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Randomness #1: Turns out we were (involuntarily) following the traces of Sigourney Weaver last weekend, who happened to be at the Mighty Mighty and “Lanes”-bowling wednesday and thursday (we went friday and saturday) – see article in the Dominion Post. From now on, I’ll stalk celebrities with web 2.0 power: The local mapping service “Zoomin” actually has a Wellington Celeb Vista group which maps celebrity sightings haha.

Randomness #2: I could’ve sworn I’ve seen Reiner, an ex-workmate from german Scholz & Volkmer the other day at J.J.Murphy’s in Wellington. Haven’t seen him in three years, and wasn’t entirely sure it was him, him being uncommonly bearded and slightly broader face. So I walked past after an brief irritated look. Afterwards I looked him up on various social networks, no mention of Wellington-travel etc. Now I just got an email from another ex-workmate Diana, apparently she has seen him down south on the Abel Tasman track as well – what the… The world is surely a small place.

A quick uncoherent summary of what I’m up to down under: Last week I met Diana, an ex-workmate from good ol’ Scholz & Volkmer. She’s travelling through Ozzie and NZ with her friend Madleen, and had a two-day stop in Wellington. We didn’t manage to meet for over two years, so found it quite funny to sip a coffee on the other end of the globe :)

Concerning work, I’m pretty much fulltime managing and developing for an US-based client doing a Google maps mashup, helping to get the awesome Silverstripe 2.2 release out of the door, and coordinating translators for localization of the interface. I’m also having a closer look at agile development, a methodology which helps us to deliver great projects – and is exactly the stuff that would’ve been helpful to learn during my studies hehe.

Today I’ve had a bike trip to the Wellington Wind Turbine, which towers in the “hinterland” of Wellington. It took some sweat getting up there, and I’ll definetly won’t feel my legs tomorrow, but it was well worth the effort: A stunning 360 degree view of the harbor area, surrounding bays and even the Marlborough Sounds (northern tip of the south island). Check out the panorama-shot (requires Apple Quicktime)

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One of the few practical side-effects about New Zealand being on the other end of the world is that you inevitably cross a whole lot of countries on your way. This meant that an “around-the-world” flight with several stopovers was only slightly more expensive than going to Wellington non-stop (1650€ vs 1400€). So there I was, virtually pointing the finger at my spinning globe in Google Earth, looking for interesting stopovers. Although I’m a bit sceptical about high-densitiy areas, the decision fell on Japan – in specific, Osaka. With a whopping 19mio people living in the greater area, this should prove some drastic change from my 750 souls hometown.

I flew into Kansai Aiport, which is essentially a gigantic artificial island 50km away from the city. First task there: Getting paper-money from my visa. Now, you have to know that I’m bad at maths. I love my calculator-widget. Well, the currency-conversion from euros is pretty strange (1:160), so I horribily miscalculated how much money I would need for my two days stopover. I’ve changed over 1000€, about ten times of what I actually needed – and will probably loose a good chunk just changing back to dollars. Kids, learning maths can really pay sometimes! ;)

This shouldn’t be the last miscalculation for the day: I was being thrown in exactly the opposite day/night-cycle, so ended up sleeping 16h straight from midday till the next morning. After rigorously studying the subway-plan (thankfully with english translations!), I’ve endeavoured into the city. In Osaka you have to look closely to find anything that qualifies for old history, its mostly concrete and advertisements – quite different from my last city visit to Berlin, where you have historical sites all over the place. Tucked away between highways and skyscrapers you’ll find the impenetrable Osaka Castle – a fortress built to withstand every invasion, with massive 20m stone-walls and several defensive rings.

I found it interesting that you can find lots of references to Japans “golden ages” in the middle of the last millenium, but will rarely come across a mention of the second world war. You certainly would expect some information in the Osaka Museum of History, a skyscraper with 9 floors space. The only reference I could find was a map of the fire-bombings by the US in 1945, accompanied with about three sentences of indecipherable kanji (english translations at tourist attractions are a bit sparse) (turns out there’s a Peace Centre tucked away somewhere). Second day was dedicated to the more modern aspects of japanese lifestyle: eating and gadget-hunting! Both not an easy task if you don’t understand the most basic descriptions in kanji (the japanese character-set). I’ve made it a bit of a hobby to guess what products are advertised on the subway billboards (shows you how much graphic design is still dependent on context/textual information). For eating, it really helped that most restaurants have a (scaringly lifelike) plastic-representation of all meals in a showcase – its just a matter of pointing at the right stuff.

So after two days of pretty mild culture-clashes and lots of new impressions, I was finding myself back on the airport (with 1.7km the longest terminal on the planet). Now, after mostly being the only non-Japanese person wherever I went (Japan only has 2% foreigners) halfway across both my known ends of the world, I didn’t particularly watch out for a lot of familiar faces. You can imagine my surprise when I met Conor in my boarding-lounge (he’s been a client of Silverstripe and we quickly made friends). Actually he was on the same plane, sitting two rows in front of me on the same seat-position – what are the odds?! (being a math-looser, I won’t be able to give you an accurate answer to this…). After another 12h of flight I was finally back in New Zealand last Saturday, and basically went right back to my “old life” (welcome drinks on the weekends, starting work on Mondays). All feeling a bit like a strange deja-vú at the moment, but I’m really enjoying to be back!

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