I'm completely brain dead.

To begin at the end, I booked me a lovely single, en suite room in the Yesinn hostel on Hong Kong Island, but nearly had a panic attack wondering how I’d find it . I DID find it, and it looked lovely once I got through all the gates and lifts BUT ... (you knew there was a 'but’ coming)...

I’m not staying there.

I’ve been moved to a place called Rialto Mansions (mmm, d’you get that lovely inner city Dublin vibe?...) and I’m in the top bunk of a room with a girl from "near Canterbury", England, and my toilet is a shared toilet/shower in the common area, with a sink somewhere else.

And the wifi isn’t working. This is the first of many non-live blogs, I fear...

It’s not enormously expensive anyway, and it’s clean AND I’m tired (and the lady is back across the road in the other building), so I’ll live for four days.

I got up on the 29th at 5:45 and got an early gobus to Dublin. I’m completely fascinated by all those space age weirdy building things, past O’Connell Street, that I’ve never seen except on gobus. And the Port Tunnel. Or some tunnel. It’s so much fun. It’s like Dublin one minute, some unpopulated Dubai-wannabe the next. Apt, no?

My Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt was – unsurprisingly - delayed by an hour due to fog in Frankfurt. I discovered that the gate section I was in is actually a circle, so I exercised my legs (and the shop assistants eyes) by going round and round and round for a while, before nabbing a single seat near the gate . Ah, the small comforts of solo travel.

I dozed intermittently on that flight, and spent about five hours wandering around Frankfurt Airport (“Fraport” is what’s written on all the buses and cars and things there, but I think that’s a separate company. Still, it’s much quicker to write and say, don’t you think?), wondering what went wrong since 2007. Back then it was big and clean and full of empty reclining chairs with foot rests. Now it’s all “Under Construction” signs, green plastic and scattered, grey, moulded chairs. They didn’t even have the magazine I wanted. And I threw my Haribo down in a huff when I discovered that the cash desks were giving priority to pushy Germans and fickle Chinese (who filled up with cigarettes and booze and jumped into and out of and round every queue they could see).

I had my bag searched going into the gate for Bangkok - which meant several difficult minutes of precariously balancing small electronics on my knees as I tried to put it to rights again – and myself and a polite German sniggered at the urgent Chinese who took the call for “Business Class, small children and the disabled” to mean “GO NOW GO QUICK YOU’LL NEVER MAKE IT, IT’S LEAVING WITHOUT YOUUUUU!!!”

That flight was unsettled for several reasons, but the food was nice and I actually enjoyed my second-hand book from Galway’s Book Exchange . I did a quick circle out of and into Suvarnabhumi Airport (except for the passport control, which is the most paaaaainfully slow I’ve ever dealt with – particularly with the urgent and queue-impaired Chinese breathing down one’s neck – and sat at the Hong Kong gate trying to figure out how the wireless worked (it didn’t). I was with Cathay Pacific this time, and had (for the first time since Etihad) my own TV screen! There was yesterday’s CNN news, one episode of the Simpson's on repeat (the one where Homer challenges everyone to a duel) and the map of where we were, which is always my favourite channel – particularly when attempting to determine whether I’m flying over Iraq or Afghanistan. ;)

Hong Kong was fairly effortless – quick passport control (I can stay here for THREE MONTHS...), trolleys that separated from each other easily and – most importantly - signs everywhere. I got some money, discovered that my phone can once again receive, but not send, and made my way to Airbus A11, which was no-where near as difficult as I had worked it up to be. The city was dark and humid, and my first impression was that of taking off into outer space. My bus was smooth, quiet and cool and I was much more comfortable than on the planes. Outside, lights in the buildings were all I could see above and below me (since – to detract from the fantasy – the lights in the bus were too bright to see anything else outside properly), and they rose up too far for me to see where they ended. The man beside me said he knew some Irish people who “lived in the west long time”, and advised me to go to Central if I wanted to see Hallowe’en celebrations (he didn’t really dig the importance of Disneyland).

My hostel was an even shorter distance from the bus stop in real life than it is on the map, but there were gates and lifts and corridors and doors and buttons and phones and everything imaginable to press before you got to reception. It’s like Get Smart, I swear. Your Shangri-La ain’t got nothing on these digs, Laura my sister...

So, back the present. Andrea has just come in and reminded me of her name (and the need to bring the key with you to the sink or toilet/shower. Jackie from Saskatchewan put my Beijing woes to shame with her daring escapades around China for TWO MONTHS. Yick. And Tiffany is sort of in the US navy and definitely wearing rugby boots and socks to bed. Something to do with vampires, I think.

Or I could just be braindead.