25 March 2008

I’m at the terminal watching people come and go. Checking my itinery to make sure I know what’s happening. I have about an hour to wait. Thought I should get to the terminal early to avoid the maddening crowd. Customs here in New Zealand was really good. Very pleasant. They asked me to take of my belt so it could go through the scanner. Fortunately I was wearing my jeans, otherwise I think I might have a breezy mid-section. They like to scan the computer separately. They even wanted to have it out of the case.
It’s 10.40am. More people now. Still fairly quiet though. Might head down to the gate shortly. Had to pay $25 Airport tax.
Well, we headed away on time. 12 midday. It’s amazing how many movies you can watch in 9 hours 30 minutes, … or was it 10 hours thirty minutes. It was a long time. There was ‘Elizabeth, the golden age’, ‘Atonement’, ‘Coyote Ugly’, ‘Beowulf’ (I only saw part of that. Not sure they should have made it all CG. It didn’t look very good at all. The animation was on a level with ‘Final Fantasy, a spirit within.’) My favorite movie for the whole trip has to be ‘August Rush’. It’s described as a modern fairy tale. Lots of appropriate music, in fact the music was the winner for me. Its just as well we were having lunch about the time I was watching this one. I needed my tissue a lot, and it wasn’t because I kept spilling my meal. You know how much of a softy I am when it comes to emotional movies. Robyn Williams and Keri Russell are in this one. Its an interesting role for Robyn Williams. Not his usual hilarious, fast talking comedy character. He is more the Fagin type from Charles Dixens Oliver.
The food on the plane was really nice. The hostesses were very helpful. My most amusing aspect of the whole trip was trying to figure out the controls for the in flight entertainment. I was still finding new things when we landed in Singapore. For example, when I switched channels to watch a different movie, more often than not it was already half way through the movie, so I would fast forward to the end to start again. As we were landing I figured out that all I needed to do was press the stop button twice to take me back to the beginning. I can imagine that if my Children had been there, they would have had it sorted in the first half hour of the flight.
We landed from about 3 metres above the ground, which was a bit rough but that was the only down side to the flight. We seemed to spend a lot of time above Australia. Couldn’t see any kangaroos though. For most of the trip, we were travelling at about 1000 kmh.
Going through Customs at Singapore was very straight forward. When I stepped outside into the evening air it was like stepping into an oven. The humidity was close on 100%. I got into the hotel at around 7pm local time. That would have been around midnight NZ time.