Daily Archives: November 25, 2009

Made it!

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At about 1:30 am Manila time I finally made it into the hotel, which means that I traveled for nearly exactly 24 hours to make it here.  Exhausting!  It was interesting at the main Manila airport (Where the service goes the extra SMILE!) where it was line after line that seemed fairly pointless.  Medical, then immigration, then finally customs.  Before customs I waited a good ten minutes to turn $40 int a solid 1860 Pesos, of which my taxi ride from the airport (another 1o minute line) cost 240.  Arriving at the airport, they insisted on calling Kristin’s room to make sure she was really expecting me, gave me a key and I had finally arrived.  Whew!  Too bad the key they gave me broke Kristin’s keys, but I suppose it couldn’t be perfect.  It is awesome to be with Kristin again!  🙂

On the plane I was super annoyed with an older lady who took my Window seat.  She practically refused to move, finally saying “well, I don’t want to be sandwiched between two men!”   I just kept reiterating that she was in my seat.  As a stewardess came over to see what was up just as I said, “fine.”  She asked me if I was sure that was OK, I just nodded and sat down, not wanting to push it anymore.  The lady got the patented MN passive aggressive treatment from then on as I pretended she wasn’t there.  But when I looked at her, sleeping with her head against the bulkhead, which was the only reason I had wanted a window seat, I knew she had come out ahead.  Sigh.  I didn’t even get out the noise canceling earphones, which actually served as awesome earplugs on the first leg.  I read a little, watched the movie without sound (its amazing how much more of the set details and acting you can absorb that way) and mentally willed the time to go faster.  It felt as long as the first flight.

I think it is time to go wander around having successfully retrieved three roles of toilet paper which they are unexpectedly stingy with in a $110 a night hotel.  Called the front desk and talked to two different maids in the hallway and put that in the stash.  I have the “please clean our room” tag out, so hopefully we’ll get at least one more as I have stashed the rest away 🙂

–Nat

Trip to Manila, flight leg #1

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It’s hard to believe that I left at ~10 am and showed up here about 15 hours later with about 12 hours of flight time.  I must have fallen asleep everytime they got ready to trundle out the drink cart, because I got one diet coke on the entire flight.  I managed to get all three meals, though but I would have been way better off missing one of them and getting a couple more diet sodas.  Thanks to Dan for showing me the empty waterbottle trick  (bring empty waterbottles and fill them at the drinking fountains post security checkpoint) when we went to Dugway, it would have been much more irritating had I not had my own bottled water to fall back on.

I had the great fortune of having a window seat and an adjacent empty seat.  Since the 747 configuration featured 3 seats in the outside rows, that meant the lady on the aisle and myself shared the middle seat as a place to store our stuff.  I was quick to steal the extra mini-pillow, too, and I think I probably slept about four hours during the flight.  Strangely, the first movie shown was “The Time Travelers Wife.”  This was strange because I was listening to the audio book at the same time.  From what I saw of the movie, you should read the book.  Next up was “Land of Lost” with Will Ferrell – an airplane is a perfect venue for that movie, for sure.  Not good, but mildly amusing and you don’t feel bad if you miss some of it.  I managed to listen to about three more hours of that audio book and read sixty pages of the new Stephen King novel Under the Dome which is starting out well.

Dad, I made sure to choose the beef for the inflight meal.  It at least resembled beef 😉

–Nat