Escaping winter

31 August 2019

The Auckland winter ends tonight officially and the weather hasn’t been too wet or windy lately.  It isn’t really that cold by many standards in four-season countries.  However, I know that the wet and windy misery can stretch on till November (or December) so hence I have another escape from Auckland … even if it’s on the last day of winter.

I begin this trip by flying to Singapore.  With an ETD of 1005, I arrived at the airport at 0800.  It was buzzing, perhaps it is Saturday morning with lots of people going for their escape from winter.  Despite being on standby, the kiosk gave me my boarding pass without manual intervention.  That was very welcome as the queue for the helpdesk was long.

It was a 20 minute process through immigration and security with some queueing.  The ushers were kinda abrupt with people.   With everything going quicker than expected, I had some time to kill in the lounge before departure. 

My flight left about 10 mins late.  I was seated in an aisle seat; there were a handful of empty seats around but one would have to be extremely lucky to be beside one.  I reckon I had been very lucky with the seating assignment for this long daylight flight.

Time went quickly with reading, comedies and chatting to the Johorean couple next to me.  The meals were OK for a mixed audience and I had a chicken curry followed by a beef rendang for the second meal.  The latter was a little too yellow, but my philosophy is that food doesn’t have to be authentic … it only needs to be nice if one were to ignore the name that has been applied to it.

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