compared to the large group from an 'ethical pharmaceutical company' who seemed to employ mainly attractive women in their twenties. Top stuff. Their fancy dress party on Monday night was most amusing.

On Friday the course finished at midday so I went into town with a colleague to see X-Men III at the Odeon in Whiteleys. It was ok, although I felt it could have been a bit longer as it was all rather rushed. He then headed off and I met Dave and we went for some food at The Shish on Queensway where I accidentally had some nuts and felt all allergic for a bit. Afterwards we went to the The Old Duke and sat out on the balcony where we talked to two random Oxbridge escorts. It was all quite bizarre but they were friendly enough and invited us to a strange non-drinking lock-in. At one point I thought they may have been trying it on but one of them had this weird bloke hanging around. London eh? I don't know what the hell is going on there most of the time.

Oxbrige people are funny. Usually I'm with the 'they're just like us' brigade. After all, I did go to a private school so I can relate to being called 'posh' and having kids from other schools randomly abuse me, so I'm usually the first to defend those who seem to attract such treatment. Sometimes it does begin to grate though, as was the case on Friday night. We fell into the whole university thing and it ended-up with the 'of course we're better because we went to Oxford' thing. Of course it's probably true that academically Oxbridge types have to be better qualified to get in, but it does result in some badly adjusted people coming out the other end who seem incapable of dealing with non-Oxbridge people. I guess people stick to what they know but I have to bite my tongue when I hear someone saying they could never marry someone who didn't go to Oxford. It's very weird, and in a way it makes me feel like I'm being judged, if indirectly. Maybe I'm just oversensitive. Anyway, you can pay to go out with both of the girls I met on Friday (and plenty more like them) if that sort of thing floats your boat. Look under the 'elite' section. Says it all really. Thankfully the vast majority of Oxbridge graduates I know are lovely people, but I'm sure they know people who suffer from the whole elitism thing. Mind you, perhaps I'm guilty of the same thing (although in my case it would be graduates, rather than Oxbridge graduates)? I don't think so though.

Project Red

Bono is guest editor of The Independent today, and half of today's revenue will go to fight AIDS. Why not help fights AIDS while getting your news fix today and buy a copy of arguably the best national paper?

Last night we went to see Luke (and some other people, obviously) in My Head Was A Sledgehammer at the Bristol Old Vic. Very avant-garde and abstract but great fun. You can catch it again tonight.

After the glory of coming first in the 'Best Cake Baked By A Man' category in Matt's 'Birthday Spring Fete And Agricultural Show' last year, this years cake could only make second place over the weekend. Still, a good time was had by all and we had some happy hours sampling the various categories and voting. I will have to make cakes more often and get some practice in to ensure future first places.

China and Hong Kong

This morning I got back from my trip to China and Hong Kong. I've had a little sleep and I don't feel too bad actually, but I'm down quite a few hours (I can never sleep on planes) so I'm sure it will hit me again in an hour or so. So, let's soldier on!

As I mentioned previously, my trip in to China was uneventful. I met the limo driver at Hong Kong airport with no trouble and followed him out of the airport where the heat really hit me - it was over 30 degrees and very humid, and I'd just been at more or less a constant 15 for hours. It was fairly oppressive and I feared that I was going to sweat to death in a shirt and tie over the week, but it turned out that the day was particularly hot. Anyway, no problem for the limo with its aircon. I traveled in style through the Hong Kong / China border without leaving my seat and before long I was at the Four Points by Sheraton hotel in Shenzhen.

The hotel is relatively new and the entrance/lobby is very grand. My room was very nice and the view pretty good. No complaints at all really, the main downside being that I only had a room until Tuesday as it was booked up after that. Annoyingly there was a huge trade show going on all week (the guy sat next to me on the plane was going to it so I knew a bit about it) and lots of hotels were full. I didn't worry as I thought we'd find something. Anyway, that evening my colleague and his wife arrived and we had a nice dinner and caught-up (he's based in Japan these days).

For five days we were based at a customer site in the city, so we'd catch a cab from the hotel in the morning and another back in the evening (the evening being much more difficult, both finding a cab and with the traffic). The journey was about 40 - 50 minutes, and.. well... if you've not seen Chinese driving then you wouldn't quite believe it. Maybe it's not all of China and is just Shenzhen, or maybe it's an asian thing? I don't know. What I do know is that it scared me silly. The roads are massively busy and nobody pays much attention to lanes, signs and so on. You progress through traffic by barging in and hoping for the best, beeping your horn a lot and flashing your lights. It's all very aggressive, although in some way everyone seems very calm. In the huge number of very closely missed collisions that we had nobody seemed to shout or get out of their cars to have a go at someone else. It's was bizarre. I'm amazed hundreds of people aren't killed every day, especially pedestrians, who seem to weave in and out of the traffic without looking like they are too bothered. They don't even particularly hurry.

