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I'm back from a day trip to Berlin (business) and as of now just finished things that I couldn't do earlier. In contrast to previous experience I did take advantage of the timer on my dish washer and don't have to run it now - yay, I remembered stuff ;)
For travel preparations I decided to not take my laptop with me and thus the whole process of packing should be a matter of less than an hour. I wonder how far I can reduce the electric gadget overload.
At 10AM tomorrow morning I should be sitting in down town Lisbon sipping on an Espresso and having a custard tard.

Saturday I was destined to pick up a friend at Hamburg Airport. I left Kiel early to stop by at one of the infamous plane spotting lookups just off the southbound runway.



Plane spotting won't become my favourite pastime but if I happen to find myself at a unique location I might spend an hour or so snapping pictures.

All photos are available in the Hamburg Airport gallery.

Touri is a very common slang word for tourist in German. So when a friend wrote "ja, aber du bist touri ..." while we were chatting about my upcoming Lisboa trip I didn't think of the obvious. Inside the SER (SIP Express Router) source code and config file touri and to.uri are usually used to refer to the callee of a VoIP call. For the next couple of seconds I tried hard to parse the sentence but couldn't make any sense of it.

I should really get away from work for a day or two ;)

I'm usually the guy to bring all those goodies from abroad back home but today I picked up a friend at the airport and in return got my share of treats.



The keyboard for sure is different from the usually full size keyboards and it took me a few minutes to get used to. It sports a US layout whereas my old Sun Type 6 has a US/Unix one. My laptop keyboard is more like the Apple one so I believe I just have to adopt to it instead of remapping keys. A Bluetooth keyboard for the living room might also be an option in the future.



I'm a sucker for Almond M&Ms and am always getting some back with me. This time I got a pack in return. Additionally I'm now a proud but somewhat anxious owner of a pack of Razzberry M&Ms that I'll have to try sometime soon.

Not that my travel plans were easy to book to begin with but after a first round of changes I got a call from Lufthansa who warned me that there is more to do.
Before I even got the call I checked my online booking overview and found something rather unique:


Later I got the aforementioned call and was informed that my booked flight was cancelled. LH tried to put me on the 2:10PM out of Seoul instead of the night flight which I did prefer. I don't like the idea of leaving Seoul early although that would get me to Hamburg the same day. Instead I might leave the next day connecting in Tokyo and Munich making the whole itinerary even more complex.

I'll head over to San Francisco as part of my work. Unfortunately that trip collides with a private trip to Seoul. Refunds for my private trip would have been rather limited so I'll simply extend my flight eastwards to reach all the way to San Francisco.


To my first destination it will be more than 11.000 miles with a 13:50h flight followed by another 10:50h leg on Singapore Airlines after less than two hours in Seoul. I wonder what the time zones and crossing the dateline will do to my internal clock ;)

After a few - hopefully nice and productive - days in San Francisco I'll once more cross the dateline westwards and connect to Guam in Seoul. From Seoul on everything should be fine as I'm guaranteed Business Class for the remaining flights.

I'll be in Guam for some time, hop over to Saipan (Kai: yet another Hardrock Cafe over there, dude!) for a day and connect to the remote town of Majuro. Majuro is the capitol of the Marshall Islands.

On my way back I will be able to take the infamous Island Hopper and spend the better part of a day landing and starting on remote atolls before catching another Korean Air Boeing 777 (brand new Business Class) to Seoul.

Seoul is yet another destination on the trip. More on that later - when I read the introduction of my tourist guide. If everything goes as planned I'll touch ground in Hamburg on the 19th of November.

The booked flights look like this:



30,000+ miles in 18 days equals a whopping 114 kilometers per hour (km/h) during the whole time.

TAP Portugal lately started operating a direct Hamburg to Lisboa connection. I always wanted to go to Lisboa and now found another reason. The promo fare wasn't as good as I expected but there were a few super-restricted tickets available when I checked. For about half of what flights usually are to Lisboa I couldn't resist.

I'll be in sunny Lisboa next weekend and now only have to book a hotel room.

Sidenote: Beside daytrips this seems to become the first trip to another country where I won't take a laptop with me. I hope my memory cards will last ;)

I ordered two more Lonelyplanet books. One city guide on Seoul and another region guide covering Portugal.



I'd love to buy these in my local book store but buying them online saved me almost 10 Euro. Even the Amazon book on Portugal had a physical 23.95E pricetag although it's available for 19.95E online.

During the last weeks lots of things happened. Beside all the reports that freenet will be split and sold.

First of all we had another great freenet party at Au Quai right on the waterfront in Hamburg. Great food, fireworks (few companies do fireworks in the Hamburg harbour I believe), lots of people and good music. I was home at around 5AM ;)



For the following weekend I borrowed a new BMW 118d for a testride.



I'm in the game for a new car due early next year so giving it a test ride was worth it. The overall driving experience is good but nothing really spectacular. In contrast to my Golf V the noise level at high speeds is worth it. I'm driving on empty Autobahns a lot and being able to chat at 220kmh is a big plus ;)



Last week we started our move to the new office. The whole process went smoothly but there's lot of stuff to finish over here. Right now I have great 6th level view onto a Circus tucked between the Kiel bay and our office.