mál

At long last

Finally, earth has shaken, continents have been crossed, internet access has been achieved, and now it is time for a blog (audience goes wild). I have not had any internet connection untill two days ago, and then I had a lot of stuff to do, then it took me a day to write this long list of bullshit, so please enjoy J

I woke up at the day of departure with two guys in my bed... sounds bad... it is bad... no but seriously it was my friend Sindri and my cousin Gummi which had been helping me formatting my computer and re-arranging stuff on my external hard drive untill 6 in the morning. Well I woke up and went upstairs and decided it was about time to start packing, so I started packing all the stuff and soon I saw that I had to much stuff since the limit is only 20kg so the classical trick of putting everything heavy into the handluggage was used, and ohhh... my god... my hand luggage sure was heavy. I had a nice farwell lunch with my family at a local restaurant (for further details I had a pizza with chicken, onions and pepper cheese and black pepper). After saying goodbye to my family at the airport I walked around the duty free stores, bought some batteries and a one liter bottle of Black Death which I could fit with a big struggle in my overloaded hand luggage.
my CD´s were buried deep into the hand lugage so I knew that for the next 2-3 days I could only listen to one CD, luckely for me the CD was Tom Waits- Closing time, so I could enjoy listening to him around 50 times in a row.

In the airplane due to my late check-in I got an isle seat next to a guy around 40 which had wild gray hair, he looked like a mixture of a crazy scientist and a mad director of a symphony orchestra. The common denominator though is mad or crazy. We were seated next to an emergency exit so the stewardess, true Icelandic beauty, came and explained to us in english how we would open it in case of emergency, i made a couple of humourus comments about that, which she did not find funny at all, and she spent 10 minutes stressing that I was not allowed to open it if there was not an emergency.
After she had gone I asked the crasy gray haired guy where he was from, and he answered me in english, I am German but I have lived in Iceland for 12 year, and you, where are you from, Iceland I answered and after looking at each other uncomfortably for a minute we realized we had been talking english for no reason... all the stewardess fault, I would like to think that she thought the crasy composer was a foreigner not me.

Anway, so my last moments in Iceland were spent sitting next to a crasy German/Icelandic graphical designer. The perfect thing to say goodbye to my lovely rock in the atlantic ocean.

In London I arrived to Stansted airport in the evening and my first objective after getting my luggage was to find a bar... now now... calm down, not for the beer, but to see the final between Barcelona and Arsenal. I asked a guy how much was left and he told me, 15 minutes, so i ran to the bus ticket office and bought a ticket for a bus leaving in 25 minutes. I went and watched the game and right at the final I ran away to catch the bus, I had just witnessed Arsenal win the European championship 1-0. It was not untill a day later that I found out I had only seen the end of first half and that Barcelona had won.

So I took the bus to my lovely airport Gatwick, the memories that came over me when once again I came in there were lovely. I obviously knew my way around there but after a short trip around I took two chairs and created my lovely bed, listening to Tom Waits.

In the morning I woke up at five thirty and after a quick airport shower in a fortunatly wanker free bathroom I went to the Etihad ticket desk to see if I could go straigt to check in or if they needed to print my ticket.

When the answer was, I am sorry Mr. Kristjánsson you do not have a reserved seat on our flights today. My heart stopped, my blood pressure went up souple of knots but the irony of it all was to much so I started to laugh (isn´t that a sign of nervous breakdown?) i told her to wait a second while I would go downstairs to the internetbooth they have there to check my mail for the confirmation number. I opened my mail and there it was a confirmation, flight on the 18th in the morning to Dubai... I wrote down the confirmation number and just as I finished and was about to close the window I saw a minor detail, I was flying with Emirates, not Etihad.

