Breakfast and then checkout at the W hotel. I leave my bags with the front desk, and put my passports and a stack of cash in the hotel safe. (This is cool, I’ve never done this before — secret back room and deposit box key — dude, I’m Jason Bourne!)

I cross under the harbor on the MTR, and am strolling over to the ferry when a girl approaches me handing out Big Bus Tour brochures. I’ve been thinking of doing this anyway, so I sign up for the red tour and ride around in the hot moist smog seeing sights. Nice. Sitting up top in the back row with the how wind blowing — pretty good, except for the heavy toxic fumes from every direction…

Under one of the road bridges crossing Hennessy Road in Wan Chai, you can pay to have old ladies put curses on your enemies. The price varies, depending on the nature and duration of the curse, but involves the lady making a paper effigy of the cursee and smacking it with a shoe.

After the tour, I catch the Star Ferry over to Tsim Sha Tsui, and head to the Peninsula Hotel for their excellent Dim Sum, but arrive too late — they stop at 2:30. But I’m in luck: the doorman gives me directions to a really cool Dim Sum and seafood restaurant off of Nathan Road. Delicious food, no English except for some menu footnotes, a little hard to find but the doorman has written the destination in Chinese, so some people are very helpful showing me the way.
Following lunch, I walk through Kowloon park. This is a wonderful place, with ornamental gardens, a recreation center with pools, and various public areas where people gather to perform different ethnic functions — perhaps prayer in some cases, here and there music and dance… In many parts of the park I see large numbers of women, many with head scarves, gathered in groups on rows of rugs having lunch. All very atmospheric and charming.

From the park, I wander up Nathan Road all the way to Mong Kok, the most densely populated place on earth. Over 340,000 people per square mile, I have read. I pass through the Ladies’ Market, and make my way to the Mong Kok station. Walking here in the pedestrianized zones reminds me of walking around in a big rock concert, but it goes on for blocks around in every direction.

Three stops, change of trains, and at Kowloon Station I go up to fetch my bags and Jason Bourne items… Farewell W hotel! And back into the station for in-town checkin and train to the airport.

This time the flight leaves on time and is pretty uneventful, but sadly I don’t get much sleep.

I like this airbus model — the bathrooms are downstairs in a waiting area that is also good for stretching and shaking out the wrinkles without getting in anyone’s way. I set me watch to Munich time, and after a while notice that it is no longer going. How can you break a good watch just by setting it? Have I put it into some mechanically crashed mode? I’ll have to find a watch shop later and figure it out.
In Munich, the Lviv flight is delayed. Ugh. Already this was going to be a 3+ hour layover, but eventually after two gate changes and more delays, we go out onto the tarmac. We get on the little Lufthansa regional jet and are in Lviv in an hour or two.

Oleg drives me to the hotel, I have a shower, put in a few hours at the office, and then back to dinner, a quick stroll, and early to bed. Sound asleep in seconds.

The long dreamy sleep from last night continues this morning. Mmmm. Soft. The feather pillows, the blackout blinds. Quiet. Zzzzzzz…

What?!?! 9:15! The alarm didn’t go off! Hurry, hurry, shower, dress, go! A family emergency on the phone further delays departure, so I just grab a pastry from the mall downstairs (turns out to be a great pain au chocolat, in fact) and jump into a taxi. I get to the office a little after 10:30, amazing!

My hosts are great with the gastronomic ventures. We take the shuttle to the Hollywood Plaza mall above Diamond Hill MTR station, and go to an upscale dim sum lunch. Attentive but discreet service, beautiful linens, great tea. Along with the delicious shrimp dumplings and other familiar items, we have some more adventurous selections like shredded pickled jellyfish, fish cheeks, and a sort of soup made with thinly-sliced tofu and something like yellow garbanzo squash berries.

Back at my desk, I finally get all the different build scripts to play nice, get my checkin ready to commit, and wrap up the week’s work.

It’s almost 4:30, and sunset isn’t until 5:53. I figure I just have time to make it back to the hotel and on to the synagogue in time for services. I say goodbye and thank you to everybody, and grab a Taxi back to the hotel. I drop off the laptop, hop on the MTR over to Hong Kong station, and head straight to the mid-levels escalator. This is the coolest thing ever. Going up the steep hill about as fast as jogging up the stairways, if you stand still. Faster if you walk.

