February 1, 2002

Hmm … first of all, I guess I should change the time on my notebook to not use Eastern Standard Time (EST) :p But that brings up another matter that I’ve been contemplating during the flight – whether it is feasible to add time zone support (as well as static storage of the time zone of each post …) to Blog. I’m not even sure whether this is programmatically possible (though I might try to find out after I finish this entry …) but if it is, I probably will add that. Anyway, on to other stuff …

The reason that I mentioned the time on my computer was because I’m typing this sometime in the afternoon on Saturday high atop the skies over Tokyo whereas Blog thinks it’s late at night on Friday :p My streak of bad-luck continued last night when I got to Tokyo. Since we were delayed around six hours in Detroit, my connecting flight to Singapore was obviously gone 🙁 NorthWest had me assigned to a different flight to Bangkok from where I was supposed to get a connecting flight to Singapore and then on to Colombo on my already scheduled flight. We boarded the flight to Bangkok, the aircraft even pulled away from the gate but then we sat on the tarmac for a while … we seemed about to take off when the captain suddenly came on the PA system and said that we’d exceeded the 11 o’clock airport curfew in Tokyo by thirty seconds and that we had to return to the gate!! As you can imagine, some of the other passengers were pretty pissed off and there ensued a long argument between the flight crew and some of the passengers about what to do (or rather what they wanted the flight crew to do – which did not include any unmentionable physical acts though I’m sure some passengers at least thought of it <vbg>)

We finally got out and were told that we’d be put on another flight to Bangkok tomorrow morning. I didn’t want to go to Bangkok and then on to Singapore and then find that my connecting flight to Colombo was gone, so I talked to the NorthWest staff in Tokyo. They were helpful enough and found me an alternate flight straight to Colombo from Tokyo but that took quite a long while and it was past midnight in Tokyo by this time. NorthWest put us up in a hotel and I simply got there, had something to eat, called home to let my parents know what was going on and then crashed 🙂

The unfortunate side-effect of all this was that I was unable do some shopping in Singapore that I’d been planning on – to get a bluetooth enabled cellular phone 🙁 Ah well … maybe in Sri Lanka or some other time I guess – not that I’m planning to fly anywhere in the near future :p I got to the airport again today in the morning, got through the usual stuff and for a change, the Sri Lankan flight to Colombo even took off on time. So here I am on the plane writing this soon after we took off … It’s a nine and a half hour flight and hopefully the streak of bad luck is over – I’ll just keep my fingers crossed 🙂

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Posted by Fahim at 11:42 pm  |  No Comments