Innocence

Bandung – the Return

The China design job is not complete yet, but the boss has agreed to let me continue the work back in Bandung and I arrived back home at midnight last Friday.

The two leg flight should have been straight forward, but we all know that rarely happens don’t we :)

I left the Shanghai apartment/hotel at 06:00am and caught a taxi straight away, a positive start to the journey. The ride took an hour as expected. This gave me more than enough time before my 09:50 flight. I like to be early, proud of the fact that I have never missed a flight due to my fault.

The flight landed at Singapore on time (15:35), but by the time I had made it to the baggage collection it was 16:00 and the flight to Bandung was 17:10. The bags did not reach me until 16:30 and I had to check all the way out.

I then had to make my way to terminal 1 from terminal 3 to check in at the AirAsia desk. The flight was not listed on the big display board, but I remembered that it was around isle 12 or 13, naturally the other end of the building.

It was now 16:50 and plainly obvious to me that they were not going to let me on the flight. In fact, the check-in queue was sooo long that even if the flight was an hour later, I doubt if I would have made it, so I didn’t bother. I went outside for a smoke to relax and make a plan.

The airline is under no obligation to help you when you screw up, so showing up at the ticket sales counter and start banging on the desk is not going to score you any air miles, so I went to the information counter and pinched a couple of sweets.

Back to the sales counter, presented my little gift, admitted my error with a sheepish smile and threw myself at the charming young lady’s mercy. She laughed and charged me $50 to re-book to the next flight at 22:40.

Obviously a long wait, but the rest of the trip went without incident. The taxi trying to rip me off for double the already hyper inflated fare, is normal. I just paid the correct amount and the driver accepted the payment with a shrug of his shoulders and helped me with my bags.

Unfortunately, I had to wake the neighbours to get the key, but that could not be helped. They welcomed me with a smile and all was well.

The resident family of shrews were probably not too happy. Judging by the extremely pungent aroma of shrew piss, they’d had a great time in my absence of eight months. Once I chipped off all the dried turds from the keyboard, everything worked fine. It took a couple of days to get the phone and internet sorted out and obviously the motorbike was totally dead. The bike should be ready by Monday afternoon and I can begin to get my life back in order.

Good to be back :)

Dave