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The past few days have been great. I stayed an extra night in Prague after Nate left to meet up with his gf in Dublin, which allowed me to experience a different part of the city: Wenceslas Square. Saturday's highlight was seeing a classical guitar duo perform in a small chapel near the Charles Bridge. Their performance was very very impressive. It's nearly impossible to over-emphasize how awesome Prague is...there's so much to do and so much amazing stuff everywhere you turn. Five days was not nearly long enough; I'll be back soon!
I got to London on Sunday and booked a hotel for one night in Soho since I didn't have a full plan laid out for my ~5 days in the UK. Unfortunately, I managed to book a "vintage" 19th-century-style hotel where everything was straight out of the 1800s. Lots of people (like my mom & sisters) would love this sort of place, but I'm too much of a technology whore to ever contemplate living without modern-day things like an upright shower or a sink with a single faucet for both the hot & cold water. And obviously overhead lighting, a TV, and internet access would all be nice too.
I had a great time meeting up with a local CR member for drinks that night, then I had lunch with one of my former NL students the next day. Since I'd seen the London sights before and my main UK poker friends were all in Manchester playing dumb SCOOP events all week, I decided to pack up my stuff and move to a hotel in Milton Keynes for the week. Why? Because they have a wind tunnel!
The Airkix tunnel is in a giant shopping complex near the train station and has been PACKED to capacity since I got here. Apparently it's a school holiday for the next few weeks, so there are tons of kids everywhere. I still managed to get two sessions in yesterday:
I booked 3 sessions for today to work on head-down flight with one of their coaches. My first was early this morning, and it went really well until my final flight of the session -- skip to ~6:30 to see what happened:
My head fell through the net! (Net = what we call the floor, which is made up of metal wires.) Even though they told me beforehand that this happens every now and then, it was still pretty scary for me when it happened. The spotter (the other guy in blue in the vid) is apparently supposed to be monitoring the separation of the net's wires to make sure this doesn't happen, and if you look closely in the HQ version of the video you can see a gap in the wires widening where my head was pushing them apart. He's supposed to push them back together every time I fall out of the position, and I probably should have looked for it too and moved to a different spot on the net, but neither of these things happened. Neither of these oversights will ever happen again while I'm in the tunnel.
So my goggles got jammed into my right eye as my head passed through the net, which burst a blood vessel and is now a pretty dark-red color. It didn't really hurt, but I wanted to get it checked out by a doctor before continuing anyway. The staff was really helpful post-accident, and the guy coaching me even drove me to the emergency clinic to have it checked out.
Fortunately, the eye exam turned up no signs of serious injury to my eye other than the burst vessel, which is a somewhat common (and relatively minor) injury. Regardless, I decided to take the rest of the day off and re-assess the situation tomorrow. Risking further injury to my eye is not something I want to do, but regular flight poses nearly zero risk to it, so I plan to work on smoothing out my sit-flying and various transitions more tomorrow.
That's it for now. I fly to Moscow on Thursday to spend a week with my student Nick, and I'm really pumped about that. Plus, I just learned that there's a wind tunnel about an hour south of Moscow! I'm definitely taking Nick there next week...life is good. :)
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