Leaving central, the escalator passes through Soho, a zone of very groovy restaurants: tapas bars, wine bars, multi-asian trendy, fusion… I half expect to see Rick’s Café Americain… And up to the mid levels. I step off at Robinson Road.

I find myself walking behind a guy wearing a kippah (yarmulke) so I figure I’m headed to the right place. And there it is — I head down Castle Steps from Robinson Road, and find the security door leading to the sanctuary. The other fellow headed off in another direction, to the Orthodox service apparently.

Huh? There’s no one here but a few Hong Kong kids from the university. They’re here on a class assignment, and a nice young lady (a medical student) begins interviewing me about being a Jew, what’s a Rabbi, what do you do on Shabbat, and so on. A nice couple from New York also shows up and we share confusion about what’s going on, and being interviewed.

It turns out that the Orthodox service upstairs starts before sunset, but the progressive service will start at 7:00. OK, so I say Shabbat shalom to all and wander off for an hour or so.

I roam the mid-levels for a bit — well-to-do folks walking their dogs, coming home from work, heading out for nightlife — and find myself in a funny multicultural picture: watching an NFL game (the Saints are thrashing Tampa Bay) sipping an Australian beer in an Irish pub in Hong Kong before Shabbat services. Beautiful!

Back at the synagogue, everybody is very warm and welcoming, though there’s one guy asking me for ID and scoping me out in with an eagle eye… He’s very fit and his accent is possibly South African? Or is he Israeli? Anyway, he seems to be the security guy, and on pretty high alert…

It’s a special night at this shul. A long-time family of the congregation is moving away. Very nice service, touching moments — this seems like a great community. They invite me to stay for dinner, and I do. Interesting bunch of people. The fellow I’m seated next to is a lawyer designing trading processes for emerging Asian economies (or something like that), but before becoming a lawyer he was a nuclear arms control negotiator. (!) Which comes up because of the “oh, you speak Russian too?” business.

I like these people … but I may never see them again. Funny how these things go. And now it’s the taxi to Hong Kong station, MTR to Kowloon station, up through the mall to the hotel room tango. And into bed. This time it doesn’t matter when I wake up — it’s the weekend! Though I should try and catch up on some other work. Maybe in a few minutes. I’ll just lie down for a second… Zzzzz…

People are go, go, go — you need to be pushy too or you might not get on the elevator. And once on board, they use the close button. More than once. Why wait the extra few seconds for the doors to close, if you can make them close now?

Speaking of buttons, this is another example of the ridiculous design excess of the W hotel. Maybe this arrangement of buttons made sense to someone at  the time, and isn’t so hard to figure out… But when I come home late from dinner all tired out, I don’t want “not so hard to figure out”. It’s like this at each turn…

Work continues to go well; today we have simple box lunches together in the lunchroom. Outside the window is a bunch of open space to be developed, where the former Kai Tak airport was. We see that there’s a large fire burning and some firemen putting it out. Odd.

There are lots of obvious things that make Hong Kong different and special but like Jules Winnfield says, it’s the little things. Here are a few examples:

• Trailers full of thousands of bamboo poles, I don’t understand this until I turn the corner and see how they do construction scaffolding here. (!)
• Drivers slamming the automatic transmission into park whenever the taxi comes to rest.
• One of the ingredients in my fruit salad is corn.
• The slogan of the MTR (metro, tube, subway): “Caring for life’s journeys”; on the back of buses is written “longevity – serenity”.

Looking at a map of Hong Kong is kind of funny, because of the preponderance of colonial names. Sure, there are a lot of streets called Wing Lee, Po Wan, Wo Fun, and so on. But there are so many like Argyle Street, Queen’s Road, Elgin Street, Jubilee, Staunton, Robinson, Wellington, etc… And these English names are so much easier to communicate for us non-Cantonese speakers: destinations such as “Causeway Bay”, “Star Ferry”, or “W Hotel” are easily conveyed, but I still can’t say the place name “Tsim Sha Tsui” and be understood.

