Phrooah. Waking up for the past two mornings to write that damned story I’ve owed my editor since Monday isn’t what I was expecting. But, two hours each for the last two days have paid off, and I’m done! Am mighty impressed with myself, mainly because I’ve never known myself to wake to work (rather, to get up willingly at all) and because I have very, very low expectations of myself.

It’s been impossible to get any real work done over the past couple of nights, because after the three-hour dinner (starting at eight or nine o’clock) is over, you’re wiped out from the day’s events and all the wine you’ve absent-mindedly consumed.

As some of you may have noticed, I finally decided to buy a pro account on Flickr, because the thought of manually organising my pictures, especially the recent travel ones, proved too scary a thought for someone with as short an attention span as me. Also, everyone seems to have one these days, and I desperately seek approval from all you cool people.

Been having rather interesting talks with Benjamin, who writes for TechPlanet Asia, who, more than me, is mucho techie nerd, and I’m awed by his visions of a new web and the media’s evolutions with it. He’s just launched Scoop Asia, so good luck to him and it sounds like a valiant mission.

When I get the chance later, I’ll post pictures of yesterday’s event. Probably, the highlight for many of the journalists was meeting with Karl Erik Stenfors, a “zChampion”, which is essentially a new-agey term for people who, uh, champion the cause of the IBM zSeries servers. It was great meeting him, and he has such incredible passion for his mainframes—to put things in perspective, he’s been around since the first IBM 360 mainframe back in the ’60s, and he showed us one of the monsters at the IBM museum, where he was required to manually flick, up and down, the binary input switches. Screen? Keyboard? What?

He also looks a little like Christopher Lloyd’s Doc Brown in Back to the Future, which is fitting, in strange irony.

Update: Here he is!

Because Internet connectivity is a bloody rip-off, and means either a lightning, panicked scramble with my browser or a breezy, hair-pulling session in front of a keyboard laid out in French encoding, I’m going to do all writing offline, before logging on to post everything in a flood.

A two-hour walk around Montpellier reveals a charming town which I’m told is a University town. That might explain the majority of the passersby being youths. I got approached thrice in the two hours I was walking around by a couple of them asking for money. Though I don’t speak French, the action of rubbing your forefinger and thumb together, combined with a pitiful look are pretty universal I guess. So was my apologetic shake of the head.

I’ll be surprised if I don’t get a sunburn from here. The sun was bearing down for the most part, and though alleys and lanes inbetween the buildings were tight, the sun still shone straight through. The roads seem almost identical, with most of them running together to meet at a central, large, open space where several big malls are.

Mostly, people don’t seem to speak much English. Either that, or they’re faking it. I’ve been warned by too many people about that, and in typical fashion, have gone the extra mile by developing a paranoia about it. (Was it just me or did people seem miffed that I was forcing them to respond in English?)

After dinner, a walk back to the hotel (it’s true—people really do walk everywhere here) met with tons of excited French milling about just, from what I see, doing nothing other than standing together in a mass in the square. Turns out France beat Spain 3-1 at a World Cup match. I’ll post the videos of the people later.

Hello from France, or Montpellier, to be exact. Surprisingly, in spite of this blog usually taking first priority for me, I was unable to write earlier and make one of those Oh-I’m-So-Excited-I’m-Going-to-France type posts, mainly due to general incompetence and sloppiness with regards to owing my editor a couple of stories, and the mad, mad rush over the weekend to write them and pack for the trip.

And I still owe him another, which I promised to write within the next two days. Finger-crossing’s never really worked for me, unfortunately, but trust me when I say mine are crossed fairly tightly anyway.

Well, this post would be fine and whimsical and all excited, if not for the fact that a big downer—even before setting foot out of Singapore—was my losing my mobile phone in the lounge toilet. [Insert wail and/or expletive here]

Clearly, I’m not meant for luxury, because I’d theoretically never have lost my phone if I had taken the economy flight, instead. But no, I had to go into that all-steel toilet with its dim, calming lighting and leave my metallic-silver phone on the counter.

I’m not holding my breath for anyone to return it, in spite of my calling the lounge staff within 45 minutes of misplacing it. Perhaps I sped up the process by pointing them straight to my phone, even. How friggin’ depressing.

Though I thought I was sufficiently over it, I remember dreaming about my phone on the red-eye flight. Pathetic, isn’t it?

Altogether, it’s taken me exactly 24 hours to get here. That’s right—an entire day. Blame it on the five-hour transit from Paris to get here, on the two-hour delay of that flight, making it seven hours, the baggage getting delayed for another hour…Astounding, for what I thought would be a rather straightforward affair. Perhaps I’ve been spoilt by Changi’s efficiency.

I had no idea I was that addicted to my mobile phone, because I found myself scouring the airport for public phones and Internet terminals, in order to get some semblance of connectivity back home. I bought an international calling card, which calls most places I can think of. Except Singapore. Credit card-calling didn’t work either; the operator said that Singapore wasn’t one of the destinations they called. That’s right. Somehow, in the midst of our advancement in the World, the French still think we’re in China.

So anyway, I’m undecided whether it’s that the French really are rude, or it’s just their manner. Or if, heaven forbid, they are racsist. Even the flight stewardesses treat you with cold indifference, and behave almost as if you ought to be going down on your hands and knees thanking God that you had the privilege of being served by them. I don’t know if they treated the passengers in First Class better, but I thought Business shouldn’t have been as shabby.

Oh and thank you Air France, for your wide choice of FIVE “on demand” movies, three of which were in French.

(Another journalist just called to say that she’s at a café next to the hotel, and it’s 1€/hour of Internet connectivity. I try not to think about the 10€/hour that I’m on now—which could ironically run out as I speak.)

So far, I have very little else to say about France itself, given that I’ve only seen the inside of two airports here till now. And this hotel that I’m in, of course. More after the walk that I’ll take, once I get this posted.

Update: Great. I spoke too soon. The connection did drop as I wrote this, so I shall go and get this posted at the aforementioned café.

Further update: Back in the hotel now, because wi-fi is completely unknown here. At least unknown outside of the hotel. The café with the cheap Internet access was equipped with rows of terminals, but all the keyboards were in French layout, and that means that “q” is “a” and “z” is “w” and so on. I tried, desperately and rather stupidly to retype this entry from my laptop screen, but it proved completely impossible. So it’s back to expensive connection for me.