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Published: April 23rd 2006
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Plåta betong?
Not everyone seems to be of the opinion that money is best spent rushing across the globe to take pictures of concrete, my man Gibbon happens to be one of them. Actually this trip came about as a result of the upcoming Songkran festival in Thailand. My good friend Kay in Bangkok had four days holiday announced and was dying to get out off town, thereby avoiding the water (and other substances) splashing that will take place at random in the streets. And with Easter coming up here in Europe during the same weekend it was a good enough opportunity to travel without spending too many days off work indeed. At first we looked at options going into the countryside and spending some lazy days at the coast. As you have already figured out the flights were kinda overbooked when we got around to planning. Pretty much every domestic airport in the south was filled to capacity. And if we found seats on a plane out off Bangkok you could be sure there would be no matching ones for a return flight. It even went to the length of me logging into the Thai Airways website continually refreshing and refreshing to see if any cancellations would come up. This resulted in a mildly successful attempt where suddenly two matching tickets became freed up on flights to and from Phuket airport. I had to confirm the outbound flight time with Kay waking her up at three in the morning only to see the tickets disappear before my eyes again...
That is how we came up with Singapore.
I think neither of us was particulary thrilled about the choice but it seemed like an easy enough getaway for a couple of days with good priced tickets, and besides we never toured the city together before.
My good friend Gibbon drives me to the local airport wondering why I am about to waste another shedload of money on a mere week's trip to Asia, and begins to inform me of the quantities of other pleasures that can be obtained instead. It is a valid question I guess, and as always I feel a bit put off by the thought of going away when it would be so easy and comfortable to just spend a week off work doing nothing in the familiar environment of one's own home. Thank God for non-refundable airtickets!
For this trip I am unusually well prepared, having studied the main attractions (while rolling my eyes at all the governmentally sanctioned hyperbole of the official websites), scoured endless lists of hotels and spent a lot of time with the
Google Earth satellite maps trying to familiar myself with the city layout (it still is a bit messy I think). Plane tickets bought all the way, hotel reservations made, loads of notes printed, good thing to know then that all it takes is a single delay on the first city hopper domestic flight to Stockholm and it will rupture the entire plan. My city Jönköping is blessed with a small international airport that has spent its last years in the shadow of termination. I try to endorse its survival in any way that I can, even though this means risking the entire onward travel, seeing as how plane tickets that are not interconnected in a single booking will give you, the passenger, absolutely no guarantee of any compensation in the event of a failure of the first airline to meet its time table. Lovely.
Fortunately, today is my lucky day. Not only do the flights to Stockholm and the onward flight to Helsinki where I will board the Finnair MD-11 depart and arrive on time, the long haul flight is also granted some tailwind cutting an hour off the flight time down to a mere nine hours time. Bangkok here I come!
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