Took the Star Ferry to Central and the MTR to Causeway Bay (a colleague here suggested the destination). Very nice pedestrian district with lots of mixed shopping: glamourous fashion items and just around the corner a stand selling skewers of cooked things — the octopus I recognized, and I think the kidneys of some small animal, but little else. Pretty cool. A surprise awaits around every corner. Oh wow, check out these service access panels on the side of a building: when they say “gas chamber” I hope they mean something very different from what the phrase conjures up for me…

Looking for dinner. Rice pizza? You’re kidding. I’ll pass. Ah, here we are! A likely-looking restaurant with no English in sight, other than a tiny footnote here or there, perfect. I go in, and between the English menu, pointing at other tables, and some English, I manage to order spicy salted squid, pan-fried greens, rice, and a (giant) bottle of Chinese beer. Great food. And you gotta love the atmosphere: people seated to my left are watching the horse races on TV with their meal, while on the other side of the restaurant they’re watching what looks like a mystical soap opera or something.

People are really paranoid about germs here: gauze masks (only a few wear them), sterilized handrails, regular disinfection of the elevators; maybe that’s how to live with the highest population density in the world. (Over 300,000 per square mile in Mong Kok!) But people will still reach into the communal plate with their chopsticks. Weird.

Then back on the MTR (that interchange at Central/Hong Kong is lo-o-ong) to the hotel, and into bed. Check on the typhoon, but the jury is still out. It’s the biggest storm in the area since 1990, but it isn’t clear exactly where it will reach the coast. I have a bit of an itchy cough, like I’m getting a cold. I hope not! Sleepy time. Got to wake up in the morning and get back to work.

This day did not occur, due to crossing the international date line while traveling westwards. You see, if we didn’t have a date line then Monday would be followed by Monday…

It’s time for another trip, so time for another blog. I’m traveling to Lviv again, but this time to Hong Kong as well! This trip will be a circumnavigation. I’ll be working at two development centers in two weeks, and I’ll drop by Stirling University in Scotland on the way home.

• 17 Oct: SFO -> HKG … I hadn’t appreciated that a flight from San Francisco to Hong Kong passes over Alaska and Siberia!
• 24 Oct: HKG -> MUC -> LWO … Let’s see how Lufthansa does red-eye.
• 30 Oct: LWO -> WAW -> AMS -> GLA … The shortest segment with the most legs.
• 2 Nov: GLA -> AMS -> SFO … And home in time to vote.

Stay tuned for updates from your faithful correspondent. And remember to click on the pictures to see them full-sized.

This is a “boundary” post — above is the new trip; below is the previous trip to Lviv last Easter, rearranged in story order.

Dawn over the North Atlantic. I notice that we’re crossing ESE over the Firth of Forth above Edinburgh, so we must be flying almost right over Nina’s head. Hi Nina! We land at Frankfurt, and rather than dock at the jetway, the plane parks out in the lot and we get one of those gate buses back to Terminal 1. Remember that I’m worried about my connection time? Well, I guess this doesn’t affect the baggage handling anyway. Queue for passport control and the German entry stamp; queue for security. (Come on, let’s hurry up — I’m just changing planes here anyway!) Putting my stuff onto the scanner belt… “The shoes too?” She shakes her head to say no, don’t worry about it. I walk through the detector *beep!* and I’m taken aside for detailed examination. Empty pockets, put shoes through the xray, scan, scan, pat, pat, turn around, pick up your feet… (I can’t believe he’s scanning the soles of my stockinged feed with a metal detector!) OK, all done. Tchuss!

Get to the Austrian airlines gate which is already open for boarding. The gate bus takes us back out to the lot, to the airbus that’s almost right next to the Lufthansa plane that I came in on. Again an empty seat next to me. This next leg is easy — up to altitude, a sandwich, there’s the Danube off to the right (first time I’ve laid eyes on that great river) and we start our descent into Vienna. This is just a few minutes longer than SFO->LAX. Apparently I’m in the forward-most row of economy; up ahead is some more privileged class of seating, different only in the little curtains in front of my row to be drawn for privacy. However, because they must be fastened open for arrival and departure (this is placarded in the craft) the lady up there gets only about five minutes of privileged isolation behind the curtain. Down to a fine landing in Vienna (I must come visit here sometime) and we’re going to dock at a jetway to the terminal this time… but wait! Another craft is still at our stand, so we have to wait a few minutes. This is my tight connection and I don’t want to see what happens if I miss it! But the Iberia jet soon pushes back, and we’re off the plane and into the terminal. Did I mention that this connection is the tight one? So I zip along, whoops, hold on! Queue for the passport control and the Austrian stamp. Queue for the security checkpoint (I put the shoes, belt, coins, wallet, EVERYTHING on the conveyor this time!) then past a glittering series of Mozart-Sacher-Torte duty-free goodies shops directly to the gate — which is open for boarding and we leave on time.

