Flying to Taipei from Hong Kong

It's ever-so-slightly cheaper to fly with Dragonair than Cathay Pacific (if you care for saving fifty Hong Kong dollars after you've spent two hours flicking back and forth between websites) but I'd forgotten that I'd made my booking with the former, so had to trundle my luggage down to the Dragonair desk, where they tried to upgrade us to the Cathay flight leaving thirty minutes earlier.

Usually I would have jumped on this like a shot, but that would have encroached thirty minutes on my complimentary time in the Cathay Pacific lounge, eating complimentary pastries and using the complimentary washrooms over and over again, so we declined, and went to buy a comb. I'm not sure how these things would be related, but my girlfriend told me to, so how could I decline?

There are no combs available for sale in the IFC branch of Watsons. I hope that one day this prevents a terrible calamity occurring, the kind where the heroine of the piece has to decide whether to obtain a life-saving and hair-tidying device either from the 7-11 on D'Aguilar Street or the IFC Watsons, and the only way to decide is by reading my blog. Unlikely, I know, but so was the 'plot' of Terminator 3.

At the airport, we used my two free passes for the lounge; it's larger than the China Airlines lounge I visited last time, but noisier because there's more than two people in it. There is a full bar though, and pastries that appear less solid than the ones China Airlines had to offer.

However, the bar turns out to be a swizz: you can only get microwaved bread with melted plastic cheese there: beverages are from a fridge tucked away around the corner. Tucked away around the corner without supervision. Now I'm not saying that if you'd paid 200 HKD for the privilege of entering the lounge, and you were then disappointed by the plastic cheese, that you could recompense yourself by emptying the beer fridge. The unsupervised beer fridge.

I'm not saying that at all, because the beer in the fridge is all either Skol, which went off sale in the UK in the 1980s (and the cans look to be that vintage), or Hite, a Korean beer that they missed the leading 'S' off in their rush to export it from Korea and thus get it out the country.

It's not a hideous environment by any means. It's quite pleasant, but the trouble is Hong Kong International is quite pleasant, so apart from some subdued lighting, there's not much extra you get in the lounge that you don't already get for free.

Although I did get the lounge for free, but then that's because I've put enough spend through my credit card in the past 12 months to pay for a small family car.

Anyway, never mind all this. I'm free as a bird. Free as a great big metal bird (subject to the constraints of air traffic control) to fly over the sea to Taiwan.