I went upstairs, talked to the Etihad girl and apologized to her and went to the Emirates desk, there everything went smooth and I was on my way to Dubai, the flight over there was nice, half empty plane so I had 3 seats all for my self which is nice… watched couple of movies, played some chess in the in-flight entertainment system and watched Family guy. In Dubai I had over 10 hours wait, so the most natural thing for an Icelander is to search out a bar where he can hang out, so I did. Hidden in a far corner of the airport was an Irish Pub, god bless the Irish. I took over a corner and set up my little office, laptop and external hard drive, all the luggage around me, ordered some fish and chips and a beer. Anyway, I could not get the internet working because I needed to install drivers for my network card and the CD was deep in my hand luggage. So I started writing some stuff for my friend Woodsy, a little interruption to the story here, just want to say a couple of words about Woodsy, he is this jolly good Australian guy that has high ambition, is interested in the human mind and has a big passion for AIESEC, I have only spent 2 or 3 days with the guy but already I count him as a good friend and I know we will meet more than once more in our life, this is a proof of the amazing things AIESEC brings you, anyway after writing some 8 or 9 pages, having a couple of beers, I started to watch Contact. My friend and cousin Gummi had recommended me to watch it, and since I have a very similar taste of movies as he does (except for the movie Equilibrium, I will never accept that as a good movie) i decided to check it out, and yes, I admitt I was wrong (i had said it was not that good) it actually is a quite a good movie and the thought is quite cool. So as the end was coming a group of guys sat in my corner, i finished the movie and then started talking to them, it turned out that they were coming from Afghanistan and were in the Canadian army. After saying a couple of poor jokes about Canada I noticed that they didn´t like it so I said couple of worse jokes about Iceland, they loved it and we had a really nice conversation after that.
On my flight ticket it only said Dubai-Jakarta but in reality this plane went Dubai-Colombo (sri lanka)- Singapour-Jakarta. During the flight I had two guys sitting next to me. I had the window seat and the guy in the middle was from Sri Lanka (I think, at least he got out there) and on the leg over there he slept the whole time with his head on my shoulder (seriously, not almost on my shoulder, or on my side, nono... on my shoulder) I tried to push his head over to the other side but it always fell back on my shoulder... The other guy was from Saudi Arabia and spoke no English, I talked to him in sign language for a minute but then I gave up and watched some movies. When we were closing in on Jakarta we got some immigration stuff to fill out, the poor Saudi guy spoke no english and no Indonesian so he had no clue what to do, in the end he gave me the paper and his passport and I filled out everything I could fill out, and made some parts up... hope he didn´t get in trouble for that.

Well in Jakarta two lovely girls were waiting for me, Goody and Kenny, and they drove me to the guy where I spent the night, thanks Ara for that. In Jakarta there is a constant traffic jam where ever you go, for them an hour drive between places is short, for example the office is in south Jakarta and Ali lives in south Jakarta, it still takes him an hour to drive here.

Anyway the next morning he drove me to this bus company, or mini van company which would take me to Bandung where the national planning meeting was taking place. I was supposed to go with an Indian guy named Yousuf and I called him 20 minutes before departure and he said that he was coming. Then it was 9 o’clock and he ws not yet there, everybody else was in the car and they were trying to get me aboard so they could go, I tried my best to raise some trouble over the ticked succeeded to delay them for 5 minutes but then we went without Yousuf. When we had driven for 5-10 minutes we turned around and picket up Yousuf... Yousuf my man, what´s up with Indians and being not on time??? Anyway, we talked the whole way to Bandung and Yousuf which will be here until April next year as a trainee turned out to be a great guy. We arrived in Bandung, I lost my phone, and I had a doughnut with cheese!!! Weird thing, it really is weird…
We went to the conference and met all the amazing members, the spirit in the plenary was enough to lift up the house and move it to Iceland, but since that didn´t quite happen I was melting like mad, and when they told me Bandung was the cool city and Jakarta would be much hotter I almost fainted. After a great conference I stayed behind in Bandung to get to know the AIESEC people and the city. I stayed at Ferry´s place for a week; he and his family were very nice to me in all ways so big thanks goes to him. We went and saw some tourist places and some museums and I managed to spend some time with the AIESEC people, was present at the planning day for them and it is good to see the ambition and spirit they have, now it is just to turn that into action. While I was with them I tried chicken legs, and no I am not talking about the meaty leg sold at western restaurants, really the leg, the claw it self… that was an amazing experience.

On Monday I got back to Jakarta and stayed at Yousuf´s room for two nights before I got my room. My room is cool, has air condition and a mattress that´s about it, but that´s all I need. More interestingly the bathroom has a Chinese/Indonesian style toilet, so basically a hole in the ground J and no hot water and no shower, to shower I must pour cold water into a bucket, and splash it on my self… interesting, interesting… in the bathroom there are a lot of ants and flies as expected but what I love about it is that there is this little lizard who lives there, I am going to call him Sheva in honor of the excellent signing for Chelsea, Shevchenko. Sheva is a bit shy, he always runs into cracks in the wall when you enter the room, but the funny thing is if he is not close to any cracks he will freeze and be absolutely still until you exit, just hangs there on the wall trying to blend in with the wall… I like him.

Anyway, I will be writing more regularly now that I have internet access… Hip hip Hoorey!!!

Thanks for all the e-mails regarding the earthquake, and the conversations I have had with some of you on msn and Skype, I really enjoy staying in touch with you all.

posted by Tomas @ Friday, June 02, 2006