First leg of the journey

Saturday March 29 2014

Current location: Kuala Lumpur – Low Cost Carrier Terminal

We flew from Melbourne at 1.30am landing 8 or so hours later at 6.30am in Malaysia. Originally we were only transiting through (with a layover of 7 hours) but since we wanted to use the lounge with showers, food etc. we had to enter the country to get landside to use the lounge. Ah, well.

It’s now 5 hours later and it was definitely worth the extra queuing. Far more to see and do over this side. Premium Plaza Lounge is very comfortable and worth the entry price.

Actually we are both very happy with Air Asia X so far – very clean, newish fit out of the plane. Our first point of contact being the check-in staff at Melbourne was very positive. She checked our baggage all the way through to Tokyo, got us the row to ourselves and added to that she was cheerful and pleasant throughout.

I’m very happy with such an easy start to the journey. Steve is wary as we’ve still another leg of our journey to go. I guess I’m just grateful for how it’s proceeding so far. I believe we are due to arrive at Haneda airport at 11pm Tokyo time so we should sleep well by the time we’ve taxied to our hotel.

A few weeks ago a Malaysian Airlines plane (MH370) went missing without a trace. Obviously there was much wild conjecture about what transpired. There’s an American program on the TV here in the lounge about the missing flight but nobody really seems to be watching it. Interestingly we are travelling with Malaysian Airlines low cost sibling Air Asia X.

We humans seem to lose interest in things very quickly. Clearly this is partly an innate quality and the fast pace of media I our modern world capitalises and possibly extends this attribute.

There’s food on offer here in the lounge and it’s most very edible. There’s simple rice congee, fried rice, thin spicy vegetarian noodles (my pick of the bunch) scrambled eggs, baked beans, toast, cereal and some apples/oranges. For gratis, I’m mostly satisfied. Tea, coffee, soft drink, juice and local Tiger beer round it all out quite nicely.

I’ve got my feet up; I’m cleanly showered and I’m relaxing just nicely.

6pm

We are about halfway through our flight to Tokyo. There’s a young child screaming their lungs out – poor thing (and parent/s). Both flights have actually been relatively peaceful {we did upgrade to Air Asia X’s ‘quiet zone’}

I commented to Steve whilst we were browsing a bookshop in KL airport that I felt certain assumptions could be made regarding local culture seeing as a large percentage of shelf space was given over to business management texts. Certainly, this was not something I had noticed in Australia or America for that point.