At least they're using words, and not just emojis!

Eightblack, simply stunning how you can captivate readers with your wit, humor and hard-hitting satire. Incredible typemanship! If I had even half the flair for writing as well as you do, I would do nothing else but write.
You bring joy to so many readers with your words, writing should at the very least be your CSR activity!

If you have a long layover at LAX, don't forget that you can access the Qantas F lounge to help pass the time.

Plus. there's a new airside walkway between the Tom Bradley terminal and AA domestic gates, so you don't have to clear security again.

Had to look up those terms. Oh dear, i guess your little one doesnt hold you in high regards.....
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=boi

That's not what I think of when I read boi...

eightblack should ask the friends he's staying with what it means to them :p

I'm guessing your daughter is dismayed that you attempt to communicate with her at all, must less via sms/text, and is doing her best to discourage you by being as incomprehensible as possible.

You should attempt revenge with ambiguous emoji's. I know it weirds me out when my parents text and get really thrown when they use emojis. Enough that I walk about in a confused daze for a few minutes wondering what the world has come to. Friends also have a similar reaction to their parents who text with emoji's. Unfortunately, we are too old to pull off "this is what kids these days speak like" trick and are forced to accept the multitude of WhatsApp/Line/WeChat melting pot group conversations of aunts, uncles, and cousins. Besides, they all paid a lot for our college educations.

We called them Putsi flies in Northern Rhodesia.... basically a type of blow fly... and yes, they do hurt!

You will never need a DNA test to prove he's your son. :D


Am loving the TR and look forward to hearing if you ever get home. (Or even want to. ;) )

Awesome news, now to find the time to read one of the great trip report writers.

Quote:
Originally Posted by RandomBaritone View Post
Goading your teenage son by joking that he's gay? Then gleefully retelling the "insult" to strangers online, some of whom are in fact gay?


Having read eightblack from the beginning I'm certain this isn't what he intended, although it's how it came across.
__________________

I have known and read all of Eightblacks work for year, and had some dealings with him as a moderator - there is nothing homophobic about Eightblack

Finally. I’m stateside. Talk about a cluster. It just shows you what happens when you fall off the travel conveyer belt after a while. You lose your edge. What a mother of all effort. All I know is that I am at least 10 pounds heavier as a result of the 432 bamboo baskets of dim sum I inhaled these past few days, the excessive amount of beer, wine and champagne that may have passed my lips (which I only drank mind you to help calm my nerves and not offend my hosts) and the 12 solid hours I just spent at 2 CX lounges.

I think all the humid Hong Kong air caused my pants to shrink. This meant I had to go full on Asian and buy a polyester track-suit. You know the ones with the elastic waistband. Shiny gold color to boot. Man oh man, someone should have told me about these wonderfully eclectic fashion garments years ago. To annoy my daughter and wife, when I see them, I am going to wear white socks with my glistening new outfit and pull the pants up as high as they will go before I choke on my own walnuts.

FedEx showed up just prior to 11am HKG time and I was in a cab within 20 minutes, weaving my way down off The Peak and heading to Chek Lap Kok. For about the 16th time in 4 days. At least that’s what it felt like.

Rose, the most underworked housekeeper in HKG did a jig as she handed me the Fedex envelope, relishing in the fact that me leaving meant one less person to feed. And fewer pairs of underwear to iron. Another friend of the boys had appeared on the doorstep on Sunday so I was kicked out of the spare room to make way for her and sent to bunk down in a storage room on a blow up bed for my last night in Honkers. I felt like Harry Potter in the first few movies, you know, when his bedroom was under the stairs.

That’s the thing about expat life. If you live in places like Singapore and Hong Kong and you have a guest room, you will be inundated with wandering travelers. All the time.

People who you barely recognize will call you up…

“Hey Simon how are you, its Nick”
“Nick who?”
“Nick Williams. You know, I used to date your sister”
“Dude, that was in the 4th grade”
“Yes, it has been a while”
“Anyway, I have 5 kids now and my 2nd wife and I are coming through Singapore and were wondering if we could crash a few days”
“Umm. Sure. I suppose”
“Can you pick us up?”
“I guess. Anything else?”

And then my wife would go semi-postal as when the person who we hardly knew rolled up with his tribe, I would conveniently have a work trip and leave for a week. That woman had zero tolerance, I tell you.

I thought the CX flight was just ok. Nothing special. I didn’t want to be rude when the polite staffer offered me a bottle of Krug although I did object a little bit when they served the champagne at the same temperature as the surface of the sun.

I politely told the vague CX staffer that you could be arrested for serving bubbles that warm. There was much scurrying and cussing from the galley in New Zealand and moments later, a much colder bottle appeared.

Apparently that crazy travel blogger, Lucky, reckons that CX is the most comfortable bed in the sky. Which I think is stretching it. Ok, it’s very pleasant and it certainly is a wide seat, bit there’s just something about CX’s product now that is not quite right. I cant put my finger on it. Kinda like that weird Uncle at Christmas who keeps to himself in one corner of the room, says nothing to anyone all day and then, right before he’s about to leave, starts calling everyone Helen. In Portuguese. You know nothing good would come out of looking at his browser history.

