Nova’s Journey – Singapore Trip, Day 1: The Departure

Author: NovaJinx

And so my long-awaited trip to the Southeast Asia has begun. I will be doing a series of blog posts on my antics on that side of the world as well as the main goal of my trip, the Anime Festival Asia ‘09.

Travel log 18th of Nov.

6am
Couldn’t sleep much at all last night, too anxious and excited. Thanks to a pilot strike, all Finnair flights were canceled including mine, so I was forced to quickly book a flight from another airline to Frankfurt from where my intercontinental flight to Singapore departs.

8:20am
Boarding a train headed for Tampere. Unfortunately the replacement flight is operated by a bargain airline that operates from small airports, so no sipping beer at Helsinki-Vantaa international terminal. Instead I’m headed for Tampere airport which can barely qualify as international and as far as I’ve understood is mainly used for freight and domestic flights.

10am
Arriving at Tampere airport. The terminal is a sheet-steel shack with cracking floor and generally worn-out look. The fat, very tired-looking woman at the info desk looks at me like a dog turd on her shiny desk and rudely tells me to wait for the check-in to open in two hours. 4 hours to departure.

Noon.
Check-in finally opens. And when they say it opens at 12:30, they actually mean that the staff comes to work at that hour, not that you can actually check-in for another 15 minutes.

2pm
30 minutes to departure, boarding is supposed to start but no staff has showed up at the gate and the aircraft is nowhere to be seen. 15 minutes later an announcement informs us that the aircraft will be delayed for an hour. Everyone rushes for the small bar upstairs. Beer must flow.

3:15pm
The drunk, tired and pissed off people finally get to board the airplane that arrives and nearly blows down the entire terminal. I swear, the building has no kind of sound barriers of any sort and any aircraft passing anywhere nearby will cause unbelievable noise and trembling of the entire structure. The aircraft is of course the cheapest piece of junk that is still allowed to fly within the EU and has minimal sound-proofing, making the cabin noise headcrackingly loud. VROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO-

5pm
The plane arrives at Frankfurt-Hahn, mad rush ensues as people flock the bus leaving for Frankfurt International which is 120km away. It’s very hot in the bus. Suicidal thoughts.

6:45pm
The bus arrives at Frankfurt International. Frantic searching of the Qantas check-in desk, driving around on trams from terminal to another.

7:30pm
Check-in opens. An endless line of fat, smelly British tourists rush the counters. Wondering if the ballistic armor plate in my backpack will cause some confusion in the security checks.

7:45pm
Cleared the check-in and entered the international side without too many problems. Burger King and beer. 30 minutes of hanging around the wrong gates, quick relocation and successful clearing of yet another checkpoint. The security dude was the coolest ever, almost took my PSP. Recharging laptop for the intercontinental flight. Departure for Singapore Changi airport in one hour.

This all posted from the gate at Frankfurt International. I’m still pretty damn hyped but the lack of sleep is slowly taking over. I guess this will be the first intercontinental flight on which I’ve actually managed to sleep. The weather forecast for Singapore shows it’s gonna rain shit and old ladies for pretty much my entire stay but it’s not like I was going for an outdoors holiday anyway. More posts coming soon, stay tuned.

P.S. No pictures yet, sorry. Fucking Samsung PC Studio took way too long installing so I didn’t get a chance to upload any yet. I will add pics later along with the next post.

Tags: beer, offtopic, singapore