Friday 2019_01_25

Going home 😦

It took me until abut 3 am to pack. Checkout this morning was smooth and painless. I then sat in the hotel bar/restaurant until Renato arrived to take me to the airport. On the way, and over a coffee at the airport, we talked about research philosophies, the future of Napier and USP’s collaboration, costs of and accessibility to higher education in Brazil and Scotland and much else.

On the plane I wrote up notes from Thursday and Friday, and slept maybe three hours.

Saturday 2019_01_26

I arrived in Frankfurt just about on time, found somewhere conducive to Bruce-thought and had a stuttery Skype conversation (perhaps we shouldn’t have tried to video-call) with someone who has been very involved PB in Porto Alegre. She concurred with quite a few of the barriers to effective PB others have mentioned, but demurred from others. So I will need to do some weighing up as I write up. She is keen to be involved with our project, so despite my jet-lag I think this was a success.

My flight onwards to München was uneventful – I slept from just after take-off until the wheels hit the tarmac. I’ve now been moping around terminal 2 for about 6 hours. (My flight to Edinburgh is at 11am tomorrow.

Something always goes wrong with travel. In this case, fortunately it happened on the return leg. I’ve lost the boarding cards for my first two flights, and with them my baggage receipt. I hadn’t realised until I got to the Eurowings counter to paranoia-check whether my hold-bag would go straight to Edinburgh. It took a couple of phone-calls by the Eurowings staffer to find my baggage receipt number. That’s now written on my boarding card for the final flight, is in my iCalendar (so on all my devices). I’ve also just found there is a Hans im Glück here, so I’m off to put some calories into my system.

Tschüss!