Overflown

The Museum of Fine Art is on the flightpath for Taipei's domestic airport, which means every couple of minutes another plane flies over. They must be rather proud of this, because in the entrance hall of the museum is an installation consisting of some very loud speakers that blare the sound of a plane flying overhead, while a shadow of a plane is projected across the ceiling. This is fun the first few times, but I imagine the museum staff could be quite aggravated.

Flying through the air with the greatest of ease

It was an uneventful flight from Seattle to Narita. I was in seat 10A, which is the foremost seat in economy next to the exit. That meant I could stretch my legs out more than anyone else on the plane, although as I was about the third person to board it was very cold, because I was sat right by an open door for half an hour. Ah, at least it's fresh air.

Air travel does strange things to you. I watched The Expendables 2, which is terrible, but I was surprised by this, even though I've already watched The Expendables. It seems that at 30,000 feet, large parts of the plot evaporate into nothingness. I slept a bit, read a good book and half of a terrible, terrible attempt to write Cthulhu-noir, and dozed a little. I was hoping to do some work, but the battery on my laptop was flat and it appears I've packed my charger in my hold baggage, so I've been less than productive on this flight. I doubt I'd have got that much done, crammed into such a small space.

At the airport I bought vast amounts of gum. This, combined with unfeasibly large amounts of shredded wheat that I'll be taking back into Singapore, makes me a nervous flyer. Still, only a few hours left now. If only I could rid myself of the taste of stale beer that is glued tight to my lips after last night's carry-on, I'd be able to relax. Water doesn't wipe it out, nor does chewing gum, aspirin or maple-glazed doughnuts. Perhaps Singapore will fix me.

Unhappy travels

What is it they say about it being better to travel in hope than arrive in Seattle?

Early morning in Osaka

The flight from Singapore to Osaka was easy; I arrived at the gate, had my seat changed to one 17 rows further forward than I'd been assigned at check-in, got on the plane and went straight to sleep, only waking to find myself watching a programme about dinosaurs at 5 in the morning. I don't think I've flown long(ish) haul with Jetstar before so it was a surprise to find they've got some in flight entertainment, even if it is only a screen hanging from the ceiling at the front of the cabin.

Back on the plane again

The day after the wedding the weather was bright and clear. We got up to see the Forth Bridge shining in the sun, and instead of spending the mid-morning vomitting into a gutter, I avoided eating any suspicious vegetarian sausages for breakfast and went for a walk instead. We walked down the coast from Queensferry to a pier and a large stone seal, which I got to sit on. I like sitting on statues of animals. When I was young I got to sit atop an enormous squirrel in Beckenham Place Park. I've sat astride a plastic panda in Taipei Zoo, and now I've barged a small child out the way in order to ride on a huge (freezing cold) seal a few miles from Edinburgh.

Hungry

After work tonight I rushed out to the bar across the road and inhaled a gin and tonic, before decelerating enough to swallow five truffle-oil-infested balls of fried cheese, and finished off by gulping half my wife's drink too. It was time to catch a flight again, which meant it was time for some alcoholic assistance.

For those of you at the back of the plane

These are some of the things I was reminded of this weekend. There's a difference between how friendly people are in New York and Canada, and there's differences between being at the back of the plane and the middle.

Having missed our connection because United couldn't fly into Newark because of a bit of weather, we were hoping for a decent dose of compensation when we did arrive in New York.

Not so.

Delayed

The day started chilly and overcast in Dartmouth, but by midday the clouds had burned off and it was sunny again. That was good, because it meant we had something nice to look at from the window of the terminal. You couldn't say the same of New York; thunderstorms there meant that our departure from Canada was delayed by two hours, which in turn meant that we were most likely going to miss our connecting flight to Hong Kong. Neither of us were downcast by this; it should be more bad news for our insurers, but we'll get to hang out in New York for a day with our friends, and hopefully arrive back by Tuesday morning. It might even be possible for us to get bumped onto a direct flight home, which would be rather more pleasant than the utter grind of a flight to Hong Kong plus another interminable wait in the airport and another connection.

Stuck in transit

We drank high-class booze and ate truffle-infused deep fried balls of macaroni and cheese until 1 in the morning, then went back to the flat, picked up our luggage and headed to the airport.

Our flight didn't depart until 7, so arriving at the airport at 3 seemed a bit premature. Changi is a strange, almost unearthly place that early in the morning; you can look up to the enormous ceiling of the check-in hall, and see birds flitting between the rafters.

Or you can look at the check in desks, where a huddle of coral-jacketed airport staff had a last minute pep talk.

