Just ranting

28/9/2008


Ven & I got up pretty early that morning, so we could have breakfast before taking the ferry.

I was well aware that Jangmi was on its way to Taiwan, had been keeping an eye on it since 26/9. Thought I could get lucky.

After back to HK, Ven & I went our separate ways. She back to home sweet home, me to HKIA for my 13:30 flight.

Not more than 10min, Ven called, said the taxi driver had heard an announcement on the radio. All flights to/from Taiwan after 12:00 had been delayed, included mine. But I was optimistic, as always, Ven commented more than once I'd been too much of it.

Anyway, I wasn't worried, just got a text message from the airline said my flight would depart according to schedule, and called the hotline just to make sure. Everything looked fine. So I got on the airport bus.

It started to get bad from here.

Half way to HKIA, another message from CX, my flight had been delayed. What could I do? I was stuck on the bus in the mid of highway. Was heading to the airport anyway.

When I got there, it looked peaceful. Went straight to the check-in counter, hoped to get my boarding pass. Shouldn't be hard, I'd done online check-in already. No such luck.

The pretty CX crew told me the flight's delayed, got to wait till 14:00 for "further notice". And "please go to counter F14-18 for assistance". That's standard.

So I went to Terminal 2 to hang out a bit, watched some news in the Apple store. And yes, they got an Apple store in HKIA. What people do here? Buy a brand new MacBook and hook up to free WiFi?! Jez...

Around 13:15, got another text message, said my flight's been delay to "5:30, 29 Sep". Note, it's "5:30", not 05:30, not 5:30pm. What's that? Of course gotta ask CX ppl. "Oh, it means 5:30am tomorrow," another pretty CX crew said, "and you have to go to F14-18 for check-in."

I got there, but it's chaotic. There're already like 500ppl gathering around with no order at all. Just couldn't figure out where the line(s) was/were. I just wandered around outside that herd of ppl. After 10min, found a senior CX crew, asked her about the line. (Did it exist at all?) Lucky for me, I was in HK, not the Mainland China. When a line's drawn, ppl actually queue up along it. The senior crew was actually working on getting security draw some lines and get ppl in order, well, as much as they could.

So, I got a line to queue up. Then started to talked to the lady in front of me, who happened to be from Taiwan. She had a boutique in Taipei, and was travelling with her staff and buying goods in HK. They got quite a lot of luggage, 4 big suit cases.



To be continued...