Tuesday, November 10, 11:57am PST

Location: SFO International, in a booth by Ebisu.

I'm drinking unfiltered Kizakura sake and eating sushi, in a kind of mild homage to Karine's breakfast of the same. I woke up on five hours sleep feeling very discomfited; it felt like there was an egg blender in

my gut churning everything around. I'm not sure whether it's the exitement of going somewhere new, the stress of leaving so much behind in stasis, or just a simple lack of a full night's sleep. The sake is doing its magic and soothing my nerves and the sushi is nice, too. Maybe there's some wisdom in having sushi for breakfast. The sake is pretty good.

My first experience with sake was in college - we got some cheap sake and since we knew it should be served hot, we microwaved it. The resulting liquid felt like hot, rabid gym socks were attacking your mouth. I was not much a fan of sake for several years thereafter. It wasn't until a New York trip to visit some Pho-listers that I had a good sake experience - a $70 bottle with some delicious, cold zaru soba. Then I decided it wasn't so much that I didn't like sake, I just didn't like crappy sake. For some reason I prefer unfiltered.

The lines were amazingly slow for checkin. Even though I found a line with a scant dozen people in it (the

line for Air China had probably about 300 in it), it still took half an hour to get through. And they didn't

have my frequently flier number attached to the ticket. Normally, this wouldn't really be a big deal, but I'm flying probably somewhere around 13,000 miles this trip, which by the standard metrics is worth about $130. And leaving that kind of money sitting on the table doesn't seem appealing. Eventually, I coaxed the Lufthansa people into giving me a temporary number and I'm going to see if the United folks at the gate can attach it to my ticket. (It's a Lufthansa flight operated by United; odd! Odder still, it's at the exact same time as a real Lufthansa flight from SFO to Frankfurt - I guess the two planes will fly together?)

The local Travelex couldn't give me any Tunisian dinars. This makes sense, but I wasn't anticipating this issue; hopefully I will be able to get dinars in Frankfurt, or I'll be showing up after midnight in Tunisia on Saturday morning with not a penny of locally-accepted currency. Eep! Worst case, I can throw some US currency at the cab driver and hope for the best.

Anyhow, the sushi's done (yum!) and I'm going to see about slogging through security. I'm not going to pay T-Mobile $10 to post this, so I'll just see if I can get WiFi in Frankfurt. NetStumbler finds *five* T-Mobile access points, on channels 1, 6, and 11. There's also an unlabeled Sonicwall. They're all 802.11b. Here are the APs in descending order of signal strength:

000BFDF3A3BE tmobile chan 1 cisco

000BFDF3A4C2 tmobile chan 6 cisco

000785B3E7C0 tmobile chan 11 cisco

0006B1413CA4 (no name) chan 11 sonicwall

000D2858571E tmobile chan 1 cisco

000BFD600200 tmobile chan 6 cisco

Oh, and why does the latest version of FireFox crash every time it closes? Wierd. Maybe it's a plugin.

Update @ 12:40pm PST

Turns out there's a smidgen of free wifi - "sfoskl" 001150389C9D is accessible and open if you swing right immediately after passing through international security. I'm sitting outside the Silver Kris Lounge down an obscure side corridor. There's nobody here, plenty of power, and free WiFi. I love these little nooks!