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Heathrow Meets Challenge Posed by Olympic Arrivals

Months and years of preparation paid off for Heathrow organizers as Olympic athletes flowed into the bustling airport on Monday, July 16th. Heathrow managed 236,955 departures and arrivals, making it the busiest day the airport has ever seen. Heathrow usually averages between 100 thousand and 110 thousand arrivals daily, but they saw over 121 thousand on the 16th.

Former British Army officer Nick Cole headed up the airport’s Olympic preparations, bringing in extra staff, volunteers and security to ensure the smooth processing of Olympic VIP’s. Athletes from 50 participating countries landed with their assorted gear, to be greeted by oversized Olympic rings and teams of volunteers and airport employees who worked efficiently to process the athlete’s bicycles, sails, javelins, etc. Hundreds of customs agents laboured to shorten the normally long immigration lines and wait times.

Some have labelled the influx of Olympic participants into Heathrow Britain’s largest transportation challenge during peacetime, which naturally excludes the evacuation of Dunkirk in 1940. Thanks to the efforts of Nick Cole, Heathrow staff and volunteers and military and local law enforcement personnel, Heathrow managed the extra traffic well. Coordinators even managed some entertainment for newly-arrived athletes. Outside Terminal 5, a choir performed Adele’s 2011 hit, “Rolling in the Deep”, though most travellers were probably too busy to truly appreciate the music. Rows of buses stood ready to transport VIP’s to the Olympic Village, in east London.

Though things went well at the airport, not all was happiness and joy as the athletes began arriving. In spite of designated traffic lanes displaying painted Olympic rings, some athletes experienced rather long journeys from the airport to the Olympic Park. One American athlete tweeted that his bus had been lost for several hours, a fact with which he was not pleased. Perhaps he would have been better off with a Heathrow airport taxi after all. Even so, most of the buses managed to navigate the route just fine and everyone arrived safely. Boris Johnson, London’s Mayor, noted that passengers whose buses got lost had a chance to see more of the city than they otherwise would have. Now that’s “bright side” thinking for you.

Olympic participants can take advantage of VIP bus rides and designated traffic lanes, but everyone else must still make their own arrangements for transport to and from Heathrow Airport. No other traffic, including taxis, is permitted in Olympic-only travel lanes, but London and Heathrow taxis are allowed to drive in bus lanes. Because of this privilege, not to mention the cabbies’ familiarity with the area, Heathrow airport taxis are still visitors’ best bet for getting to and from the airport and around London.

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Loans for Unemployed People – Keep Your Finances Intact When No Source of Income

When there is no source of earning, several individuals find themselves in huge financial trouble. They become unable to fulfil their mandatory personal requirements because they do not have sufficient funds to do so. As a result, they desperately want a suitable financial source to have some kind of security. Loans for unemployed people are exactly the financial alternative that can provide a hassle free life to the jobless individuals. These loans have come up as a big relief for those people, who have the shortage of funds during adverse days of unemployment.

The unemployed people can acquire these loans to meet any of their personal ends. They can get a significant amount of money to continue their financial activities until finding a new job. Applying for these credits provides several benefits to the people such as:

Guaranteed Approval on Your Application

If an unemployed person is seeking help from the bank loan, then he or she has to wait for some time to get loan approval from the bank. The majority of the banks or finance agencies are reluctant to provide financial assistance to the unemployed people. On the other hand, loans for unemployed people provide a financial help to them by ensuring guaranteed approval from the lender. The loan applicants can enjoy peace of mind by having a quick transfer of funds to their authorised bank account without any hindrance.

Receive Funds on the Same Day

These loans also provide the benefit of same day money transfer. The unemployed loans are the perfect means of getting funds quickly if someone is having an urgent need of cash during financial turmoil. These loans are easy to apply through an online approach where no paperwork is required. In fact, the online way also makes the way easy for the lenders where they can quickly complete the approval process and provide requested funds on the same day of the application submitted by the borrowers.

