Try­ing to get not to ex­cit­ed be­cause these things tend to get can­celled due to bad weath­er, ter­ror­ists, bu­reau­cra­cy, Euro­pean en­vi­ron­men­tal guide­lines and that kind of crap, I just went to Rot­ter­dam on sun­day, bought some Tom­my Hil­figer stuff, ate at Cap­pado­cia II and pre­tend­ed not to be there for the Red Bull Air Race. But a cou­ple of hun­dredt­hou­sand peo­ple are hard to ig­nore, so it took some fig­ur­ing out how to get into Rot­ter­dam in the first place (and to get out was even hard­er).

But the good thing is that parts of the air­race are high up in the sky, and un­less there's a sky­scraper in front of you, it's just vis­i­ble from wher­ev­er you are. The deal is they fly as fast as they can over the riv­er, but to turn they have to make some kind of hair­pin and the way to do that is to fly straight up, spin 180 de­grees and come back down again. It re­al­ly looks like fun and I won­der why this oc­cu­pa­tion nev­er came up on my pro­fes­sion choice test.

Like the Red Bull X-fight­ers it's a big show that doesn't get di­lut­ed be­cause of the com­pe­ti­tion that's part of it. For­mu­la 1 with an M. Schu­mach­er is to­tal­ly bor­ing com­pared to this stuff.

And among the about 700.000 peo­ple, I met Big Mek, Ms. Big Mek and Lit­tle Mek.