Almost home. And still going strong.

Ahhh, the beauty of being able get my connectivity fix thanks to using 3G on my mobile-phone again! No more hunting for wireless networks just to check my e-mails or do some quick blogging. Right now I'm using my Nokia 6120 as a tethered modem and it works much better than when I last tried it in early January. (Note to all those iPhone 3G owners: Haha, it works out of the box without any hacking whatsoever!:-P)

Anyway, the flights were pretty unremarkable except for the stop-over in Paris CDG which I'll rant about at a later date. Was very happy to get out of Washington IAD because the queues in front of the Lufthansa counter were pretty long and everything took much more than time than expected. It was a good decision to be at the airport 2 1/2 hours before the departure time, by the time I got to the gate I had little time to spare.

Now I'm looking forward to this train moving out of Vienna's main-station so I can complete the final leg of my journey. It will be good to be home and it will be great to have that first sip of cold beer!

By the way, my counter jet lag efforts seems to have paid off, I only got 2 hours of sleep on the way to Paris and even though my internal clock tells me that it's 5:30 a.m. I'm still going strong. Let's see how the afternoon and evening turns out...

All in all: Home Sweet Home! :-)

Home Sweet Home @ CeBIT 2008

Home Sweet Home

So, here I am, back at home...

I think it's quite needless to say that everything still feels a bit weird around here. Even though my day actually was pretty much the standard day I spend while I'm here with my family: I got up for lunch even though my alarm clock was set for 10 a.m. (I didn't realize just how beat I was after those 3 days in Moscow) and spent most of my waking hours in front of the notebook, only really being interupted by reading the newspaper, having coffee with my mother and picking up my brother from the city.

But other than that I still have a hard time grasping where the hell I am. Didn't I wake up in Moscow only yesterday? Didn't we have lunch in that Azerbaijanian restaurant only yesterday? Wasn't I in St. Basil's on Red Square only yesterday? Did I really ride a camel in the Gobi? Did I really spend time wandering around Tianamen Square being completely fascinated by its size? Or was it all just a dream???

Browsing through my photos and listening to that Russian CD it's of course obvious that everything did indeed happen. But it's still odd. After all the Gobi Desert is about as far away from here as possible (with the notable exception of the North- and Southpole that is;-). Yesterday morning I was still in Moscow, on the road, travelling. Today I'm back home, wandering through my memories of that outstanding trip, thinking of all the things we experienced: the amount of crappy instant noodles that we ate, my messed up feet on Lake Baikal, the cool Belgium couple with whom travelled in the Gobi, the Vodka drinking with our driver there, the children we meet in the first Mongolian city we set foot in, ... and so much more.

It will really take some time for me to thoroughly realize just what I saw these past few weeks. In the meantime my life around here will definitly keep me busy as I'll be heading to Vienna on Friday, with university starting on Monday and lots of other things to be done, articles to be written, projects to be finished, hardware to be reviewed, friends to meet and drink a beer with, e-mails to read and reply to, photos to sort through, etc.

But for now and most of this evening I'll go back and re-visit China, Mongolia and Russia. :-)