I even see my bag getting loaded as we walk up to the little steps. (Duck as you enter, this is a smaller plane!) This plane is a Dash-8 which is very cool, though I’m a little squeamish about being exactly on edge to the prop. I think this is the most dangerous seat — if that prop fails I’m toast! — but we would all be toast in that case, and in fact the problem is that it’s the loudest seat. Still, it’s a great craft and we’re up and over the Carpathians and down into Lviv in about an hour. Again an empty seat next to me!

Lviv airport. (This is the terminal, viewed from the runway side!) We get off the plane, a few dozen of us, and thank goodness I asked for the VIP service. The other passengers are milling around to get on the bus and go to whatever the passport and customs rituals are like these days. For me, a nice young woman with my name on a sign takes me aside to a separate bus of my own, gives my luggage tag to some official guys, and rides with me in the bus to a comfortable lounge where I wait a few minutes until my bag and driver show up. That’s it! Oh, I did have to answer a few simple questions from the other pretty lady in camouflage and beret so she could stamp my passport and exit card. (I must remember not to lose that.)

The drive to the hotel does pass a variety of rather drab buildings that are a bit Soviet or maybe like older suburban Milan at its worst, but soon we’re into the old tsentr and there are nice parks and a warmer pre-20th-century feel. Suddenly, here’s your hotel. Welcome! The staff speak English (some very well, some just fair) and the amenities are very nice. It’s very comfortable and plush without being crass. A genuinely good place. I even have my power plug and WiFi issues sorted out in just a few minutes.

Got up this morning, had a shower, tried to follow some horrible Russian comedy on the TV (I still find the Ukrainian channels a lot harder to follow), and went down to breakfast. A big buffet, and I could have gotten really carried away. But I just take a bit of scrambled eggs and sausages, some local form of blinis, a few cheeses and charcuterie, fruits, toast, and juice. Had to ask for coffee, which seemed weird. I forgot to try the Kashi. Back to the room and set up this blog. Checked the Lonely Planet recommended walking tour and decide to head out on a modified version. I think I’ll change from the slacks and nice shoes back into the black jeans and walking boots. (Lots of people were staring at me last night, and I am not sure what that’s about — I guess I don’t match the local template or something. Sod it, the jeans and boots work well for me.) On second thought, this is Easter Sunday, so I think I’ll keep the upscale garb.

There are a couple of sites near here where there used to be synagogues — one from the 17th and one from the 19th century, both destroyed by the Nazis. Thought I’d pass by for a visit… why not on Easter Sunday? Didn’t find a trace of them; will have to double-check my notes about their location. I can’t bear to stand on a corner, gawking at sights and studying a map; partly I’m embarrassed to display my tourist status, and partly a security thing. You know, try to blend in (fat chance) and don’t be a mark. So no synagogues, what about churches? Stepped inside one church to find a stunning baroque interior, but left quick to avoid the American with the camera and guidebook. Passed another church — the oldest in Lviv — which was closed, perhaps for repair? Walked past the arsenal museum (which was closed) and past the last standing parts of the town’s medieval fortifications. Wearing the dress shoes instead of the boots, I have had to walk carefully on the cobbles to avoid injury. I don’t know how folks scurry around here (mostly they don’t, but the type “a” folks do).

I forgot to mention that yesterday the maid service brought to my room an Easter bread in an ornate carton: kind of an emergency Easter basket that I could have taken for blessing if I’m stuck without a real one. And today we can eat it, I guess because Lent is over.

