The Loooong Flight to the Philippines
My flight left JFK on Monday, May 15th, 2006 3:45pm Eastern Time. I arrived in Manila Airport on Tuesday, May 16th, 2006 12:00pm Eastern Time. That’s roughly 20 hours.
Wow, that was a long trip.
The first leg of the trip was mostly me weaving in and out of consciousness, working on Golden Age backgrounds with my Lenovo Thinkpad X41T Tablet PC, ignoring the guy sitting next to me, constantly misunderstanding the pretty stewardesses, and watching two movies: Serenity (really good, scifi film), and Hotel Rwanda (really good, disturbing, Oscar-caliber film – probably not a good choice going to a third world country) – both using my laptop naturally (I totally ignored the nice LCD screen bolted on the seat in front of me, except for the time duration information and the cool rear plane live camera feed – just clouds mostly). The upside of the trip was that each seat in economy class had a power outlet – despite what I was told earlier – configured for empower plugs (which I fortunately had the foresight to buy before leaving), so I was fully powered the whole trip. The downside was that the seat was incredibly cramped, and I found myself standing on the seat on occasion just to maneuver my body around or search my backpack. The food was nothing to write home about and really not very exotic for an airline called Cathay (I was expecting pork lomein but got a ham and cheese sandwich instead).
The second leg of the trip was the flight from Hong Kong to the Philippines. I didn’t get to see much of HK save for its airport, which looked like any other modern airport. I got lost at some point, but found my way by following people that looked more like me. The flight itself was only an hour and a half, and I slept the entire way. The guy sitting next to me seemed friendlier, and everyone sounded like a relative of mine.