Rebuild Your Credit History

The unemployed loans are not only beneficial in monetary terms; they are also useful in rebuilding the credit history. These loans are the means of getting a short amount, which mainly required during a financial emergency. The small amount of borrowed money usually has easy repayment schedules, which further helps the jobless people with bad credit to transfer their credit scores from bad to good. However, proper use of flexible repayments is essential to avail such ideal opportunity to recover your credibility among the lenders.

Search for Flexible Interest Rates

As the loan amount is small in these loans, the loan seekers need to find a suitable deal, which should involve the flexible interest rates. To obtain this advantage, they have to search out a suitable lender, who can understand their financial compulsions. For the purpose, doing a comprehensive online research is important because it can give them a clear idea on which lender is providing unemployed loans at competitive interest rates, which eases their financial burden during tough days of unemployment.

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The Garden At Wakiu

The house sits on the site of what was our vegetable garden, we grew a variety of vegetables and a couple rows of Tahitian taro. The fence on the backside of the garden was covered with the vines of the soft shell passion fruit and the lower end was curtained by a stand of purple sugar cane. The garden was filled mostly with patches of apple bananas and scattered around the perimeter were citrus trees; lemon, grapefruit, and lime to begin with. Also among the citrus were a few macadamia nut trees and some young ulu (breadfruit).

Access to the garden was by way of an unimproved road (grassy and sometimes muddy) down the center lengthwise of the property coming right of the highway. A swinging farm gate was hung on a solid six by six post at the bottom of the first slope about twenty feet from the highway. The sloping entryway leading to the gate was lined on both sides with yucca plants. After the gate, the land leveled out for forty or more feet with a slight slope from left to right as you entered. We planted a Ti-leaf (cordyline) hedge backed by a Wili wili (bear’s claw) hedge the width of the property at the edge of the level ground before the land took on a second slope for about twenty feet till the next leveling out.

From this point on the land has a gradual slope running the rest of the length of the property to the back boundary some seven hundred plus feet from the highway. The roadway ran halfway down the middle of the land to the end of the cleared area. A bulldozer had been hired to grub the upper half of the property in 1990, before we started to plant; the lower half was still wild with overgrowth. The first of the palm collection was planted lining both sides of the roadway twenty feet apart.

These first palms in the garden were Pritchardias that were germinated from seeds collected in the 80s; several of the seeds came from the former Maui Zoo grounds in Kahului where a native Hawaiian garden was planted by Rene Silva, the grounds keeper at the time. Rene told me which species of Pritchardia each of the trees were; I had at least one of each of the represented species growing along the roadway. However, over the next ten or so years, I saw one by one of these palms die off mostly from the virus that attacks the growing point of palms. One or two died from boring beetles or worms.

Out of the dozen or so Pritchardias that were originally planted, one survives today. It is a Pritchardia munroi, which is among the rarest of the Hawaiian Pritchardias or loulu (as they are called by the Hawaiians). After we moved into our new home in the garden in 1999, I began to plant more loulu. My goal is to have at least one specimen of each of the species of loulu growing in the garden. It was at this point that the garden started to take form as a repository of native palms. Now that the surviving Pritchardia munroi was about ten years old and bearing fruit (seeds), I found that there was a demand for the seeds in the global palm collecting community.

I started looking at palms other than loulu at this time and found that I could trade my loulu seeds with a palm seed merchant for seeds of other palms from all over the world. So, I started germinating these new seeds and planting the palms in the garden; there were more seedlings than I cared to plant in the garden most times, so now I started to wholesale them as potted palms to an outlet in Central Maui. The sales helped to defray the cost of raising these palms, buying plastic pots, potting soil, organic compost and fertilizers. Each time I was ready to make a seed trade, I would ask for the seed merchant’s price list, match up the available seeds with photographs of the mature palms in palm books or on the internet, select the palms that I found to my liking and then traded for the appropriate seeds.

Not all of my seed selections made it to plantable palms; some did not germinate, some germinated but did not survive the early seedling stage, but many did survive and have been planted in the garden or are still potted and waiting for their turn to be planted in the garden. At this point, there are over one hundred fifty species of palms from a good number of genuses that are represented in the garden at Wakiu.

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