Early Start

After my walk around town yesterday, I woke up charged. Full of beans this morning as I head down for breakfast. I then found out that I was a tad too early. The breakfast hall was only opened at 7. So, I enjoyed the free wifi instead before heading off to join the 8 am rush hour into the Exhibition Center.

It was just after the first series of talk when I drafted this entry. In severe need of coffee, but to be honest the speakers has been very good so far. As you can see from my notebook, it was getting a bit intense although disappointingly, most of the data were already presented 6 months ago at the American meeting. They ended up by updating what was available, but nothing earth-shattering were announced so far.

After this trip, I was invited to give a local update on the day of my birthday. The topic was multiple myeloma and I managed to get the details for my talk within the first session. I can now enjoy the test of the conference without really having much pressure.

Walk into Town

After lunch, I took the conference bag - all 2.5kg of them - back to my hotel room, FaceTime Anita and the boys before heading back out. Destination, Central London.

From Canary Wharf, I took the Jubilee Line - in Zone 2 - straight to Bond Street, changed to Central Line to Queensway and had lunch at one of the kebab house there. Just like the good old student days. There, I heard in the background a lady talking to her children in Malay. Sure enough, you would more than likely bump into Malaysians around here, being one of the hub for Halal food. I chatted with the husband later on, and they had been here for almost 2 weeks and would be flying home tomorrow evening. A nice school holiday treat foe their children I must say.

After lunch, I went to Whiteley's, where my favourite cinema from the student time stood. It has since changed company but it was still going strong. After lingering around for a while, I doubled back to Central Lie alighting at Oxford Circus, where I really started my journey. It was a nice sunny day and without the breeze, it was warm enough that I had to lose my jacket.

I had to make a confession here, amongst the first shop I walked into was the Apple Store, located at Regent Street. We were talking about a proper shop here, not the pretenders like Machine back home. I'll blog about that later maybe.

I walked further down towards Covent Garden where I got most of the shopping done for the stuffs to take back home. mainly shirts and bits for the boys. I stopped over at the Haagen Dasz for coffee, where during my student days, I went usually on the final night before returning to school with my friends, to more or less drawn our sorrow. None of us were really looking forward to return to our boarding house especially after a couple of weeks away, having a great time in London.

That was actually the first half of what I did, I after that, I returned to Marble Arch to further remember my student days, as well as dinner at Edgwere Road.

Day 1

So, the first order of business today was to get the registration out of the way. Luckily, after woken up in the middle of the night last night, I was able to get back to sleep after a couple of hours. Woke up this morning, and was full of energy. Unpacked, got the ironing done, answered the emails and headed down for breakfast.

After congregating with the rest of the group, we took a cab to the exhibition centre, 10 minutes away.

The exhibition centre, dubbed the ExCel, was a typical converted warehouse building, impressively big and was more than suitable as a venue with its huge hangar-like hall. Walking from one hall to another took a good 5-10 minutes, but the good thing was everything was under one roof and we did not need to go outdoors at hall.

The registration included discount cards for travel to Central London, as well as a delegate bag which included the abstract book which weighed easily 2 kg. It has a companion CD ROM dual as well, so the 2 kg documentation package would head straight to the bin.

The rest of today would be filled with satellite symposium. I planned to stay until luck, before heading back to the hotel to leave the bags and Mac Air. I would then head to Central London to do some shopping as I was not able to yesterday or the rest of the week. Will blog later then.

And yes, we get free fast Internet at the Conference Center as well!

Boarding soon

At KLIA now, and just crossed over to the Satellite Terminal. Grabbed a sandwich at O'Briens and off I went utilising the free wifi here. It was only available for 2 hours though before your address is blocked. Connection rather sluggish and start-stop, and I ended up using my iPhone for connections.

While I settled down, the other people in my group started to show up. I had to have the coffee as it was pretty clear that I would probably fall asleep soon. That was good since I was hoping to be able to sleep all the way to Heathrow. It should be early morning when I touched down, and I couldn't afford to fall asleep then. I planned to go see the town on the day. Will write when I touched down and have an Internet connection. Bon voyage!

First Entry

Got my luggage checked in. Plus the big jacket of course as I did not really want to take any chances as far as the weather was concerned. Stepping into the KLIA Express with just a 1.5kg sling bag was should I say, liberating. iPhone in arm, tuned to some podcast, I began chirping away on the phone, with this first entry of the journey.

I realised that I may be a tad too early, but I prefer to get the bags sorted out and just chill out later. Maybe settled in at one of the cafes - hmm! Better check how many ringgits I have left in my wallet. No Golden Lounge this time I'm afraid!

I decided that I would be sleeping the whole journey this time around. At least the first day would be a whole day of chilling. Maybe I would take the tube into Central London and reminisce about the days there when I was a student! So watch this space!