Tried lunch at an outdoor cafe in the Ploshcha Rynok; sat in the shade to get out of the hot sun, only to have a cold wind pick up. (They actually had a stock of blankets to give to people.) Took forever to get served, and then although there was borshch on the menu, the only food they had was sandwiches, ice cream, and some pastries. Got a coffee (excellent) and what was described to me in a limited English vocabulary as “apple cake”. Apparently if you don’t speak much English then apple=fruit and cake=any patisserie. Fortunately, in this case it was an excellent not-too-sweet cherry strudel. Five bucks was no problem; the service was almost nonexistent. (The Ukrainian friends-and-family  in a dozen seats around tables to my right ordered a bunch of things, which all came five to ten minutes apart: two chocolate ice creams, later on two vanilla, later a sundae, and so on…)

Walking back through the Ploshcha Rynok to the hotel, stopped to listen to four women singing something sounding like karelian pop gospel. Amplified, accompanied by MP3 tracks, very gospel-preachy-Christ-our-savior; strong singers and drawing a good crowd. This was on a small stage with a few JBL EONs, a small Mackie, and a laptop. I have yet to see what happens with the big stage. Beautiful weather, and the forecast is for the rain to hold off through tomorrow. Walking up one narrow street, there was construction scaffolding against a building; I crossed to the other side to pass by — I’ve seen the technical condition some of the cars are in, so I don’t for a minute trust a scaffolding tower!

Morning came late today. Or late came early… Although I dutifully changed my watch to Frankfurt time as soon as we left SFO, apparently I missed the Western-Eastern Europe timezone change; my watch has been an hour slow since I arrived. (Maybe that’s why everything has been closing so early.) So while I thought I stayed up really late last night, in fact I stayed up extremely late. I went down to the breakfast buffet today and it was gone! So I had to order some regular breakfast, back up to the room to prepare and zoom! out into the street by noon. I’m glad I sorted that out before going to the office tomorrow!

For today’s stroll I head down to Ivan Franko park, over to the west past Prospekt Svobody and opposite the university. The walk along there reminded me a lot of parts of Paris — change some signs from “Бул. Ð’. Гнатюка” to “Rue Vaugirard” and it would almost pass. Having to read slowly still, letter by letter, but that creates some nice surprises, to follow one such discovery click here. In the park, I stop and make some notes on my BlackBerry:

Ivan Franko park. Birds twittering, the trees still bare, but promising soon to bud; people strolling in ones and twos, sometimes with a toddler or followed by a small dog. A group of young men take up position around a park bench. Sounds of playground squeals carry across the park and blend with the dull roar of traffic; above all the other sounds, the spirited singing of the birds.

After the stroll in the park, what next? More strolling, of course! Back over to Prospekt Svobody; much busier today. The streets around it are closed to traffic for the holiday, and the Planta is full of people. Groups of old men playing cards, playing chess, or just talking and smoking; kids driving around in little electric toy cars that their parents rent for a few minutes; the little girls may prefer to take a ride on a grumpy pony.

As I look around at everything going on, I realize — as much as I’m enjoying my freedom to wanter and soak all this in — how much I want to share the experience. And perhaps that’s why I’m bringing you, chers lecteurs, so much detail.

Well, what about lunch? Let’s try someplace really great. Amadeus is one of the top restaurants in town, and I could go ahead and spend a few hryvnias… Alas, it’s closed. Strolling, strolling, through the Ploshcha Rynok where an ancient guy is playing Godfather music on an accordion; he is an excellent player and I drop a 2 Гри note in his case. Up a side street and suddenly there it is — “Lviv Premiere” if I read it right. What the heck, and in I go. Excellent! Nobody can speak any English, it’s horribly gaudy (check out this water fixture with waterfall and illuminated bubbling columns) but somehow warm and genuine at the same time.

A big batch of friends/family are having lunch there (adolescent kids at a separate table) and the alpha guy could play one of the Corleone family. This is so cool! They offer me the menu in either Polish or Ukrainian, so I choose the latter. I have a small salad, borshch, bread, and beer; followed up with a coffee. Yum. Great food and vibe for ten US dollars. A soft jazz cover of “careless whisper” oozes from the Mackie 2-ways in the corner; it is a great improvement over the obligatory disco/rock soundtrack running everywhere else.