As well as the mad drivers there is the whole scary communist thing going on. One day on the way back from work the army stopped us and asked to see our passports. I didn't have mine of course (don't they always tell you to leave it in the hotel safe?!) and I sat there with images of dodgy Chinese prisons and visits from diplomats going through my mind. Thankfully it was rush hour and the soldier didn't seem to want the fuss, so he waved us on. I carried my passport after that. It was scary, and if anything it reinforced my view that a British ID card would be bad. Not only would I not like to go through that feeling again, but I don't think it gives a very good impression of the country to tourists and the like. Anyway, it was all ok in the end.

The hotel had a couple of reasonable restaurants in it and on Monday we went to the 'Chinese' one (they were all Chinese of course, this just happened to do Chinese food). It was very good, if slightly bizarre. We ordered a number of dishes including a roasted duck. With some fanfare the chef brought it out and sliced it for us before showing us how to do the pancake bit (much like a Chinese in the UK). The strange bit was that he started with a whole duck and sliced off the skin before wheeling the trolley away. We sort of assumed that he was off to do the boring meat slicing elsewhere but he never came back, so from the whole duck we just got the skin. Very odd. The next day we quizzed one of the people in the Chinese firm if that was normal and she looked at us as if we were crazy, so God only knows what was going on there. For dessert we were offered ice cream or something but we thought we'd try something authentic so we asked for a 'Chinese dessert'. With some trepidation the waitress brought us some pots with a very dark jelly and a pot of honey, the idea being that the jelly was a bit bitter and the honey is for sweetening it. We ate it and it was ok (with the honey), but I wasn't a massive fan. The waitress seemed vaguely impressed that we'd eaten it anyway. Later we pondered what it was over drinks and couldn't decide. I didn't think about it again until we found out that it was probably made from the inside of a turtle shell (which is scraped to get the black stuff). Yum.

Luckily someone at the Chinese company we were working at found us a hotel for the rest of our stay so on Tuesday we checked in to the Landmark Hotel, much nearer the centre. I was impressed - it certainly looked nicer in the rooms than the Sheraton, the food was pretty good, and the service was impressive. There was rosewood everywhere and you even get a 'butler' who leaves you cute little notes. He's just one of about a million staff who seem to be employed just to say good morning to you as you leave, but hey, I'm shallow and I really liked that. The location is more central as I mentioned but seems to be a bit of a seedy district at night. That might be your thing of course, but if it isn't then the hotel food is good.

On Friday we got our work done (on time and more than was asked for, of course!) and checked out of the hotel and got the limo back to Hong Kong. The way back was less smooth - the queue at the border took ages and customs went through my bag (I must look dodgy to the Chinese army) but in the end we were through. My colleague and his wife flew back to Japan but I couldn't get a flight until Tuesday, so I went to a hotel in Hong Kong. I got a room at the Grand Stanford. It was ok but I felt rather unimpressed after the Shenzhen hotels. It was more money (everything in HK is more) and the service was far worse. I also had a really rubbish view of a wall from my room! It's true that the hotel itself does have an excellent view of Victoria Harbour but don't expect that in all the rooms! Anyway, there's more to life than views so I didn't worry too much about it.

The hotel is in the Kowloon district which is known for its shops, and boy are there shops! However, a lot of these seem to be hairdressers (bizarrely) and Indian guys who make made-to-measure suits. These guys almost ruin any stroll around town as they are good at spotting Europeans and chasing you around trying to convince you to get measured-up. You have to be pretty forceful to get them to go away and... well.. it's just not British to shout at strangers is it? I did feel like telling them that I might have been interested in a fitted suit if they'd just shut up and let me look at their posters (which is true), but starting any conversation with them is daft.

Hong Kong was generally very hot and I restricted my strolls to relatively short bursts. Sadly, as I was in China on business my suitcase was full of suits, shirts and so on rather than summer wear so I had to improvise a bit around what I had on me, and it wasn't massively suitable. Still, I did get a good poke around the place. I'd really recommend it for a holiday - there's lots to do and there's enough English spoken for it not to be a problem (much more than Shenzhen). It's got quite familiar touches too thanks to being British until so recently so you sort of feel at home. Be prepared to spend quite a lot of money if you like a drink though (a pint often costs more than your main course). If you were there for a holiday rather than killing a couple of days then it wouldn't be cheap.

