Tuesday 24.11.2015

My day started with buying orange juice from the local supermarket Coles. Shops are open already after 7 in the morning and the supermarket is open until very late (10ish or so). I knew that alcohol is sold in separate shops in Australia, but I thought it would be like in Finland: meaning that beer is available at supermarkets, but other alcoholic drinks at separate shops. Here all alcoholic drinks are sold in separate shops. This story doesn’t matter anything, I am just saying. I was just after some orange juice, honestly :-)

We arrived to the airfield with the contest director Adam about 8 o’clock. Early time is ok, since the sun wakes me up and that’s why it’s difficult to sleep longer than 7 in the morning. In Finland I would sleep much longer during summer, even the sun rises there earlier. Quite many of European people have told me that they haven’t been able to sleep longer than 6 o’clock here, which is exactly what happened to me on my first days of this trip. Also that’s exactly what those German guys said who shared the Airport Shuttle from Sydney to the airport. So waking up (too) early sounds quite common.

The briefing was for the first time in the hangar today, and I think it worked pretty ok even it was the first time. There aren’t fancy decorations or curtains on the wall, but Adam told that we will have a stage there. Surprisingly the temperature wasn’t too bad. Best part of the briefing was Terry demonstrating what kind of signals you should do for the tow plane if you are running the wing tip. He had really great moves :-D Too bad that I wasn’t fast enough to catch it on video.

We had good laugh with Wojtek when he was folding A4 papers… let me tell a little bit of background: each team has their own pigeon hole for tasks, weather sheets etc. in the hangar. The pigeon hole is marked with this folded A4, which has the name of the country on it. Wojtek’s clever folding system is meant to lift up the documents on top of it, so the documents are easy to pick up. And why we laughed? Because this paper folding is very good example of what kind of skills are required for arranging competitions, nothing too overwhelming, just normal office skills. Jess added that you need to also know how to get the copy machine working. Yep, you need to know copy machine’s soft spot and kick that with right angle.

The day was filled with planning coming days and the routines on facebook, Flickr and how I will use the website during the event. Fortunately I found a possibility to code a little bit of my own things, so I found a way to make the site meet our requirements better. In the evening I waited again for the Europe to wake up, but I have to wait until the morning what decision/ideas the sgp.aero-guys will have.

Dinner was chicken skewers, potato and bacon salad, feta salad and bread. I left with a full stomach.