Fractal Blog

Sitting comfortably in the business class lounge at Changi Airport, happily drafting the previous blog entry, a bored glance at the flight departures screen suddenly showed our flight's status having changed from 'Check-in' to 'Flight Closing' with seemingly no intervening stages, a full forty minutes before the scheduled departure. That sounded a bit too scary to ignore so we hot-footed it to the gate where it turned out they had barely started boarding. We boarded anyway (business class tickets are so nice!), and found ourselves on the top deck of the A380.

The seats were very wide, there was a huge entertainment screen each and plenty of buttons to play with. But the real fun was the sleeping arrangements. Having loudly proclaimed himself not at all impressed with the seats because they wouldn't go "fully flat", the other Airbus A380 Novice had to eat his words following the video presentation on how to convert the seat into a bed. It involved similar procedures to folding down the back seats of most cars to make the boot bigger. The result was fantastic, even I could fully stretch out and I had an excellent few hours sleep. In fact I didn't want to wake up.

Disappointingly the food wasn't any better than on the flight to Singapore, although I'm told that if I stopped choosing European foods and went for the Asian choices I'd get better meals. The problem with this is that I'm not quite such a chilli-fiend as Other People, nor do I consider noodles with fried meat (and chilli), irrespective of how excellent, to be suitable for breakfast. Still, we both loved the A380 experience so much that we would actively want to repeat it in the future.

We arrived in Sydney nearly on time. You know you've come a long way if the welcome announcement doesn't just say "...where the local time is X" but "...where the local time is X on date Y". If you squint just right you can see the harbour bridge in the background of this picture.

We got issued with 'Express Path' invitations, a new spiff for 'selected' (i.e. business and first class) passengers who can go through a specially short immigration and customs queue. We were very glad of this since the normal queue was unbelievably long! In the event we cleared both immigration and customs in under an hour, with officials wishing us all the best setting up our lives.

Taxi to serviced apartment. Weather is about 26C and sunny. Result!