Flight to France

[aggienaut]

   Hello from Paris, France.

   I will be attending the world beekeeping conference in Istanbul and due to the vagaries of airline
pricing I am taking a very convoluted route there and back. So now I'm in France.

   Departed Melbourne Sunday after I believe not quite even two weeks back. The equinox and therefore beginning of Spring (by my reckoning anyway -- Australians are barbaric heathens who just consider the season to change on the first of every third month), which, normally I don't travel much during Spring and Summer because the beekeeping season is on, but hey this conference is Kinda A Big Deal.


And now another episode of...
In Flight Movie Reviews!
   I've watched just about everything worth watching and Etihad has an unusually bad selection (and a huge amount of auto playing advertisements! I remarked on this last time but it bears commenting again, I thought you were supposed to be classy Etihad!) so this is really down to scraping the bottom of the barrel for crumbs.

X-Files Season 10 - I've had to turn to the "TV Shows" section of the in flight entertainment I've gotten that desperate. Anyway this is the new season of X Files after something like a ten year hiatus! Ah the memories of watching that intro (they didn't change it!) back in high school! Of the three episodes I thought the first one seemed a bit more there's-very-definitely-a-alien-related-government-conspiracy than I think I remember there being but then again I'm not sure how accurate my memory is. Episode 2 was good and a bit in a different direction, glad they're starting out running through the paces. And Episode 3 was really quite funny and I really liked it. Not to give away any spoilers but it was in the strange small town happenings / cryptids / monsters category.

Arthur: Legend of the Sword: I really didn't even want to watch this the trailers had looked ridiculous but eventually during the 14th hour of the flight or so I gave in because I do really like Arthurian stuff and thought I'd at least have a look at it, and.... it's utterly ridiculous!!! Like. WTF. It seems to take place in a not-England fantasy land except London is there. There are giant (giant!!) elephants with castles on their backs, the bad guys have an army of pleather-clad ninjas, for some reason all references to druids have been replaced with "mages" lest any semblance of the actual historic context seep through and just... really ridiculous. I don't have enough internet access just now nor quite the interest to look at its critical reviews but I hope it got the shellacking it deserved. I only got about halfway through before in-flight entertainment shut off (again, WTF Etihad, the entertainment system doesn't work until you're at cruising altitude and shuts down again as descent begins, leaving us sans entertainment for a good forty minutes at the beginning and end for no clear reason), and I do not feel any need to watch the rest of this film whose underlying idea seems to simply be "so we take a few key words from the story of king arthur and just cobble together from there a super CGI heavy fantasy drama from the cheapest script writer we can find."


   Will post about Paris itself in another entry.

Comments

[mexpatriot.livejournal.com]

And yeah pretty annoying when they keep interrupting for announcements. Especially when they interrupt your movie for an announcement. Give you another 10 seconds of movie watching before the interruption comes back again in another language.

It's especially annoying when you speak both languages.

I really loath air travel. I wish there were trains everywhere. I've seen flights where you can sleep in a bed. Not sure where. Cathay Pacific? Singapore? Anyway, that is probably way out of my price range.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

I wish I had time to take trans-atlantic boats, I think that would be really fun. Obviously there's plenty of cruise lines available today but the idea of taking a luxury cruise doesn't really appeal to me, its more the old timey just taking a boat to get somewhere idea I like

[mexpatriot.livejournal.com]

Yep! Right on! If you find out about how to take a non-cruise ship across the Pacific or Atlantic, lemme know, because that is much better for me.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Apparently you CAN take passage on container ships! I heard this somewhere and looked into it a bit. I think you make arrangements through the shipping company. I always thought it would be kind of neat, though it'll take like two or three weeks to get where you're going and at the room and board cost it actually I think ends up costing about the same.

[mexpatriot.livejournal.com]

Costs the same as air travel? That would be great! I don't care about the time, how long it takes. Specifically, I want a to take a ship from the West Coast of the Americas to Kolkata (Calcutta). Is this doable? How much would that cost? How long?

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Check out this page! It has a list of travel agencies that special in arranging travel on freighters, as well as other information! (:

[mexpatriot.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this!