"Mr Jpatokal? You want to fly today?"
<blink>
"Yes...?"
"But you have reservation for tomorrow. Not today."
(click to enlarge)
For me, going to Bangkok is like meeting an old lover with whom you're still on good terms -- both of you know exactly what you want and how to make it happen. I spent a leisurely day and night doing some last-minute souvenir shopping, browsing assorted guidebooks to prepare for the upcoming trip and, last but by no means least, eating all my favorite Thai dishes like
som tam Thai (raw papaya salad),
muu yang (grilled pork neck),
khao niaw (sticky rice),
khao phat ka kapi (rice fried with shrimp paste and served with a host of goodies to stir in),
chaa yen (Thai-style iced milk tea)... I'm afraid, in a very mild sense of the word "afraid", that I'll be chained by my tastebuds to South-East Asia for life.
So the first sour note was only hit when I got to the airport and heard the above words at check-in. Turns out that while my printed itinerary said "SUN AUG21" (correctly), the
actual booking was AUG22, and this was printed on the ticket itself but I'd been too blind to notice! The check-in guy commiserated and said that getting to SIN would be no problem, but he couldn't guarantee me a standby seat for SIN-JNB: the chances were looking "good" though, he said, and he'd waitlisted me already.
I contemplated the alternatives in a funk: if the seat doesn't materialize, best case is that I spend 11 hours cooped up in Economy, and worst case is that I have to wait until the next day's flight -- which also means flushing my JNB-LLW ticket, my lodge reservation and my friend's plans at the Zambian end. Ouch.
BKK-SIN SQ69 C B773 seat 12D
I'd been expecting to kick back with a glass of bubbly and start counting elephants as I boarded, but needless to say I wasn't in much of a mood to celebrate. KrisFlyer's on-demand audio was a little dodgy today, but otherwise SQ did an OK job of trying to cheer me up, even the stewardesses were positively effusive by SQ standards ("Hello there! Would you like a drink after take-off? You don't? Are you sure?" <pouty face>). It's just a two-hour flight, but the meal was served with full C regalia including enough knives to arm a division of al-Qaeda. Given a choice of beef, chicken and
phad thai I opted for the "
beef cheek in red wine sauce with saffron potatoes and somethinged asparagus", and the beef was just meltingly smooth -- or at least two out three pieces were, the final one turning out to be a glob of lard encased in a thin layer of meat. Ick; it's a good thing I had three knives for hacking away at it. The accompanying salad with what they termed "hot" smoked salmon (quotes theirs) was also excellent, the stuff is known as warm smoked salmon in Scandinavia and I've never seen it outside Finland before. Two thumbs up! Dessert was a choice of fruit, I opted for a slice of pomelo rather incongruously wrapped up in plastic wrap.
I then spent an hour hacking on the new Berlitz World Traveler language program, plowing my way through the Mandarin and Russian modules, both of which were, frankly, too easy even if you don't have a thorough grasp of the language. The program may work nicely enough for European languages that use Roman letters, but not being able to select between pinyin, characters or voice only for Chinese is a major handicap -- for most people because they can't read the characters, but for me because I can read them thanks to my Japanese studies, even though I don't have the faintest idea about the pronunciation!
The flight landed on time and I headed to Transfer Desk E, a Dantean pit of people with problems with their tickets. There was a queue just to get in, one frazzled guy was trying to shuffle people into the appropriate queues and I had to pester him three times before he finally gave me a queue ticket, after which I had to twiddle my thumbs for another half hour (no separate queues for Raffles/First pax either!). Once a Filipino maid with a bogus ticket was tearfully disposed of it was my turn, I presented my case and the lady at the counter tapped at her PC for a while. She made a phone call, then tapped some more with a puzzled expression on her face, then turned to me and said:
"Mr Jpatokal? I can't put you on standby for the flight... it looks like you're already booked on it!"
<blink>
Yes, in business class, Spacebed all the way to JNB. Everything was going to be OK after all and a stone fell off my heart... and here I sit in the Silver Kris lounge, sipping on my glass of Piper-Heidsieck. Zambia, here I come! ^