They kept going into these huddles, and then not doing much. United's reservation systems were completely borked for about three hours this morning; you couldn't be checked in, the website was utterly down, and it looked like somebody was going to start writing out boarding tickets by hand. We were told that if we'd checked in online already, they could issue us tickets. Well, perhaps they could have done, if my online check-in yesterday hadn't resulted in that self-contradicting THIS IS NOT A BOARDING PASS boarding pass.

On the way out

Last day in the office for a while, and I had to contend with lots of things breaking, or not quite working as fast or as well as they should, until the death of a thousand cuts culminated in four dead hours in the afternoon waiting for various processes to stop chugging away and actually do something. A red hot laptop is not a blessing.

Slightly troubled travelling

Although the flight to Japan was uneventful (if you exclude the inevitable unpleasantness of sobering up midway through the journey), leaving was more difficult. It was raining hard at Narita and there were lots of planes queued up to leave, which mean that our aircraft burned up too much fuel on the ground and had to return to the terminal to have more fuel added. This has never happened to me before in 15 years of being squashed into aircraft, and paranoid ideas began to flow from the back of my brain.

The back of my brain isn't very imaginative: but then I didn't say the paranoid ideas were well-thought-out, creative ideas, did I?

The Stench of Guts

Flying does terrible things to your body, but then so does staying up past midnight drinking, so I was quite accepting of the stomach cramps and restive bowels that I experienced as we landed at Narita. It's a stupidly long flight from Singapore to Tokyo; about 5,500 kilometres, where I sat and my body turned to something like cheese.

Running to the Tiger

I met a friend I hadn't seen since he moved to Beijing last year, and dallied too long over pizza in a restaurant at IFC, watching the rain pelt against the window. My friend, an old hand at last minute sprints to the airport, told me it would all be fine, but as we walked to the railway station I could feel little palpitations of fear clenching in my chest.

Lost in transit

I flew back to Hong Kong today with Tiger. That meant travelling through the Budget Terminal at Singapore. Calling it the Budget Terminal conjures up visions of a flyblown hell-hole full of grumpy low-cost-carrier travellers, but in fact it's a nondescript shed that's not too crowded, and although there's a paucity of high-end duty free shops, there's a decent bookstore and free internet. And in three months time Tiger are leaving the Budget Terminal behind, so then it will be back to the idiotically expensive handbag shops and the 'free' wi-fi which requires all sorts of passport details you can never remember. Ah well.

Put them by the toilet

When the day is long and exhaustion threatens to leach the joy from life, I keep my spirits up by reading transcripts of Ryanair's investor briefings. Michael O'Leary, the accountant-turned-dark overlord of the European aviation industry is a master of the blarney. Despite being a man with a job that is mostly office bound, he seems desperate to come across like a muck-covered prize pig farmer, returning from the Big City to tell the other denizens of his ten-pub, nine-person village about the terrible things he's seen.

Overworked

After spending all day in an air conditioned hotel, I took a taxi (lamentably unterrifying this time) back to the airport, checked through Immigration and hung around for two hours in an air conditioned building, before getting back on a plane and returning to Singapore. The only exotic part was the air conditioning on the plane on the way home, which managed to be even colder than the conference room yesterday. And there were all those scientists thinking you couldn't go below absolute zero. None of them work for Singapore Airlines, or in the Thai hospitality industry.

Leaving on a jet plane ... eventually

It was too good to be true; we got to Heathrow unbelievably quickly, the roads through London clear, perhaps because everyone else was staying inside. A few flakes fell on us as we went through Wandsworth, but the weather wasn't too bad.

We checked in, dropping off the world's biggest bag full of paperback books, strolled through security, and then somehow I managed to smuggle my wife into the Cathay Pacific lounge for free. It's not as nice as the lounge at Hong Kong (few things are) but it was nicer than being crammed into the departure area with what felt like the rest of London. I stuffed myself full of biscuits and when there was only an hour to go before take-off, we trundled down to the gate.

It looked unusually packed. This didn't seem like such a good sign. Outside, the snow was falling more heavily now.

Let it snow (a little bit later, please)

And so, as our holiday in England comes to an end, snow begins to fall on Heathrow, and according to Heathrow's website, it will be heavy snow from 9pm.

Struggling under a great weight

While we were in Oxford, we bought more books. That was probably a bad idea, as we haven't finished the books we started 2012 with, and we were given books as wedding presents, and we now have a knee-high pile of weight-limit defying paper to transport back to Hong Kong.

Oops.

Toilets

Apparently Cathay Pacific are still having toilet trouble: by the time we were approaching Heathrow, at least two of the toilets were out of order. Were they blocked by foreign objects? Isn't every object foreign when you're in international airspace?