05/31 Narita -> Charles de Gaulle -> Frankfurt -> Friedberg
06/02 Friedberg -> Dortmund
06/03 Dortmund -> Friedberg
06/05 Friedberg -> Frankfurt -> Charles de Gaulle -> Tours
06/06 Tours -> Paris
06/09 Paris -> Versailles
06/11 Versailles -> Charles de Gaulle -> Narita

We are leaving today for a week in Okinawa, where the temperature is above 20 degrees even now. Hopefully we can spot the Iriomote Wild Cat. Do not expect me to reply (or even see) any emails there.

PS: I have my sun glasses, but the elusive Friedberg jacket is missing again.

Weekend business trip to Fukuoka. A two day support session in the customer's data centre, the security measures of which would merit a blog entry of their own, but part of them is that they cannot be disclosed.

All the regular hotels are fully booked, thanks to a Glay concert, so the three of us have to a share one room, the good news being that it is a room at the luxurious JAL Resort Sea Hawk Hotel. Ironically is located right in front of the Yahoo (sic!) Dome, where the concert takes place. If they opened the stadium roof, we could even sneak a peek-a-boo (23rd floor, view of the beach, too).

The room price includes coupons for free entry to the nearby Asian Healing Spa Puna Ola. A five minute walk is kind of inconvenient, but on the other hand the place is positively big and at 1:30 in the morning practically empty.

09:24

Ebisu. Sitting at my desk in office. I realize that I am in real danger of missing my 10:30 flight.

10:12

The train pulls into Haneda Airport.

10:14

The self-service check-in machine refuses to issue a boarding pass. It can only do so until twenty minutes before departure.

10:16

I receive a boarding pass at the ANA counter. They tell me that there is no need for me to hurry. I keep on running anyway.

10:18

The security check is very smooth, a welcome change from how things went on our US trip, where we were selected for the supposedly random special screening process on every single leg of all our flights.

10:20

Arrive at the gate for boarding, which should have started right then. However, the plane is a little late itself.

10:30

Boarding starts.

10:35

I am in my seat.

The three most interesting items in the duty free catalog:

• A very cool, but totally over-priced Godzilla-vs-Mothra Hawaiian shirt.
• A special Lego set with an ANA plane complete with crew and passengers.
• Official FIFA World Cup T-shirts that spell Laipzig with an a.

We are just about to leave for a two-weeks/three-weekend trip (thus amazingly/unfashionably long by Japanese standards) to the home of the brave. Previous experience clearly leads me to believe that I will not be blogging about it as much as I should during the trip (the lack of a laptop this time makes this even less likely) nor after it. So instead I'll just briefly summarise the schedule in advance.

We are leaving Tokyo today at 18:00 and arrive in San Francisco at 11:07, a fact that Google Calendar seems to have trouble visualising appropriately, even though I registered these events with their respective time zones. We will be staying with Ashley and Maciej, who will also take us on camping trips to Yosemite for Saturday and Sunday (most likely in the rain), and to Big Sur the following weekend. The week in-between is reserved for sight-seeing in San Francisco, with a fancy cabaret/dinner show on Thursday. We will leave the Bay Area on Monday (May, 1st) for two nights in Las Vegas, including the world's biggest buffet and a helicopter tour of the Grand Canyon. On Wednesday off to our final stop, New York City, where Lu and Martin kindly agreed to take us in and will join us for the musical Chicago on Thursday. Monday, 8th, back to Tokyo, arriving there Tuesday afternoon.

Kitty will be staying with Faiz in nearby Kameido. All involved parties are intrigued how that will play out.

And now I really have to go find my sunglasses....

Terracotta Warriors. Audacious taxi drivers. Cold weather. Daytime fog. Bell and Drum Towers. Riding bicycles on the city wall. My niece (!) Susan (studies music composition and plays the violin). Chinese food that I actually like.

• Catalogues are in short supply at IKEA.
• People rush into subway cars before letting other passengers get out first.
• There is a neat prepaid Public Transportation Card that works with trains, subways, busses, ferries and even taxis.
• The German-built maglev train to the airport runs at up to 431 kph, but is not available if your flight arrives at midnight or leaves in the early morning.
• Pyjamas are perfectly normal attire when going out.
• Remote controls have to be wrapped in plastic.
• Wedding guests do not dress up much, but expect free cigarettes.
• Almost all taxis (and hence half of all cars) are Volkswagen Santanas.
• Starting at 2 Euro, legal DVD are not much more expensive than pirated ones, but not many shops carry them, there are less titles to choose from, and they have region code 6.
• Chinese food is different.

I am getting around quite a bit these days, and my passport is beginning to look like a stamp rally. China is actually one of the very few places I need a visa for (at the same time it is one of the very few places Cissy does not need one for). I have also started to collect mileage, or rather mileage cards. I have three now (Star Alliance, JAL, NWA/KLM), each used at most twice, and Air China is likely to give me a fourth one today.

