After flying 21,948 miles on 7 flights and visiting 4 countries over 12 days I am finally home. The jetlag isn't so bad. I think flying PE helps and one leg flying First definitely helped.
The show went well and a visit to one of my suppliers in Japan was good as well. One Air New Zealand branding campaign from 2002 was titled Being there is everything, interesting advert I found from
Youtube. pretty much sums up my thoughts of the trip. You get a lot of respect from your suppliers and your customers for just turning up to a show 10,000 miles away.
It was great to catch up with a few AFFers in London, maybe we all had a few more drinks than we should have but it was a fun night and who can complain when the prices are actually cheaper than back in Australia.
BA First was nice, in some ways it is better than Qantas First, but overall the experience on both airlines had good and not so good points. The private dining area of the Concorde Lounge was nice certainly different to that of the Qantas First Class Lounge in Sydney or Melbourne.
It was great to catch up with 3 other AFFers this morning on my final flight up to Brisbane on QF19. Interesting if you are earlier than the person that you are guesting into the lounge you can leave their name with the person at the door and also with the staff at the front desk at the top of the escalator. Something that I always thought possible but has never been explained before. There were a couple of interesting discussion points during our conversation this morning. Also nice when the lounge staff recognize me.
Brought myself a sim card for Europe so I was able to text family and friends(AFFers) who had Imessage on their mobiles but I made sure to check what time it was back home before texting. Having a local sim card and Imessage means that you are using only a bit of data and no call costs for the messages. the local sim is handy for displaying maps as I got a little lost one night but with the local sim card just fire up the IPhone and check my location.
My first ever free upgrade on Qantas from economy to Premium economy on my flight home last night was fantastic, first ever upgrade on Qantas, my only other free upgrade happened 5 years ago flying back to Australia ex Narita on JAL on a Qantas codeshare.
We, my dad and I had a spare day in Japan yesterday where we did a run on the
Shinkansen to Odawarra to visit a castle, next need to try the Maglev in Shanghai, also had time to visit the Bank of Japan currency museum,
wiki needs updating and the Tokyo Stock Exchange(
TSE), both providing some information in English to explain a bit about themselves. The Japanese Yen wasn't formed until 1871 so a rather young currency than I would have thought.
Very clear day in Tokyo for 2 days, cars are running cleaner fuels and I guess the industry has changed as well which certainly helps. The Tokyo subway was efficient and clean; I have never seen anywhere in the world where someone would vacuum the stairs of the local subway station.
A few photos are up on Facebook and I will get around to adding a trip report before the end of the year. Now time for bed.