I'm a bit of a newbie to business travel and one thing really hit me on this trip. My hotel has its fair share of 'business men' and they were easy to spot since they were like me, sat at the bar reading a paper or something rather than chatting to obvious wives/girlfriends. There was a purpose to this though as most of them seemed to come to the hotel bar to pick up hookers. It was a real eye-opener - you sit at the bar on your own and within about two minutes a girl will come and talk to you. Now these aren't trashy-looking women and some were beautiful, but it was a bit odd. Thankfully they weren't pushy at all and it all seemed to operate on a bit of an 'understanding' - the men would say very little to them before wondering off to their rooms. Somehow the whole thing wasn't at all seedy though and you only noticed it if you watched what was going on. Most of the bar was filled with couples and groups. It did serve to give me a pretty negative impression of men traveling on their own though. I don't doubt that some of those men have wives or girlfriends, yet a lot of them probably 'relax' with hookers quite often. It's sort of depressing really.

Anyway, here I am back at home. China and Hong Kong were great and it was a fascinating trip. China is the 'most foreign' place I've been and it was a bit of an eye-opener in many ways. Still, every new country I go to reinforces the idea that people are all the same pretty much anywhere you go. The Chinese may live in a dodgy state that does questionable things, but most of them seem to be happy and are just getting on with life. Of course I didn't go to any poor or rural areas where it's completely different, so I'm not blind to the fact that it is completely different. One thing I do know though - there's a lot of money there and a lot of big companies with big ideas. I'm sure we'll all see more Chinese influence in the world at an rapidly increasing level.

See some pictures including the fascinating view from my hotel room in Hong Kong on Flickr.

Trips away

Last weekend we had a lovely few days in Mousehole in Cornwall. It's a small harbour just along the coast from Penzance and it very cute in that typically Cornish harbour way. I'm not sure why I haven't been before since I've been to pretty much everywhere in Cornwall before. Having said that we also popped in to Land's End, another place I haven't been before (and less tacky than I thought it might be, mainly because you can ignore the tacky bits). Anyway, Mousehole was great. If you ever find yourself there then I really recommend The Old Coastguard - it's a very good bar/restaurant with great views. The Ship Inn is also a good pub with great pub food. I was surprised that there weren't more places to eat/drink on the seafront actually - the old Lobster Pot restaurant is now flats, and with so many tourists clogging the place up you'd have thought that there was money to be made. Ho hum.

Anyway, I'm starting a small phase of visiting places beginning with 'C' and I'm now in China. I'm in a rather nice hotel in Shenzhen having arrived via Hong Kong a few hours ago. The flight was as ok as flights can be - the extra legroom I had this time (last time I flew to Hong Kong in Economy my legs didn't really fit) made it much more comfortable. Funnily enough I sat next to a guy from Cornwall on the plane and we talked about last weekend. There's some massive trade conference going on here and he's over to sell his wares. The hotel staff were slightly surprised when I said that I wasn't here for the conference and perhaps it is bad timing since a lot of flights were booked-up and I have to move hotels on Tuesday as this one is full. Not too bad for a trip mostly booked on Friday though.

More on China as I experience it. In the meantime I have to adjust to the whole jetleg thing and chill out a bit...

It's funny how some things in the world are different in a way that you can't easily predict. For example, despite knowing a few Americans and working with them every day, today I discovered that electric kettles (of which there is at least one in every house in the UK) are pretty rare in the US. Why this is God only knows, but you can check out this Amazon review to see their reactions to a kettle that turns off when the water has boiled, and so on. It's quite sweet.

I had an entertaining weekend dismantling a piano. No, it's not a terrible waste since the piano is knackered and beyond economic repair, and I finally decided to get on and do something about it. Nobody was willing to come and dispose of it without charging a good deal of money for the privilege, so I decided to break it up and take it to the dump myself. At this point I can assure you that dismantling a piano is easier said than done! The initial part (removing the keyboard, hammers and dampeners) is easy, but when you get to the cast iron frame and string it gets massively irritating. To get the iron frame off the main wooden piano frame you have to remove all of the strings, which is a time consuming (and blister-inducing) job. It's also rather more noisy than you might think - God only knows what the neighbours thought I was doing! Still, it's almost got to the point where I can separate the iron frame now, at which point it can get into the car. It will be nice to free-up some of my sitting room and paint the bit of wall where the piano was (which remains in the previous owners tasteful 'hot pink'. Out of destruction I can bring order, you see. Sort of like God.