Home!

Okay, I'm getting kind of tired of the "I'm home!" blog post. I'm travelling too much, and while I'm seeing cool things in beautiful places, the best part of travel is always the arrival home.

Both KL and S'pore (learning the local ways) were great. The hotels were incredible, the food was mostly edible, and the work went really well. I had few problems with the 30C equatorial climate (1 degree of latitude north of the equator) and was pleasantly surprised with successful meetings.

The jetlag, however, knocked me out at least half the time I was there. Tuesday, after the incident with the night club in my hotel room, I was useless. I think I did some of my best presentations, and reached some real low spots for working while sick. And while I did that, I played observer to other people going through their own highs and lows. Or more precisely, lows and highs.

The worst often comes out when people are travelling. There was an incident at the airport earlier today yesterday where flustered airline staff were facing two customers with ticket problems. One was irate and mean. The other was polite and quiet. I feel bad for the attendants, but I recognized a motive in their reactions. The loud man got no quarter. He wasn't getting on the plane until he relented his demands. The polite man got his ticket fixed and an upgrade to business class privileges. I think that the ladies, unwilling to help the loud man were also unwilling to think of themselves as mean. They tried to at least balance the goods and bads that they had control over.

I saw it again this morning. The cab I grabbed from the train was pulling up to let out another fare. It took a while for the passenger to step out and once my bags were in the boot and I was in the car the driver blurted out," She was such a bitch!"

He had been stiffed for most of the fare, the lady arguing she wasn't going to pay rather than offering to go inside to the bank machine, or similar. We talked on the short ride home and at the end, as we pulled up to my apartment, he mentioned her smelling of whiskey and that she should just go to bed.

"Yeah, I should have a whiskey and go to bed," I replied, adding "But I don't have any cola to mix it with."

"Oh you want cola?" he asked. I've got cola! After lifting the luggage out he reached into the back of his trunk and pulled a can of Coca-Cola from his private cache, insisting that I enjoy it and sleep well.

The taxi driver had just had someone do him a wrong, and he immediately forgot it and offered someone else a kindness.

And I guess that's the summary for this last leg of the trip. I saw some interesting things and met a few really kind people. The Crown & cola is nearly sipped now. And the dawn is winking in the sky. So it's time to sign off and shut down for a while. Me, not the computer.