0117
UA 895 HKG SIN 2040 0020 744 15H Ch9 dead air Empower Y

An exemplary cabin crew, what seems to have been an older
aircraft. The side bins were of an older style than on
the other plane, but not so old as the ones I remember
from the early 747s, which looked as though they had been
made in high school shop class.

to begin
Fresh seasonal greens - cucumber, tomatoes and roasted
sunflower seeds; French dressing

main course
Hunan-style chicken with Chin-kiang vinegar sauce; stir-
fried Chinese noodles and sauteed broccoli

Grilled cod with lemon dill butter sauce; Basmati rice with
vegetables, sauteed spinach with enoki mushrooms

dessert
Apricot cheesecake with apricot coulis

quick and lite meal
In lieu of our formal meal presentation,
we offer a complete service for the lighter appetite.

Fresh seasonal fruit

Warm crispy bacon, apple and celery wrap served with
horseradish sauce

Apricot cheesecake with apricot coulis

[Wines same as on the previous flight.]

The salad was okay, but the sunflower seeds were raw and
stale.

The chicken was quite tasty - the ketchup-tinged red sauce
full of garlic and a surprising hit of hot pepper (I found a
bird pepper in my portion), and its accompanying broccoli
perfectly cooked. Unfortunately, the e-fu noodles, quite
nice in themselves, were covered with a brown sauce that
tasted like 80% sugar and 20% vinegar.

Taurus was a decent wine, tannic and big with blackberry
and other dark flavors. Good long finish.

I passed on dessert and had a glass of Port instead.

After some sizable jolts on the descent, we landed a few
minutes early, but as the line was long at T1 Immigration,
I fooled around on the free terminals until the line
seemed manageable.

Then I got in the shortest line, which of course immediately
ground to a halt. Reason: a chubby 40-ish Chinese guy was in
the process of being denied entry. The officer kept looking
at his passport; finally summoned a supervisor, who kicked
the unfortunate out of the line but instead of having him
detained (I've seen this before, and it's heartrending)
shunted him over to the side, where he spent the rest of my
time there shouting into a cell phone. For me, the process
took just long enough for an empty stamp spot to be found
(there was one on p. 18); I immediately resolved to have
pages added at the next opportunity.

Lori_Q likes boutiquey, perhaps even funky hotels, so she
booked us into the Perak Hotel at the edge of Little
India. The room we got wasn't so good, but after a day of
flying I didn't feel like fussing. At least it had free
wireless and a nice firm bed. The deal was I'd use the room
one night, and then she would take it over, thus saving me
the trouble of figuring out where to stow my luggage during
the day while I wandered around, as for the next days I was
to share a suite with infoworks at the Inter-Continental.

After breakfast (ramen with succotash, strange; fruit cup,
good) I wandered off poking into neighborhoods I hadn't been
before; decided to go to the American Embassy to have extra
pages put into my passport. Took a wrong turn on Grange Road
from somewhere or another and found myself back near the
Meritus Mandarin; decided not to leave things to my clearly
compromised sense of direction and took the bus out.

There was no citizen line but a fair queue of hopefuls at
the foreigners door. After two rounds of security I was in
the fortresslike building, which has a little area for
visas and such and an even smaller area for Citizen Services
- I wonder what the rest of that enormous facility houses.
Citizen Services was efficient, and in half an hour I had
an ample supply of new pages sewn into the middle of my
passport.

Wandered randomly back to town and decided to give a much
touted in foodie circles restaurant a try - Bayang, which
serves Bali-style food. It's in the newly fancified Clarke
Quay area and turns out to be quite pricy.

Being sort of brain-dead but not brain-dead enough to
realize there wasn't any smell of spices in the air, I
didn't get anything like the rendang that I had craved but
instead ordered the set meal with crispy duck, jackfruit
curry, and a sort of deconstructed gado-gado - crudites
(green beans, tomatoes, lettuce, red cabbage, carrots,
white cabbage slaw, and parsley) presented Western-style
with a bowl of dark brown and not spicy enough peanut sauce
on the side. The duck was crispy and overdone but, I wonder
why, not dry at all. One wing, a breast half, and part of
the back, hacked into random pieces. The curry was very
tasty but a bit thin. I had avocado cendol for dessert:
odd as the avocado was quite ripe but became hard in
contact with the bed of ice. Other usual suspects: sago
noodles in red, green, and yellow; beans (big red kidneys
this time, instead of the lovely little adzukis); kernel
corn; coconut milk. A 300 mL draft Tiger was $10.50++,
which I thought excessive.

Back to the hotel for some e-mail and rest, and then to
the Meridien bar to meet Flyertalkers for Happy Hour
beers. Luckily on the way I met WWBGD and the lovely
Alexa and got to store my traps in their top-floor
suite. After which it was down for the lobby debauch,
which was made more interesting by the fact that despite
the advertised 2-for-1 happy hour special we were charged
full boat (S$10 for beer).

A truly far-flung group:
Baxter&Bessies'Mama (from Arizona)
seanthepilot (from Thailand and Canada)
opushomes (from Oregon)
rtarbuck (from Minnesota)
Blank Sheet (from Ohio)
karenkay (from Texas)
bschaff1 (from Illinois)
headinclouds (from D.C.)
dedehans (from Florida)
alex0683de (from Germany)
upup&away (from Sweden)
szg (from Austria)
zvezda (from Lithuania) showed up later.