Helen and I arrived back from New York to utter chaos at Heathrow. The British had arrested a bunch of people planning to blow up flights en route to the US, and as a consequence airports across the country were on high alert. People trying to fly out of Heathrow had been let through to the departure lounge after checking in all their carry-on luggage. Most of the outgoing flights were subsequently cancelled, so everyone was forced to go back out through immigration again. Consequently the queue at immigration snaked across most of the airport. I was quite surprised that it only took us an hour and a half or so to clear immigration. This was despite flying on emergency passports, as I had lost our passports in New York, along with my new MacBook, my video ipod, and my PSP *sigh* Oh well, all technology should be disposable, neh?

So I’m back to using my old 17″ powerbook again, and my old iPod. I’ve tried to cheer myself up by buying an external La Clie 1Terabyte drive… you know what? It worked!

We had a fantastic time in New York. It’s been 10 years since we lived in an apartment on West 60th and the city has changed quite a bit, besides the obvious lack of the twin towers. For some reason it didn’t seem quite as high octane as I remember it. Maybe that’s because I live in London now, so my standards for intensity has gone up quite a bit. I love all the high buildings littering the place. Central Park is also a wonderful thing to have plonked in the middle of your city. I also remember New Yorkers as being a lot ruder. Everyone we met was very nice and polite.

Helen and I have just finishing up a two-week trip to Australia. Unfortunately we couldn’t see all the people we wanted to see because it was such a whirlwind trip. We stopped off in Tokyo for a night and went out with our friends for dinner. Tim and Anna showed us a current phenomenon in Tokyo at the tiny expat bars, which is loud 80’s music, photos of posing expats plastered over the walls, and lots of very drunk expats boisterously working their way to horizontal in the bar itself. We adjourned for some very tasty mojito cocktails at the Grand Hyatt in Rapongi. This was actually where we were staying, and very nice it was too! The room had one of those deep Japanese-style baths, and two showers. We certainly felt squeaky clean when we explored Tokyo.

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Yesterday (Tuesday) morning I went in to have Lasik eye surgery on my eye. It was a little freaky. Fortunately the freakiness didn’t last too long, and I walked out about an hour later a bit shakey and with foggy but clearer eye-sight. Helen helped me to walk home, and as I walked the anesthetic drops in my eyes wore off, and my eyes both hurt and started streaming with tears. I got home and took some asprin and lay in bed and listened to an audio book on my iPod.

My eyes started feeling a lot better yesterday evening, and today I feel almost completely normal (only with 20-20 vision!). I’m still a little worried of my eyes getting infected or something, but I am putting in my eyedrops regularly (anti-inflamitories and anti-bactarials). Tomorrow I’m going back in to work, and I’m blown away by how fast this whole process was. I reckon that if you told someone 10 years ago that they would be able to correct their myopia and be back to normal(-ish) within 48 hours, they wouldn’t have believed it.