Airborne

Stream of consciousness post, travelling over the Atlantic Ocean (yes, this very second)...
- These Lufthansa s.o.b.'s are all about getting passengers trashed. I've had three glasses of wine and a shot of cognac... and I'm in coach... and it's free.
- I sat down in my seat and looked up and saw a "Hotspot" sign. I'd read about this sort of thing, but it's an eerie thing. Maybe I should surf over to a porn site to freak out my seat-neighbors.
- A great/sad story from Luca (from Australia)... "he" is the Dave, the 2006 Australian Barista Champion:

Apparently this morning he and Peter Wolff decided to risk the hotel superauto coffee. Of course it wasn't great, but they were pretty damned impressed. So they asked where it came from and were told that apparently some Australian roastery had sent the hotel a whole bunch of sample coffee ...

... OK, so which hotel opens up stuff addressed to their guests and then runs ALL of their WBC blends through their superauto?!

Poor Dave; half of his signature drink gear smashed at the state competition, his luggage went missing for half a day, making him miss his practice session at the nationals and now this!

Can't wait to see how he performs!

Holy crap... so the hotel opened his coffee and used it!
- There's a duty-free cart that just went by with cartons and cartons of cigarettes on it... I haven't flown internationally in 12 years... I'd forgotten about dutyfree.
- Looking forward to seeing everyone in Bern... looking forward to coffee-touring around Italy. This is a dream come true.
- When I got on the plane, there was a woman with her boob hanging out of her shirt. She was getting ready to breastfeed, but jeezus-kriest, she's in full-view of everyone getting on the plane. I love the European mentality.
- The trip starts at SCAE Bern 2006 and ends at Sant'Eustachio Cafè in Rome.
- I'm scheduled to emcee the first half of both first-round days, and the finals (and awards ceremony). The biggest challenge of emceeing the WBC (which I experienced last year in Seattle as well) is learning to pronounce the competitors' names. What's funny is that sometimes, it's more helpful for me to write-out the competitor's name phoenetically in Korean.

Europe... here I come!