We are leaving for Bangkok later today. Because a lot of people had the same idea there were not many flights available and we got some pretty unfortunate ones: Leave Sunday afternoon, arrive in Bangkok at midnight, return flight leaving Bangkok at 6 am. In addition to that, because I do not want to miss my Japanese language course on Saturday, I am returning on Friday while Cissy stays until Sunday.

The BBC Weather Centre forecasts thundery showers for the whole week (with temperatures in the thirties nonetheless).

As a result of simultaneous business trips, Cissy and me are staying in Manila this week, more specifically in Makati City, which is the financial and commercial centre of the country. We are very conveniently (and cost-efficiently, and least for GaiaX and me) sharing a room in the luxurious Mandarin Oriental that Citybank likes to book for its employees. I have to admit that I am feeling a little uneasy in this high-class hotel and am somewhat shocked by the intensity of security precautions here: Armed guards (and we are talking really big guns here) are posted at the entrances of all buildings in Makati, and they check the bags of everyone going in. Cars driving up to hotels and shopping malls are also searched. This is apparently not a recent development triggered by terrorism, as the Philippines have quite a history of commercial kidnappings, piracy, and political assassinations.

On the plus side, everyone speaks English, and everything is cheap. In fact those are the two reasons that brought me here since Oracle University seminars in Japan are available only in Japanese language and at five times the cost (even including flight and hotel still about twice the cost). Plus, I get to eat a lot of fruits here.

I spent the weekend at Ashley's and Maciej's place in Richmond, which is a very nicely located residential area on the West side of San Francisco. A five minute walk (across a golf course and past a museum) takes you to the coast with a great scenic view of beaches and cliffs. They let me stay in their basement (bed room / Buddhist temple), gave me a tour of all the main attractions (excluding Alcatraz, but including an over-hyped burrito that once again demonstrated why I should stay clear of Mexican food), Maciej took photos, and all of us (including Ashley's parents and their impressively wooly cat) had a good time, I think.

It just occured to me that one of the reasons for the strict US immigration checks are that they have to deal with visitors from the future. I, for example, left Tokyo at 3 pm today and arrived in Los Angeles at 8:30 am, more than six hours before I left. But just for the record, I was neither fingerprinted nor photographed (at least not that I am aware of).

We took Austrian Airlines to Frankfurt and since the flight was via Vienna, we decided to stop by for three days and take a look. We saw the Schönbrunn Palace (sans Labyrinth and Imperial Garden, both closed in winter), the Coach Collection, Mozart's Magic Flute performed by puppets, the Imperial Apartments and Silver Collection, Secular and Ecclesiastical Treasuries, the Butterfly House, the State Hall in the National Library, the Esperanto museum, the House of Music, the Hundertwasser Village, and loads of snow.

We arrived in Berlin at 7:17 in the morning by overnight train from Warsaw. The couches in the sleeper's car were quite comfortable, but we did not really feel well-rested, probably because of the lengthy discussions with the Polish and German immigration officers about the validity of Cissy's visa. We had about ten hours to spend in Berlin before returning to Friedberg, and my brother guided us to an exhibition of ancient Chinese treasures, a Vietnamese fast-food restaurant, Hotel Adlon (including Michael Jackson's baby-balancing balcony), the Reichstag building, the Brandenburg Gate (visible this time, last time it was veiled by T-Online), a piece of the Wall, and Terminator 3 at the Sony Center.

Sylwia's and Holger's wedding took place in Chojnow in the Polish country side and although this was the first wedding I ever attended (my own will likely be the second) it seems to me that Polish weddings are much more lively than German ones. There was also a lot of food, very delicious but just too much to handle. I am quite impressed by Holger's command of the Polish language, which allowed him to say his lines in front of the priest to everyone's apparent satisfaction. Because of the not so glorious train connection to Krakow, we had to unfortunately leave in a hurry (sorry for taking our room key with us). All the best to the couple, and thanks for the invitation (thus providing the main reason for our trip through Eastern Europe) !

While Warsaw is the political capital of Poland, Krakow is the cultural highlight, featuring for example the Wawel castle. But the main attraction is not there either, but in (or rather under) the nearby town of Wieliczka: nine centuries of mining produced a total of about 200 kilometers of passages as well as 2,040 caverns of varied size, placed in 1978 by UNESCO on the first List of World Cultural and Natural Heritage. The mine has been visited by tourists since the 15th century, a four-hour tour (which still covers just about 2% of the area) takes you down some two hundred meters to see stunning displays of mining work, giant caverns (big enough to house a secret underground German airplane factory), underground lakes, plenty of sculptures, an orchestra and an incredible church built out of salt by three miners over a period of 70 years. The air is at a constant temperature of 14 degrees Celsius and so healthy that they have some set up a sanatorium for people with respiratory problems. The mine has been in use until just a few years ago and still produces salt from the water that has to be pumped out to keep it from filling up. I have not seen the Pyramids in Egypt, but this mine must be the closest Europe can get to it.