Sitting in UB airport at twenty to three in the morning is not the best start to any trip. The airport was strangely quiet earlier today at a couple of hours before flight time, apart from for Postcard Man – the longest surviving airport ‘employee’. The reason being that the flight had been delayed until eleven that evening, a ten-hour delay. Now call me suspicious but when a airline tells you there is going to be a ten-hour delay on a two-hour flight its generally not a weather or a mechanical issue, especially if exactly the same thing happens a couple of times in a week (people waiting for Air China’s flight to Beijing on the 6th were told the same delay). Nope – this reeks of a scheduled event due to Air China not wanting to change their timetable in the face of reality.
So after an afternoon waiting around UB my girlfriend and I duly headed back out to the airport for nine in the evening. Eleven o’clock came and went, which had been the delayed flight time, and shortly afterwards the announced delay had an hour added to it. When the MIAT flight to Seoul, due to leave at half past one in the morning, started to check in before us we could see our time slipping further and further away.
And god, was the airport this evening the best ever argument for having a ticket check two kilometres down the road to filter out the extended families coming to say their goodbyes. Groups of teenagers with clothes looking like they fell off the back of an Oxfam Hercules took endless photos of one another on the latest five-hundred dollar mobile phones. One young girl sported a pair of jogging pants with “enter the filly party” written right across her buttocks, that left me pondering for quite a while…Mothers would be fawning over their departing offspring, siblings would be turning away to cry, farther would be stoically standing by, sometimes swaying slightly with the first effects of slightly too much earlier fairwell vodka. Finally, and hour after the Seoul flight had been called, mother (dressed in her best pinstripe with an aging ‘Russian mafia doll’ hairdo and rather too much face-whitener) would realise the little darlins would miss their flight if they didn’t get to the very front of the check-in queue en masse.
Anyway (yep, I love starting sentences with that word) After the scrum for the check-in we were spat out through immigration and security to wait for another couple of hours air-side. Finally, at three in the morning they announced the arrival of flight CA901, that would turn around as CA902 and hopefully transport us all down to Beijing. So, a five-thirty arrival in Beijing… should be checking into the hotel at about six to six-thirty in the morning… That was about the time I was planning to wake up from a nice refreshing eight-hour sleep in the luxury of my normal Bangkok Hotel.
Thank you Air China. I would be cutting up my frequent-flyer card if it didn’t get me a quick check-in in Beijing. Actually as I never intend to use you again I think the card will face the scissors anyway…
T
Now 10 past 3 in UB airport.
