Diary of an emigrant

Thursday, February 15, 2007

Spare me.


There surely can be nothing quite as sad and worthless as a grown adult who, authoring their own misfortunes, is unable to take responsibility for their actions and uses all their precious time blaming others, until - becoming so bitter and twisted they are unable to recognise friend from foe, or truth from fiction - they finally succeed against all odds in fulfilling their own mean and nasty little prophesies.

Saturday, February 10, 2007

House sold...?

We have agreed the sale of the house. The buyers were here today to measure things up, and we had a good chat. They're very nice, and I hope they enjoy the house as much as we have done. We agreed a completion date of 30th April, and our target date for the flights is the second week in June. They suggested we could use the garage between 1st May and when we go away, if we need it. This could be really useful, although we'll be trying to sell or ship everything prior to the end of April.

Monday, February 05, 2007

Guess I've misunderestimated the flight times

Our idea of driving 1400 miles down to Lisbon and hopping over to Brazil on the short flight to Salvador has been scuppered! The times they publish for the flight are local times, meaning it looks like it's just a 4-hour dash, whereas* it's actually an 8 hour slog. Couple this with the fact that the shortest internal flight from Salvador to Manaus is 9 HOURS (at least without changing planes). Unfortunately the flight just crawls up the Brazilian coast, stopping at just about anything that looks remotely like an airfield. I did it once before, when I was young and knew no better, but now? Ha - I don't think so. The flight times from Heathrow would be 10 hours to Sao Paulo, then 5 hours to Manaus. To do about 70% of the distance (Lisbon - Salvador - Manaus) is going to take 17. Bad joke.

*I know this is nothing to do with Brazil, but I've been reading a lot of US posts recently, and I've noticed that a lot of Americans seem to think that the word "whereas" means "although". You know, like "Whereas I can't grasp the general principles of English, I don't care." Obviously the President's illegibility is catching on.