Twenty-five Thousand Kms and Five Minutes From Home

Ahh, the joys of international travel.
Left Jakarta Friday morning @ 7 am. Arrived in Vancouver 800 years later, Friday afternoon at 2:30pm. Go figure. As I flew over the international dateline I waiting for the feeling I was younger by a day but in vain. Lotta hogwash as far as I can figure.
Had a nightmare trip with Cathay last year; cold crappy food, surly service, wooden benches for seats, late leaving, late arriving etc etc. In other words, identical to business class in most if not all North American carriers.
Things went fairly smoothly between Jakarta-Hong Kong (except for the Sing stop no one bothered to mention to me). The new HK airport is vile and sterile which may work for Chinese people but leaves me flat. You’d think they could put a bit of greenery in there the beat the icy, morgue-like spaces that extend as far as you can see as you make the 20 minute journey from gate 80 to gate 4. And the signage was abysmal. No mention anywhere of a shuttle train between the two principal terminal! I thought it was me until I saw plenty other folks with that “look” gazing at banks of flight info and airport layouts in Kanji trying to figure out what was going on. Like a scene from that old Eastwood movie where he climbs into the cockpit of a prototype fighter jet he plans to steal only to discover all the instructions are written in Cyrillic.
And, dammit, after having humped my way over to the right terminal I discover the only pharmacy in the whole place is, you guessed it, back about 100 meters from where I landed. In the end, after 90 minutes on the ground, I made my gate a quarter of an hour before scheduled departure. Or so I thought.
This time ‘round we were only 45 minutes late pulling outta the HK terminal, riding seats designed by Mr. Chips and, horror-of-horrors, discovered my “Personal Entertainment System”, the three and a half inch screen recessed into the top of the seat in front of me, didn’t work. No movies or Donkey Kong for 14 hours!
Made the necessary scene with the flight supervisor (“bla bla bla foreign correspondent…bla bla bla.. fly across Asia regularly… bla bla bla) but unfortunately, every seat in the plane was full including those in business and first class so I was stuck with it. And a box of chocolates. And a promise that customer service would be in touch. Right.
So I slept the whole way. Or at least most of it. Popped a melatonin pill (all the rage among long-haul Asia-Pacific fliers the past few years: pineal gland produces the substance that has some vaguely defined impact on the body’s clock and supplementing it tricks your brain into thinking everything is a-ok) and wham, goodbye Hong Kong, hello coast mountains. Okay, fair to say I woke up every 20 minutes for eight hours but at least I slept. From sometime after the forgettable chicken pasta until the smell of runny plastic omelets and bitter coffee work me up 2:20 minutes before arriving in Van. Cool eh?
Didn’t have a chance to read most of the in-flight fare I picked up in Jak and Sing: August’s “Bike” magazine, the best rag of its type in the world, the new UK version of “Stuff”, the electronics mag that plays to my vain inner geek who needs things like the Archos AV340 ($700US) a multi-media jukebox with a high rez 3.8-inch-wide screen mounted on a body only slightly larger, housing a 40 gig disk that’ll carry 50 full-length movies, runs MPEG-4 video files to 25-frames-per-second, all bundled with something called the digital video recording module that allows you to record straight from TV (replacing the VCR). There’s a 3.3 megapixel digi-cam attachment that also shoots 320x240 pixel video (like my four-year-old Sony DSCR-50 still cam) and an MP3 player (though no info about how much storage space but presumably you’re saving onto the hard drive alongside the flix). Not bad, squeezing all that into a package that’ll almost fit in the palm of your hand.
Ate Time magazine in under 45 minutes, enjoying particularly the front-end essay about the declining fortunes of Hong Kong plane spotters since the closure of the old Kai Tak airport, the one with the runway that extended 300 meters into HK harbour. Only hole in an otherwise nicely written story? Not a single Chinese voice; foreigners only and, one suspects, Brits all.
And, I’ll have to wait till some other time to read Men’s Journal, which is as close as you can get to a mainstream gay magazine that pretends it’s not really a mainstream gay magazine by including three pages of pix of former Chili Pepper guitarist Dave Navarro’s workout regime and an article a few pages on about how thongs for men are the next big thing.
Anyway, it was a pretty painful trip and now I’m sitting in Rick and Stacy’s kitchen at 645 am having snoozed another eight hours away. They’re both looking great and young Ruby, now 15 months is scuttling about without a care in the world, highly interactive child after getting over 10 minutes of shyness. Looks lovely in the new, dark-blue batik dress Jay and I chose for her during my pre-departure oleh-oleh run in Pasar Raya, Blok M last week. Ruby has huge blue eyes and blond hair so the color really works. One down and three to go!
The house itself is really nice, up above Robson Park where we used to play tennis and soccer with views out to the North Shore mountains and east towards Abby. Nice big yard and room for flower gardens (there’s a big, fat robin sitting on the fence right now) and few if any junkies – except for the former crack-head United Church minister across the street who allows hypes to use his space to get off: sounds kind of unhealthy for anyone who is ‘recovering’ to create that kind of environment methinks.
They had a helluva time getting the place and have been rewarded with a lovely space.
Taxi dropped me off here at about 3 yesterday afternoon, two hours later I was on the court being taught a lesson in humility (I’ve not played much – once actually - since getting sick last year: my only lame excuse) followed by brews at the Biltmore Hotel with Rick n Dave. It was so beautiful yesterday, probably about 27C, a few clouds and a slight breeze: Vancouver at it’s ultimate best. Indy weekend here so the downtown is gonna be mad.
The Biltyw was my old stomping ground when I lived with Dee on E 10th back in 1993-94 (Holy shit, 10 years?) about five minutes and five short blocks from Rick’s place. The scene of the misguided marriage proposal to my old live-in love has fallen victim to the same city council cigarette Nazis as the rest of the bars and restaurants in the Lower Mainland, forcing them to build a glass enclosure for smokers where the entire bar sat whist we were there. Similar to the smoking rooms your find in most airports if slightly less vile.
Rick says the new Punjabi management have scared off all the Natives (The old biker owners couldn’t have cared less and probably actually encouraged the alcoholics as long as they had money in their pockets) so the place really doesn’t take off at night the way it used to, though I suspect the fact that its four days before the end of the month welfare cheque day might have put a dent in attendance too.
Today I’m off to take care of the storage locker, take a trip down memory lane before ousting a bunch of stuff. Dave’s daughter has left us her Ranger so hopefully we’ll be able to take care of it all in one go. Later, plan to hook up with Karen and maybe Darren for drinks. Gotta call Andrew and Mary, and see if Kev and Nicky are about as I’ve not heard back from them since I mailed and called last week. Sure hope they’re around.