Major airport waiting areas, and we have seen a lot of those in the last two years, seem to exist in a parallel world of their own, divorced from whatever country they are nominally surrounded by. At a corporate level they often have variations on the same international chains - Ralph Lauren, Polo, Chanel, Starbucks - they all appear to have adopted the Ikea snakelike path through duty free, and they all have pricing that also bears no relationship to that outside this, supposedly, tax free bubble. We contemplated on this twice on our journey from Ho Chi Minh to Medan via a 2 hour transfer at Kuala Lumpur. At HCM two coffees and 2 pastries came to nearly $15 - around $5 in an upmarket French patisserie chain in the city. And in KL we
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