To me, LH F nails it. Every time. I am biased about EK so we wont go there.

Although I quite liked the new Pier place near gate 65. I started out at The Wing and then got bored. So I trekked down to The Pier and found a very nice corner with a rather elegant high back chair and an ottoman and basically moved in for the next 720 minutes.

12 hours in an airline lounge is nothing if you ask me. It is but child's play. I have a high threshold of pain when it comes to camping out in these places as some of you know.

To occupy the time, I went and had a massage – but was somewhat dismayed when the nice young lady told me to put all my clothes back on. Not having had a massage in Asia fully clothed before, I decided to keep an open mind and try it.

Completely overrated if you ask me. Useless in fact.

Anyway.

The dining room at The Pier had a weird feel to it – it felt like a school canteen. Place had bad juju and I think when the local CX head honchos came to hire the Feng Shui man to bless the new digs, they must have ran out of money when they got to that part of the joint.

I think airlines need to go all out at their home port when it comes to their own lounges. Qantas, who are tighter than the proverbial fish's bum even capitulated when it came time to build their new F lounges. They threw caution to the wind and hired some chic interior design firm, who must have been slightly inebriated when they crafted their bid because they added many zero’s after the initial estimate. I think they sent it in as a joke.

Even though bashing Qantas is a national sport and a revered Aussie pastime, I have always been impressed with the way Qantas approaches lounges. You should be too.

The rather frightening thing I realized as I approached the edges of the US is that my solo journey was about to be rudely interrupted.

You see, my wife was landing within 5 minutes of me. She had, to my astonishment, booked an AirBnB joint and said that it was ok if I crashed there with her. Our daughter was airborne, and was due to land in the wee hours of the coming morning.

But like many things with travel and our family, things were not well in Venice Beach. For starters, my wife had rented a car. This for most people is a relatively straightforward affair.

However, the vehicle they gave my wife, well someone had recently power vomited in it. Not wanting to be rude and say anything, the mother of my children drove around with her head shoved out the window and telling herself that “the smell will buff out”. Which it clearly did not.

Then it disintegrated further when she got to the AirBnB. It literally was in a ghetto. As in the ghetto. She refused to get out of the car and promptly spun around and scurried back to the airport.

No sense of adventure is all I can say.

So we ended up getting a room at the Hyatt Regency. My wife then regaled me with the horrors of her travel experience that day. I essentially told her that stuff like that never happens to me and that she must have just been unlucky.

We’ll all be running for the hills if she ever does discover FT. Make no mistake, she’ll come after everyone. I wont even be safe in a Federal witness protection program.

In the immortal words of every child riding in the back seat of the family mini-van somewhere on a US interstate this week…

“Are we there yet?”

Well, yes we are. Sort of.

Small world! NR/Zambia was my first introduction to putzis as well... Freaky things, but ultimately survivable :D Actually they were on my poor dog, not me, as my underwear was all heavily ironed as a rule...

I believe this fact was well established several trip reports back, but it's always good to see it reaffirmed.:p

Wow. This is priceless stuff. Great reading and report.

As always, great report, Simon.

Totally agree with you re LH F....the Grand Siecle champagne served is but as minor failing, IMHO.
(Apologies to the king of Dom P, macabus).

A recent news story claims LH consumes 1/4 of the world's annual caviar production.
I always do my part to help them maintain that statistic.

Glad you made it back to the USA.

good lord, this TR kept be on the edge of my seat ... and probably foaming at the mouth too but thats ok. :)

Can you share a link to that story?

I find it hard to believe given that LH F is almost never full, and they only have one box of caviar per flight (and usually I'm the only one eating any).

I would have imagined the likes of EK get through more...

It's not quarter, it is however, five percent.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/repo...ticle14174392/

Thanks for sharing. In airline industry terms I wouldn't call 4 years recent, either, especially considering how many routes LH is taking F off of, but sure, they are a large global consumer of caviar, which I guess is not surprising.

No worries. I've since moved on to greener pastures with JL and their exceptional 2002-2004 vintages of Salon Blanc de Blanc in F.

Awesome job eightblack. I agree about LH, there's just something that puts them over the edge for me.

LH buys a lot of Italian farmed caviar and caters more than one can per flight. EK serves Iranian eggs, ripped from the bowels of peaceloving innocent sturgeons caught in the wild. Whether they taste different at FL320 after you had a few beverages of choice only 8 can tell. ;)
The champagne changes frequently, a history is chronicled here: http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/lufth...ampagne-f.html

eightblack, outstanding as usual! Hope you won't be away so long this time.

Do you sometimes tell people about us? Not me and you. But you and us. As in FT us. Ay Carumba, that’s a messy sentence. But I know you understand.

Even though I fell off the grid for a little while, FT was always there in the back of my mind. I think it always will be. This community is way better than a religion and it’s far more fun than a cult. We actually get stuff done.

I mean take my wife for example. Seriously, someone take her.

Kidding. But actually, her sister is free.

