No news yet from the airline company KLM concerning our flight home but according to their web page there are some flights scheduled between Hong Kong and Amsterdam starting tomorrow. As me, Bato and Daniel are on KLM’s waiting list we keep our hopes up and try to make the best of the situation. As I mentioned in my former blog post we have now moved the CeLeKT command center to a guest house at the National Cheng Kung University in Tainan, located about an hour away from Kaohsiung by train. Here we have had the opportunity to meet up with professor Ray Huang’s students to exchange current research interests for possible future collaboration. Provided we cannot go home earlier we will follow up our discussions with a seminar on Friday morning.

Today most of us decided to get some well deserved rest during the early hours to get back on track after many stressful days. I for one woke up an hour or so before lunchtime, during which Prof. Gwo-Jen Hwang was so kind to take us to dinner at a traditional Japanese restaurant. I have never had any good raw fish before but this was delicious!

After that lovely meal we have been hanging out at the guest house to get some work done. I can’t say I was very productive; I was very tired after lunch as I am suffering from a soar throat so I slept for some hours. Anyhow, looking forward to a new day tomorrow, one day closer to travel home.

Okay so we’re stuck in Taiwan for now because of that stupid volcano on Iceland. We were supposed to travel home yesterday but when we went to the airport the lady in the counter refused to let us travel to Hong Kong. Dragonair had received a fax from KLM with our names on it saying that we had to stay in Kaohsiung for now as there were no accommodation available in Hong Kong. At the time we were quite stressed and worried, but considering the situation in Hong Kong right now, where people are sleeping all over the airport, we obviously are far better off here in Kaohsiung.

After we had calmed down a bit, realising that there was nothing we could do about the situation at the time, we decided to go out and eat. We ended up at a cool local restaurant with good food and nice people. In some sense they were almost too nice, offering alcoholic shots with unknown contents. From there there only was one way to go really: to the pub. First we went to a Budweiser bar, which was nice, but we took a wise decision after a while and moved on to the renowned blue bar next to the Lees hotel (where Didac and Bato partied hard a couple of days before). The second floor in the blue bar had a live band who really kicked ass, performing songs like Carrie by Europe and Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen. I must admit that my throat has been sore from singing along loud with the band, and that I have been consuming several painkillers throughout the day to mend my headache.

Today we have been in contact with KLM and our travel agency in Sweden, after which the trip home has been rescheduled to the first of May. Which kind of sucks as I think it will take some time for my baby girl back home to remember me after being away for so long. :’( A bit comforting is that we are on KLM’s waiting list, so hopefully we can catch an earlier flight provided that someone puts a giant cork into the volcano to make it stop spewing out stuff. In order to limit our expenses we will travel to colleagues at a nearby university, staying at the university guest house for a couple of days. A big thank you for helping us out in this mess. Now it is time for some hours of sleep, nn!