167 hours to go


I got up at six and went straight to the airport, sneaking out without a shower to avoid waking anyone up. The ride to the airport was in an electric car, near silently swooshing past darkened housing blocks all the way to Changi Terminal 2, which seems to be a madhouse on Sunday mornings. Crowds of people wandering around, sluggishly getting in the way at every point like they’d never flown before. I’m not sure if that is because there are certain flights that are only scheduled on Sundays, or everyone is just too knackered to think straight this early.

I’ll be back here next Sunday morning, landing about two and a half hours before takeoff, rematerialising in my children’s lives just in time for a birthday party. What better preparation for that than 17 hours on a plane?

To distract myself from early morning melancholy, I went to the lounge to have a shower. Positive: now I’m clean and won’t stink up the cabin. Negative: the lounge seemed even more of a maelstrom than the rest of the airport. Everywhere, corpulent bodies moving unhappily from breakfast buffet to massage chair and back again.

Also, I couldn’t find any scrambled eggs to eat, but I guess the world doesn’t revolve around me. How cruel can it get?

Still, these are not even inconveniences, mere dots that flicker across one’s consciousness as I wander through another sterile, efficient air conditioned tunnel out of the tropics and into America. Miracles in travel are so quotidien these days.


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