There was an incident at Brisbane customs where I was paged to find and disactivate a vibrating item in my luggage, an electric shaver. Naturally a certain Fight Club dialogue came to mind but unfortunately did not ensue.

After not getting shot by the Singaporean special forces, there were two more legs of the journey. All three legs (Brisbane to Singapore, to Dubai, to London) are the same duration—about seven hours—so they are well-placed hubs for the journey. The London leg should have been much shorter but we went around Iraqi airspace for some reason. With short stopovers such as the ones I had, with barely enough time to grab a coffee, scratch arse, and scan for publicly-accessible WiFi networks and put in my credit card details, I would make a suggestion to anyone with such short stopovers and such a long trip: consider packing changes of at least certain items of your clothing, as well as toothbrush and other items, on hand luggage. The smell of sweaty aeroplane seat arse could choke a donkey.

I’m impressed with Emirates airline, especially their comprehensive in-flight entertainment system including all kinds of audio and video on demand and a wide variety of PopCap-style games. Their fleet have the satellite phones and some planes even have WiFi, for when you just have to blog 34,000 feet above the Ukraine. I would fly Emirates again, but to be honest the farthest I have flown before this trip is Vanuatu, so I have nothing to reference to.

And then I got the tube to the suburb my hotel is in. As I wandered the streets, realising that I had not bothered to memorise the street names to get there (just the path) and I had misrotated the map in my mind, I got a newfound appreciation of why the graph isomorphism problem in computational complexity theory is so hard. But exams are over, and it is time to have fun and see the sights of London, or at least try—it is dark outside, and it is 4.30pm.

This kiosk’s keyboard is impossible to type on any faster than 10wpm.

Smo