Back out into the street, and it’s strolling time! A tramvai rolls by. These are cool too. I’m making a gallery of Lviv trams. I am getting to like it here a lot. (Of course, I’m privileged and protected from any worries about ancient plumbing, employment, and a million other things that the locals must deal with…) Speaking of work — it’s time. Across the Ploshcha and back to the hotel… Rain’s coming soon, and I need to start reviewing some documents before getting together with folks at the office tomorrow.

This is a different kind of métro, boulot, dodo experience from any I’ve had before.

After waking up in my delightful plush hotel and having a perfect breakfast, I get picked up by the company driver (who speaks virtually no English, so I get to exercise the Russian a little) in a dented minivan, who proceeds to drive me out of the beautiful baroque pedestrian zone, through the iron curtain, and directly into the eastern bloc. Wow! He has to slow to a crawl at times to avoid wrecking the car in the huge potholes; some areas we pass look as though they’ve had recent experience with artillery or huge iron brickovores; drab, block-long, multistory slabs of former industrial power stand alongside building sites that look as though construction was temporarily halted in 1962.

The driver dodges a few last craters and pulls up next to one of the lesser monoliths — just slightly less industrial, it looks as though it might have been some kind of institute in the Ukrainian SSR — this is the office. The entrance is an unchained gap in a corrugated iron wall; he tells me I’m going upstairs, so in I go through the iron fence, up a few steps, and in through the front door. As I enter, a smiling old lady pops out of a doorway to make sure I’m for real; the broad concrete stairs are covered in concrete dust and lead up in a square spiral five floors. On the gravelly ground floor, between the iron handrail and the watchbabushka, stand an ATM and a coin-operated coffee machine.

Five flights up, and there’s a fabulous middle-aged woman wearing that same blue lab frock coat I’ve seen in the old movies; with a knowing and satisfied smirk on her face, she’s idly sweeping outside the rather flash and modern wooden door to the office itself. Beyond the door is a security turnstile, and beyond this the office manager is waiting; a lovely young woman who speaks great English and helps me with all the details of getting set up.

I share an office with a couple of other members of my team from the US; it’s a charmless rectangle that might have once housed a hospital bed. The view out the window is partly construction site, partly wrecking yard — I’m honestly not sure exactly what I’m looking at — against a backdrop of Brezhnev-era apartment blocks. But there’s WiFi and hard ethernet cable, the ping times to the California servers are acceptable, and the folks I came to work with are here, so we get to work. And they’re the nicest folks — always concerned that I have everything I need and making sure I’m taken care of.

We go out to lunch, which means walking past a huge building that looks almost abandoned but apparently still manufactures a few television sets, dodging the mudholes and loose cobblestones (only I seem to notice) until we approach a doorway with a little restaurant sign over it. We open the door and step from Soviet 1970 into, well, Soviet 1970 but now it’s a warm, almost cheery little dive with folks having lunch. The menu here is transmitted orally, so I go along with my host’s program and have borshch, a mixed green salad, and a delicious dish that is called something like “beaten meat” but is really a pork schnitzel with mashed potatoes. And a bottle of Georgian mineral water.

Well nourished, we go back out through the rainy sovietscape, climb the dusty concrete stairs, and get back to work. After a series of meetings, file transfers, edits, bug tracking, status conference calls back to the US and Asian offices, and other lively features of my work life, it’s time to call it a day.

I’m told that the view from the office is nicer nowadays than it used to be. The construction site is apparently a recent addition, replacing various smoking piles of tires and other features from a Simpsons cartoon hell scene.

The driver dodges more potholes, we pass back through the iron curtain, through the 9th arrondissement‘s twin, back through the beautiful old town, and back to my hotel — where the maids have turned down my bed, fluffed my feather pillows, and placed an exquisite chocolate truffle on my nightstand.

These contrasts are fabulous. Delicious.
Maintenant à dodo. À demain, chers lecteurs…
Da zaftra.

Up in the morning and off to work. Oleh makes the minivan dance around over the cratered road surface to the office. Nailing down the last details of last night’s emergency work, I have a clean deck to finish my collaboration with the Ukrainians today. A few hours of brainstorming, outlining, and writing — then a drive to lunch at the prosthetics factory cafeteria — then back to it and we finish the day with an excellent result. I’ll polish up the document tonight and tomorrow morning, and review it with the whole team in the afternoon. The trip is working out well from a work perspective.

