Zurich

Last Friday I was in Zurich - one of our partner airports is Flughafen Zürich, and a visit was arranged so we (there were three on the trip) could see first hand how the airport actually works. It was a very useful trip from a work point of view - I have a much better understanding of the problems that we're working on, we have a couple of new problems that might be interesting to solve, and we have seen the people there in person so it'll be much easier to share data and ask questions remotely from now on.

The trip there was quite "interesting". In short, all these things happened:

• flight out was overbooked and we got bumped on to a later flight, so several hours to kill at Edinburgh airport
• just missed bus to hotel so needed to get taxi there
• one of our group was almost unable to check in at hotel as they wanted our booking reference number, they didn't have a printed copy, and that's the one day when the university email system wasn't working well enough to retrieve it
• taxi didn't appear when ordered at airport - cue most animated conversation in German I've ever seen between hotel manager and taxi company, followed by scariest taxi ride ever (and I've been in an Italian taxi)
• lengthy question session by UK Border people for one of our group
• burst tyre five minutes from my house in Stirling

Still, we got there and back in one piece, and I did very briefly manage a quick trek into the centre of Zurich while waiting for the return flight. Here is some Swiss scenery:

Lake Zurich

PS: I'm told that Naomi answered "Zurich" to the question "where's your daddy today?" :-)

PPS: I'm quite entertained that this can be classed as a "day trip"!