Triple Delayed and the Usefulness of Wireless Internet
I'm in the Gorillas' house now; it's Sunday night and I'm quite tired so this will probably be the last thing I do before going to sleep and waking up to my many tasks tomorrow.
The trip from Fifth Hun to here was relatively uneventful apart from its incredible inconvenience to several people besides myself; foremost of those being Claus and my poor Coconut, who (I'm pretty sure) didn't get very much sleep on Friday night/Saturday morning. Of course they say they didn't mind, but I know (and the Coconut has said as much) that inconveniencing others is a rather poor way to start off a return trip. True, I didn't book the flight and I certainly didn't delay them and I didn't expect to miss the last bus, but anyway...
Flying from Fifth Hun to Shenzhen was nothing special. I checked in, bade the family a pretty emotionless farewell (I try very hard to keep goodbyes to a minimum of time), and boarded the plane on schedule. We also touched down at Shenzhen on time, which gave me time to roam around the place and eventually find out that the Shenzhen airport, though international, reserves about 80% of itself for domestic flights. The international flights are confined to a few little booths, and those flights are displayed on a large sheet of mahjong paper and written in on markers; the domestic flights are announced on a large flashy LED screen. If you ask me it looks like Shenzhen airport wasn't designed to be international in the first place, and the international flights just got tacked on as a last-minute thought.
At any rate I got a lot of time with which to appreciate the deficiencies of the international-flight waiting area of the Shenzhen airport; for one thing, it has only one book shop and one restaurant in it. Nothing more, so once you've checked in your luggage there's not a lot of options for entertainment other than the 54 Mbps wireless internet. Also this means that the aforementioned businesses are able to charge cutthroat prices and get away with it since their customers don't have anywhere else to get food or reading material. I got the time to find all this out by the delay of my Shenzhen-to-KL flight, carried by good ol' AirAsia. I must say, the lateness was ridiculous; when I entered the check-in line, they were supposed to be running on schedule. Five minutes later, after checking in, an announcement came and the flight was, for unknown reasons, bumped off to 9-something (it was supposed to be at 8.45pm). And then a few minutes later, it got bumped to 10.10, upon which I started running my laptop on its battery, on as dim as possible a setting for the monitor to keep the battery long-lived, and started trying to get in touch with the Gorilla to tell him.
As it was, Facebook saved the day; nobody from my family was online and neither was anybody currently in KL; Jogger, fortunately, was, and he managed to contact a church member in KL who knows the Gorilla (but who wasn't on my MSN contacts), and thus I managed to get the news from Shenzhen to Glasgow to KL. Not perhaps the most direct of routes, but behold the joys of wireless internet. Of course, if the flight had been on time, I wouldn't have needed it...
At 10.15, we boarded. The plane took off at 10.45, I fell asleep, and woke just as we were descending due to the almost-painful pressure on my ears; the advantage of midnight flights is that you never need to force yourself to yawn. It comes quite naturally, and equalises the ears very comfortably. The next glitch in my plans was that there were no buses leaving the terminal at the time at which I arrived; the last bus had left at midnight (again, my original arrival time. Thank you very much for the disservice, AirAsia!); so I had to get Claus to get me from the terminal, which meant an hour of waiting while he drove over, with the Coconut as a passenger though I didn't know it at the time. Should've expected it though.
We got to sleep at 5am, and woke 5 hours later with the sun streaming in and an errand to go on. Suffice it to say that by that afternoon, I had bought three T-shirts with somewhat humourous designs on, although one is somewhat difficult to get unless you happen to know a certain amount about how drugs are taken. That one I'll be giving to the kid brother when I next see him. And then the rest of the day was spent in meeting people, talking, eating a little, and taking inventory of the incredible amount of my items that have somehow got deposited in the Gorillas'. How I accumulated all that in 5 years I shall never know, but I now have 6 bags, all packed chock-full, of items in the Gorillas' that I have to remove somehow before they migrate to the States. So I'm doing inventory to decide what to throw, what to stow at the Coconut's (temporarily, of course), and what to bring down to Spore with me (and subsequently stow in my grandfolks' place).
As it is I'm running up a depressingly long list of "Want to Keep" and a depressingly short one of "Want to Throw or Give Away"; that list includes a lot of correspondence with various universities while I was applying for such things. Turns out I've also got a lot of books that I should return to Einstein, so I'm hoping to meet him at the upcoming Copa di IBA (yes, I know, I've borrowed those books for a year). I'm hoping to get my inventory and packing done by tomorrow, since I also need to buy my Tuesday-morning ticket down to Spore to sort out the accomodation troubles, and I want to take the Coconut out for dinner tomorrow on our first-ever really official date without chaperones... after all, so far our "dates" have been more or less accompanying each other on a shopping errand, or perhaps the odd outing with the church. And I might as well start sometime, eh?