Back at the hotel at dinnertime, I am getting a bit hungry. So I head over to Amadeus, one of the best restaurants in town. But it seems odd to be going out to wonderful dining with no company; and then I have to deal with how to expense the bill, so I decide to just go back to the (excellent, mind you) hotel restaurant. Hmmm. Chicken Kiev really is a Ukrainian specialty, but only visitors actually eat it. What the heck, I tell myself, and end up with a delicious plate of pesto-butter-filled breaded chicken breast. Soup first, of course!

A couple is at the next table speaking Ukrainian or Russian; it’s hard for me to know which. She’s a fashionably skinny bleach blonde and he looks something like a slavic Nicolas Cage in a leather jacket. At one point he leaves for about 20 minutes and she stays behind; I get the impression she’s upset. Eventually he returns, speaks to her for a while without sitting, and walks out as she gets up and follows. I have no idea what the interactions were.

My BlackBerry buzzes; it’s my US colleagues heading out for a drink. We meander some, find someplace open (it’s almost midnight), and have a beer. On the way back, some folks are hanging out — twenty-somethings or thirty-somethings. One woman in the group is laughing and starts patting us all on our backs and arms as we pass, saying Tak! Tak! Ya lublyu tibya! and so on. “Yes! Yes! I love you!” It’s awkward, and I assume she’s had too much ecstasy or something, but perhaps there’s something else that I missed.

Getting ready to leave the hotel; car is booked for 11:30. Soft rock muzak is invading my head… I’ve heard 10cc more times this week than in the preceding year! A couple of last souvenir errands, goodbye to the hotel, and we’re off to the airport. In the VIP lounge of the Lviv airport, there’s a plasma TV in the corner showing lots of air wreckage on the news — not a nice way to get ready for your flight! The various airport personnel come in from time to time and check out the news as it breaks. I can see that the accident is in Russia, just a few hundred miles from here; I can make out something about catastrophe, president, and Poland… (Later I learn that the President of Poland has died in the crash, along with much of the Polish leadership and intelligentsia. A terrible day for Poland.)

For the most part, the ambiance of the waiting room continues as normal; people getting ushered through the security and across the tarmac to their waiting planes. Eventually it’s my turn, and I put my bag through the scanner. I’ve got two bottles of liquor, which I didn’t put in the checked luggage (already on the plane) to prevent breakage. The security lady asks me “You have two bottles? What is it?” I say it’s cognac and vodka; is that a problem? “Problem. Only can have 100ml.” Doh! I’d forgotten about the recent fluid limits — I should have checked the bottles! “Don’t do it again.” She says, and waves me through. I thank her very much; but I mention how this is going to create a big problem for me at security in Munich: “Is something I can do?” she shrugs, and I thank her once more.

Quick little Lufthansa flight over to Munich; at passport control the officer asks in German about why I don’t speak much German with a name like Fuchs. (He has a point…) At the security checkpoint I explain in my broken German how I forgot the vodka in the bag, and can I exit to the Lufthansa checkin? Not a problem, he indicates the exit and I go the long way around, checking my laptop bag with the bottles in it. The laptop itself and some other key valuables/breakables come with me in a shopping bag that I had handy.

Only a few glitches remain. While waiting in the Munich airport I go to get a caffe latte — but realize that I have no Euros. So I find the bank, change a twenty, and then go relax with my latte until it’s nearing boarding time. After unexpectedly long lines for boarding pass control and yet another security checkpoint (they’re scanning every single passenger by hand; is this related to the Russian crash?) I finally get to the gate just as it opens for boarding.

I didn’t have a seat assignment until I got to the gate, so I get the very last seat: 58G. It’s an aisle seat, in the very last row of the airbus. Way back there in the tail it’s a bit of a bumpy ride, but otherwise it’s just fine. A long flight — over 11 hours — and so northerly that we pass completely north of Hudson bay and enter the USA over Spokane! Off the plane, through customs, onto BART, fighting to stay awake, and my son picks me up from BART to drive me home. The dogs are overcome with joy, I hand out the mitbrings, and take a nice hot bath. (Aaaaahhhhh.)

Great trip, successful for work, and it’s great to be home and go to sleep in my own bed again. I’ll happily do this trip again if needed.