I missed my flight to Japan
Monday morning, so I bought a new ticket and flew to Osaka from
Bangkok, departing just before midnight. I often travel for my work,
and in so doing I develop an extensive and peculiar knowledge of
airports and airlines. The Thai Airways and Japan Airlines flights that
depart at midnight on the Bangkok to Japan route do not serve dinner,
but rather serve breakfast on the plane. That seems sensible. The
Singapore Airlines flight, however, on the same Bangkok to Tokyo route,
departing at midnight, offers a full dinner, but no breakfast. What
airline has the best ceilings? My vote is for Emirates, with a
simulated star-filled sky above the aisles when the cabin lights are
dimmed. Try it. Flights from Japan to the US are surreal; one can
usually watch the sunrise and sunset in Japan, then fly east and watch
the sunrise and sunset again, yet on the same day.
The funniest moments on airplanes are when someone smokes in the
lavatory. Announcements through the public address system become quite
shrill, and usually in a foreign language, and one generally knows the
term for smoking in a number of languages. On a long boring flight,
shrill denouncements of lavatory smoking can be interesting.
And there is an occasional view out the window that one will remember:
any sunrise or sunset; Mt. Fuji descending to Haneda; a flight over
Iran 2 weeks ago; any approach into the Pacific Northwest.