I'm finally in a hotel in Tunisia after a gruelling 30 hours of travel. First flew to Frankfurt for 9 hours, then sat in the airport for 4 hours, then 2.5 hours to Tunis in Tunisia, then 2 hours coming through immigration (the queues were huge - why the heck are so many tourists coming to Tunisia). Then had to travel for 7 hours to get to Gabes, a town in the south of Tunisia from where I would start my travels. Getting to Gabes was like a neverending nightmare. I had to catch a louge (long distance taxi) from Tunis [View Full Entry]

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Okay, just spend the last 3 days at the conference. Am so sick of this conference - its been extremely educational, but I think i'm just getting restless. Simon (ex speech labs guy who now lives in Pittsburg) qnd his fiancee came down - so its been nice catching up with them. We ate at this really nice italian place which had the creamiest pasta ever. Apart from that, haven't really done much apart from attend the conference and laze about watching cable TV. Cable TV here is so cool - there's always something on - watched a show about obese [View Full Entry]

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Today, Terry and I decided to do a day trip to New York. We were actually dreading the trip, because we were really starting to feel the jet lag and would have prefered to have had a day of veging out. Unfortunately, this was the only day that we could do New York, so it had to be done. The day started early by catching a 6am train to New York. We got to see a bit of the Pennsylvania countryside which to put shortly looked like a wasteland. Essentially, think nuclear bomb exploding and destroying everything, leaving half rotting buildings, [View Full Entry]

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Today was the last day of touring we could do before the conference started properly. We decided to do a day trip to the county's capital - Washington DC. The trip was a uneventful 3 hour bus journey, that was made all the more uncomfortable by a big oaf in front of me who insisted on reclining his chair to the maximum amount. I had to stare at his big oily fat head the whole journey while trying to fight back fits of clostraphobia. Our first impressions of Washington were "what a clean city". Yup, I officially deem this the cleanest [View Full Entry]

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Today was our first real day in Philadelphia and unforunately the first day of the conference. Thankfully, Terry wasn't feeling up to attending the conference, which was great, because I was in way too much of a lethargic mood for doing so. Now before you start thinking 'tsk tsk tsk ... they should do work stuff on a work holiday', you should know that there wasn't anything relevant to our work at the conference that day, so bludging wasn't really such a naughty thing to do. Anyway, I digress. We headed off to the historical part of Phili which pretty much [View Full Entry]

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Finally arrived in Philadelphia after a grueling 26 hours of traveling. The plane trip was really horrible. I first flew for 3.5h to New zealand first, stopped there for 2 hours, then 12 hours to LA, stopped there for 2 hours, then flew to philadelphia for 5 hours, then had to sit in the airport and wait 2 hours for terry's (my colleague who is attending the conference in Phili with me) flight to come in (he caught a different flight between LA and Phili). On the positive, I managed to score 4 very good plane food meals, including a chicken [View Full Entry]

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