www.nickhodge.com

A travelog in the mak­ing: Jour­neys in 2005

A travelog from his­tory: Two Weeks in India

Presently in Shang­hai, China. Alan Rosen­feld, late of the Adobe Pacific team — now in Adobe UK is here. Good to catch up with old friends in new places.

It’s offi­cial. What do you do when you have a spare 100,000 Qantas Freaky Flier points, a hol­i­day win­dow in May and a love for Lost in Trans­la­tion? That’s right. This year the Hodge fam­ily is off to Tokyo for a week. Look out, Aki­habara and Yodo­bashi Camera!

Lit­eral Ground­hog Day in New Zealand.

Fly to Auck­land on 6.30pm flight Monday even­ing. Arrive at hotel at 12:45am. Up and awake at 6:00am for a 12 hour day of Acrobat 7.0 Road­show. Mid-afternoon, the Sky­city Con­ven­tion Centre is evac­u­ated after our room starts to fill with water and the fire alarms sound.

To the air­port, and attempt to be smart by catch­ing a 6:00pm flight to Wel­ling­ton. Take off OK, and almost arrive on Wel­ling­ton air­port. About 50m from the ground, land­ing is abor­ted due to weather and we’re off back to Auckland.

Arrive Auck­land 8:15pm, and placed on a res­ched­uled flight to Wel­ling­ton. Within 10 minutes, this flight is can­celled too. We’re groun­ded in Auck­land until the morning.

After some scram­bling, we find a hotel (of sorts) and check in at 10:30pm. After 2.5 hours of email and reports, sleep for 4 hours and awake at 5:30am for an 8:00am flight to Wellington.

At the air­port, and the 7:00am flight to Wel­ling­ton is still wait­ing for weather clear­ance in Wel­ling­ton. By 8:00am, we find out Wel­ling­ton air­port is closed until at least 4:00pm. Wel­ling­ton this New Zea­l­and trip is cancelled.

Three days, about 9 hours sleep.

Oh the glam­or­ous life in the Jet-set.

Sydney/Auckland/Sydney/Singapore/Sydney

Tim Cole goes to Eden

New faces at Adobe in Sydney: Mark Szulc

Where has Nick been in the most recent two months? 70 Days, 7 Countries

Within the short period of 70 days, I visit at least 7 cit­ies in Asia and Europe. This is a spe­cial textlog and imagelog of the experience.

I have always been inter­ested in planes — grow­ing up just over the road from Australia’s naval air sta­tion in Nowra to passing the interest on to Liam. It is there­fore aus­pi­cious that the 100^th anniversary of powered flight by the Wright Broth­ers is now. Hav­ing flown over 40,000 kms in 2 months, maybe this bless­ing is mixed at best.

Hello from cold Korea. Well, only about 0 degrees C. Not too cold yet. This pic­ture is from the Korean War Memorial. The tank, for those inter­ested, is an early Korean War era Sher­man out­side the memorial in Seoul.

Get­ting around Seoul is easy: just use the sub­way. Don’t feel embar­rased using a sub­way map, try­ing to determ­ine where you are. Even the loc­als get lost. I had two kind people ask me if I needed help. Very friendly people. Also very polite: whilst there is a small com­mu­nic­a­tions gap, you can get your mes­sage across. Pro­nun­ci­ations of some words still escape me! Vis­ited Tech­noM­all: its a 10 story build­ing full of stores selling elec­tronic stuff. Didn’t spend too much.

A big thanks to Lonely Planet for a great Seoul guide.