28, humid, and full of Japanese people is how I’d describe Honolulu airport right now. It definitely makes me miss summer and it’ll be amazing to get back to Sydney just in time for it. I think it’s pretty amazing to catch a night flight out of Sydney, go to sleep and wake up in another country. Sure it feels a bit yuck as soon as you leave the plane in pants and a hoodie, but thats really just my fault. So this time around, and its been a very long time since I went overseas, I’m heading to San Francisco as a first stop for a week.
I’ve got a conference lined up on my first day – Graph Connect 2014. I’m starting to get excited about it, but unfortunately I haven’t had the time to create a mock project to play with. It’ll revolve primarily around Neo4J. I’ll hopefully do a few posts of the sessions I’m in.
I’ve then got a week of dance events on that I’ve found online. I’m hoping to pick up a few new things and possibly try to understand the differences between east coast swing, west coast swing, lindy hop and rock n roll – and then tie it all back to what I do back in Sydney. I’ll miss the Verdi Club on the Tuesday as I’ll be arriving that night, but then there is Cats Corner on Wednesday night, 9:20 on Thursday night, a college football match on Friday, Zombie Prom on Saturday night, a couple of day time swing events over that weekend (Lindy in the Park and Lindy on Sproul) and Swing or Nothing on Monday night. The main calendar for San Francisco seems to be LindyList.com, SFLindy.com, and a reddit post.
So I’ve just activated my US SIM card from SimCorner. Basically its an international prepaid SIM card which you pay for back in Australia (or anywhere I’m assuming), let them know when you’ll be in the US, and the SIM will be activated when you arrive and deactivated when you leave. The main reason why I chose them was that they did have a promotion on ozBargain and so for $50 I have 5 gigs of data and unlimited text messages internationally. It’ll on last for 30 days, after which time I can top it up. I realise I’m on a holiday and shouldn’t really be online that much to use 5 gigs of data, but its the convenience of it all. I did have a hiccup with the SIM card arriving – having paid for express post and it supposedly being delivered on the day I left, it was “delivered” as per the tracking but I never received it. The support team arranged for a SIM card to be available at the Sydney Airport kiosk to be picked up which was very much appreciated.
I hope your day was as interesting as this blog post… =)