The trip from Fifth Hun to here was relatively uneventful apart from its incredible inconvenience to several people besides myself; foremost of those being Claus and my poor Coconut, who (I'm pretty sure) didn't get very much sleep on Friday night/Saturday morning. Of course they say they didn't mind, but I know (and the Coconut has said as much) that inconveniencing others is a rather poor way to start off a return trip. True, I didn't book the flight and I certainly didn't delay them and I didn't expect to miss the last bus, but anyway...
Flying from Fifth Hun to Shenzhen was nothing special. I checked in, bade the family a pretty emotionless farewell (I try very hard to keep goodbyes to a minimum of time), and boarded the plane on schedule. We also touched down at Shenzhen on time, which gave me time to roam around the place and eventually find out that the Shenzhen airport, though international, reserves about 80% of itself for domestic flights. The international flights are confined to a few little booths, and those flights are displayed on a large sheet of mahjong paper and written in on markers; the domestic flights are announced on a large flashy LED screen. If you ask me it looks like Shenzhen airport wasn't designed to be international in the first place, and the international flights just got tacked on as a last-minute thought.
At any rate I got a lot of time with which to appreciate the deficiencies of the international-flight waiting area of the Shenzhen airport; for one thing, it has only one book shop and one restaurant in it. Nothing more, so once you've checked in your luggage there's not a lot of options for entertainment other than the 54 Mbps wireless internet. Also this means that the aforementioned businesses are able to charge cutthroat prices and get away with it since their customers don't have anywhere else to get food or reading material. I got the time to find all this out by the delay of my Shenzhen-to-KL flight, carried by good ol' AirAsia. I must say, the lateness was ridiculous; when I entered the check-in line, they were supposed to be running on schedule. Five minutes later, after checking in, an announcement came and the flight was, for unknown reasons, bumped off to 9-something (it was supposed to be at 8.45pm). And then a few minutes later, it got bumped to 10.10, upon which I started running my laptop on its battery, on as dim as possible a setting for the monitor to keep the battery long-lived, and started trying to get in touch with the Gorilla to tell him.
As it was, Facebook saved the day; nobody from my family was online and neither was anybody currently in KL; Jogger, fortunately, was, and he managed to contact a church member in KL who knows the Gorilla (but who wasn't on my MSN contacts), and thus I managed to get the news from Shenzhen to Glasgow to KL. Not perhaps the most direct of routes, but behold the joys of wireless internet. Of course, if the flight had been on time, I wouldn't have needed it...
At 10.15, we boarded. The plane took off at 10.45, I fell asleep, and woke just as we were descending due to the almost-painful pressure on my ears; the advantage of midnight flights is that you never need to force yourself to yawn. It comes quite naturally, and equalises the ears very comfortably. The next glitch in my plans was that there were no buses leaving the terminal at the time at which I arrived; the last bus had left at midnight (again, my original arrival time. Thank you very much for the disservice, AirAsia!); so I had to get Claus to get me from the terminal, which meant an hour of waiting while he drove over, with the Coconut as a passenger though I didn't know it at the time. Should've expected it though.
We got to sleep at 5am, and woke 5 hours later with the sun streaming in and an errand to go on. Suffice it to say that by that afternoon, I had bought three T-shirts with somewhat humourous designs on, although one is somewhat difficult to get unless you happen to know a certain amount about how drugs are taken. That one I'll be giving to the kid brother when I next see him. And then the rest of the day was spent in meeting people, talking, eating a little, and taking inventory of the incredible amount of my items that have somehow got deposited in the Gorillas'. How I accumulated all that in 5 years I shall never know, but I now have 6 bags, all packed chock-full, of items in the Gorillas' that I have to remove somehow before they migrate to the States. So I'm doing inventory to decide what to throw, what to stow at the Coconut's (temporarily, of course), and what to bring down to Spore with me (and subsequently stow in my grandfolks' place).
As it is I'm running up a depressingly long list of "Want to Keep" and a depressingly short one of "Want to Throw or Give Away"; that list includes a lot of correspondence with various universities while I was applying for such things. Turns out I've also got a lot of books that I should return to Einstein, so I'm hoping to meet him at the upcoming Copa di IBA (yes, I know, I've borrowed those books for a year). I'm hoping to get my inventory and packing done by tomorrow, since I also need to buy my Tuesday-morning ticket down to Spore to sort out the accomodation troubles, and I want to take the Coconut out for dinner tomorrow on our first-ever really official date without chaperones... after all, so far our "dates" have been more or less accompanying each other on a shopping errand, or perhaps the odd outing with the church. And I might as well start sometime, eh?
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