Anyway, my better half wisely decided to come collect our daughter. Incidentally, why do people say “my better half?” My better half is from the waist down, not the woman I married. But I digress. So she booked her plane ticket, booked something called an AirBNB and then for good measure, threw in a rental car.

In the space of 2 days, she aborted the accommodation, blindly accepted the puke mobile from whoever she rented it off and then blew off a pair of plane tickets because our temperamental teenager decided that she didn’t want to stay in LAX after all – and in an attempt to annoy me, they both decided to fly home on the same flight as me.

And that’s the fundamental difference.

A true believer, a true FT’er wouldn’t tolerate such nonsense. Firstly, any serious member of our tribe wouldn’t contemplate using AirBNB unless there were a pot of points at the other end. And no serious FT’er would accept a puke filled rental car without a full on arm waving session with a person of importance - which resulted in a full refund, a wad of upgrade vouchers and a date with the station managers hot ex wife. And who just blows off 2 perfectly serviceable airline tickets, without at least trying to pry something of value from an overworked agent. Or their dimwitted reservation engine. Hang Up And Try Again means nothing to the people who refuse to follow. Or learn.

To me, the very essence of travel is not just the destination, but the whole maximizing the last drop out of the journey. I’m still a hack compared to most, and while I might like to regale the odd person on here with my First Class exploits, the simple truth of the matter is that I might have only ever paid for revenue F once or twice. And that was between Australia and New Zealand. So it hardly counts.

Sure, I’ve had plenty of client-funded travel where I accidentally booked revenue F. Like 25 times in a row. But the client in question was this quirky little German software company and their accounting department was run by a portly woman called Stephanie who kept asking me if I wanted a Weiner Schnitzel for lunch. Every single day I was in the office. Apparently she loved Australia and all things Australian. But hey, I can’t help it if she wanted me. She’s only human.

Ok, I think we’re done. For now. I’m writing this from my favorite watering hole (the same place Number 1 son washes dishes). My current wife says I spend way too much time here. By the way, if you do actually meet her one fateful day, we all need to stick to the same story. My handle isn’t “eightblack” on FT and I go to the local pub maybe once every 6 months. I’m counting on you to back me up. Otherwise I’m going to be living in your basement. And drinking your bourbon.

As I was winging my way home last night from LA, I thought how lucky I have been to be a part of a community such as FT. I mean, 2 FT’ers had a significant part to play in the logistics of this very trip. Actually maybe I can blame them for the whole thing going pear shaped.

To everyone who posted a comment, I thank you. This is my favorite corner on FT. For very good reason. There are some simply stupendous story tellers. Way, way better than me. People like Macabus. Seat2A. And SFO777. The list goes. I never get tired of reading their tales.

Over and out. Or if you speak teenager…Yeet!Yeet! And YeeBoi!

This was such a joy to read! I hope you stick around!

It was certainly a different experience reading an eightblack trip report as it was being posted. Wonderful report, kudos.

Man I've missed these. Hope you're able to pop around a bit more often ... you've been missed.

Hold up for a second. Did eightblack actually just finish a trip report?! Hell may be about to freeze over :p:D

Anyway I may be in the Denver area next month, and if so, keep an eye on your PMs.

Wow. I'm fairly new to FT and never heard of the apparently infamous eightblack. But when I saw a trip report with 108 posts in 11 days, I had to check it out. I'm so glad that I did! That was amazing :)

Thank you. I've enjoyed reading excerpts of it during our family dinners. Always a great read.

"I thought the CX flight was just ok. Nothing special. I didn’t want to be rude when the polite staffer offered me a bottle of Krug although I did object a little bit when they served the champagne at the same temperature as the surface of the sun."
YES - even though I repeatedly ask for the champagne to be made colder I am amazed that they don't understand the importance of serving it COLD (although they are marginally better than american airlines that seem to think warm and flat is the best way to serve....but I digress)
So even after I ask for GASP ice to be put in the champagne they still don't make it colder for my subsequent glasses over the next while (really they have ice, a bucket, and water - sort of the basics for cooling the bottle)
Add my thanks for so much fun reading :)

I highly recommend reading his other reports. https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/trip...-long-way.html is a favorite.

I've already started :)

Thank you for the laughs ^ :D

I mis-read that at first, sonomawine - and had images of you reading out excerpts, like a bard in the great hall :)

(Not to say an eightblack post shouldn't be declaimed, though!)

EightBlack you MUST post more regularly!

I saw this report after such a long absence and I was all "Yeeskies! This is gonna be yeetastic boi!"

After reading this I must say this trip report is so tony!

(I must have a lie down now after using up my entire vocabulary of whatever that is)

fantastic read! Thank you,Sir!

Thank you, eightblack, for a most joyous read this morning. Yes, I've only just discovered your post by carelessly visiting the TR section of FT looking for something else. I prostrate myself before an outstanding story-teller [check spelling, yes, that's prostrate. Whew]. Now I really must get on with doing the small chores I was supposed to be doing.

Salutations, Sir.

EPIC report! Thank you for telling the story. Trully enjoyed it.

Fantastic work, eightblack. Thanks for the laughs!