Found In Ceylon

The Longest Night

(Writing from the iConnect Lounge in Singapore’s Changi Airport)

So that was the longest night of my life, I think. See, here’s how it works. The sun set around 7PM in California (to be more specific, we were on I-5 in San Clemente) on Monday night, so that’s about six hours of darkness. Plus a fourteen-hour flight shrouded in complete darkness except for the last half-hour. So that totals out to about 19.5 hours of nighttime.

Cool. Wasn’t that bad.

And, really, how could it be bad when you’re riding Singapore Airlines? I now agree that their reputation as the world’s best airline is completely warranted. While the coach class is still unmistakably coach-looking, the seats have some minor improvements over any other seat I’ve tried. The seat bottom and lumbar regions are both inflatable, which my lower back appreciated. And when you recline the seat back, the bottom slides forward a little, too, so you get to stretch out more. And there’s foot rests, too!

So, yeah, it was nice. I think I slept for eight or nine hours during the first leg to Taipei.

But Singapore Airlines also wins the “most deaf-friendly” airline in my new Moleskine journal. Their safety video actually has an INTERPRETER signing in the lower-right corner. I took a video of it; will upload on YouTube later. I could understand her…she used a mixture of ASL and international-like gestures, all with a very polite, but stern tone.

And the interactive TV system is just crazy. You have more than 70 films on demand. Of course, the American films aren’t subtitled in English, but most of the foreign films are, so I watched Four Stars (French), Jasmine Women (Chinese), and The Taxi Thief (Spanish). Slept through most of the first one and the last one. I recommend Jasmine Women. I really wanted to watch an Indian film to get in the mood, y’know, but I didn’t find any of the film synopses appealing.

Altogether, three meals were served–two on the first leg and one on the Taipei-Singapore leg. Oh, that’s right, I got to spend a half-hour at Chiang Kai-Shek Taipei International Airport (TPE).

The airport was pretty dead (it was 5:30 AM), but I had the pleasure to try a squat toilet for the first time in my life. It wasn’t the worst thing ever, but let’s just say that my aim needs some work. I also am not sure if I did it backwards or not. I really couldn’t figure out which end was the front end.

The flights were delightful, the food was great, the flight attendants were overly polite (as they should be), I got to Singapore safe and sound, and I’m looking forward to the third one which departs in about three hours.

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