How is this like Rick's in 'Casablanca'? I'm sitting in one of the 21st century equivalencies but it doesn't cut it. I'm at the Long Bar in one of the Cathay Lounges at Chep Lap Kok. There was nothing like this at Kai Tak but the atmosphere was ever so much more adventurous. Among other things, the simple fact of landing or successfully taking off was something of an event. In the five years I was based here in the 1990's, I recall one Lufthansa jet that didn't get off the end of the runway and essentially had to be dismantled. I also remember a China Airlines 747 that accelerated off the end of the runway and into the harbor rather than the air. Fortunately, there was an alert tugboat captain shoving stuff and he just pushed the plane into the shallows before it sank.
There was nothing like landing at Kai Tak. You aimed at a checkerboard on a hill, made a sharp turn and then dove down between apartment blocks, laundry hanging like flags and snatches of Cantonese soap operas momentarily visible through the windows as you roared by and down onto the tarmac, the engines roaring into reverse as soon as you hit the ground, screaming to a stop before the pavement ended and the water began.
I loved it! But I also made myself a promise that the day it became routine would be the day it was time for a change. I think it was 1995 or 1996, a year or so before the handover, when, one afternoon, I kept reading, absorbed, as we scooted in over Kowloon and realized, after we'd come to a halt just at the end of the runway on the edge of the Bay, that it was time to go! We moved to Manila not long after.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
27 April 2013
Adelaide -- The Friendly, Peaceful City!
9 Dec 2012
Adelaide
My mental construct of Adelaide is of a friendly town, full of churches, everyone seems to know everyone else and I've always thought of it as boring. My Saturday night there confirmed the first and put paid to the second. I flew in from Singapore and got to the hotel around 6 PM and went down to have a Barossa red and a cigarette in a small outdoor eating and smoking area. I was pretty taken aback when a very attractive young woman asked if she could join me, she sat down before I could reply and borrowed my lighter. She was outgoing and very pleasant, acting as if we'd known each other a long time. I enjoyed her company and our conversation was one of those typical of strangers - our jobs, our spouses, our children, our travels and so on. Pretty soon one of her colleagues came over, about my age, and joined us for a smoke. Nice fellow, a jewelry maker. Turns out that they were both with a jewelry manufacturer and having their Christmas 'do' at our hotel.
Pretty soon the pair invited me to join their table inside. Eventually I was persuaded and joined the group for a drink. I was impressed not only by their friendliness to me but by how genuinely fond of each other they seemed. I was also struck by their ability to slam back alcohol. This wasn't going to go on for long, at least not for me; I was tired and my capacity is increasingly greater than my ability to metabolize excessive amounts of alcohol in a way that doesn't leave me a wreck.
So around 9 or so I begged off, wishing my new friends the best for the holidays, including frenetic sales of their jewelry, and went up to my room.
I read and dropped off after about half an hour, reflecting again on how peaceful a city it was -- a Saturday night, I'm in the very center of the place and the streets are sparsely populated and quiet.
About an hour or two later I awoke when a bomb went off. I shot up, out of bed and onto the floor, completely lost. What had just happened? Where was I? What city?
It wasn't a bomb because within seconds there was a repeat of exactly the same noise that had brought me up and out of the bed -- it was a huge bang on the wall I shared with the room next door. This time I identified that it was a body making that noise. Someone was either throwing themselves against the wall or being thrown against it. The latter seemed more likely unless my neighbor was a masochist. I figured out he wasn't when I heard a woman screaming, obviously not happy at being flung against the wall. There was also a man's voice, slurry, obviously alcohol-fueled and mean sounding.
I picked up the bedside phone and rang the front desk but there was no answer! (I later learned that every person on the 16th floor where i was lodged had been awakened by the 'bomb' and had, at the same time, decided to call downstairs.)
Meantime, the noises from next door were getting louder although the man had tired of throwing the woman at the wall. He must have been doing something even worse, however, for all of a sudden she was screaming and crying for help! This was too much, I opened my door a crack and looked out into the hall. About half-a-dozen other doors were open and sleepy guests were peering out. The fellow across the hall, with more presence of mind than me, told me that he had rung downstairs and security were on their way.
Well, security did arrive in the person on one beefy fellow with an ill fitting blazer and a two way radio. He knocked on the door of the room next door to mine, the source of the screaming - I was still hanging out into the hallway, holding onto the frame of my door. There was incoherent male yelling in response to the security officer's knock. He radioed down for back-up which appeared in the form of another beefy fellow in another ill fitting blazer. At that point, after further knocking, the perpetrator (notice how watching TV police and legal dramas helps my vocabulary when describing these situations?), clearly this time, told the security officers that he had a gun and they should go away.
Security took this new information on board and left, quickly. I, and this was stupid, shut and locked my door. As I did this, I noted that all the other doors on our floor were shutting as well.
Okay, I was now in my room but quickly realized this was a mistake. I was next door to a maniac, who said he had a gun, and the evidence showed, unarguably, that the walls were paper thin and certainly could not stand up to a random bullet.
I assessed my situation. I did not want to go out into the hall, who knew what the idiot might decide to do but my bed faced the paper-thin wall which was all that separated me from my violent neighbor. If there was a consolation in what was clearly a desperate situation for your hero, the female in the piece seemed to be better off, the volume of her cries had subsided and she was just mewling (from the nasally sounds and sniffling, I could imagine she really needed a tissue at this point; not really something attractive to contemplate). But, while the female's situation seemed to have improved, mine position was dire. I was in a room whose walls might as well have been made of cardboard for all the protection they afforded me.
So, ratiocinating like mad, I mentally coughed up the concept of 'field of fire' and, like lightening, calculated that the field of fire in this case definitely included my bed and most of the room.
If I'd been truly awake I probably would have gotten into the bathtub but instead pulled the one chair in the room into the far corner, against the outside wall, taking up as little as I could of the arc of the field of fire. I sat there, heroically assuming the protective fetal position.
Eventually things next door calmed down, the male in the piece was just muttering, mostly obscene things which rhymed with duck but involved physiological impossibilities. The female had dried up or drifted off -- she was clearly as liquored as he was though not as prone to violence.
Finally, about twenty minutes after our brave security team had precipitously abandoned their post, the police arrived. Within a couple of minutes the situation was resolved. The male next door was arrested, escorted out, unarmed (in fact, he had not had a gun at all), and the female was taken downstairs and checked out.
The moral of this story? Adelaide is not boring, you can never tell when your Saturday night there could get truly lively.
Now, please excuse me, I'm traveling again and need to curl up in my chair and go to sleep.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Adelaide
My mental construct of Adelaide is of a friendly town, full of churches, everyone seems to know everyone else and I've always thought of it as boring. My Saturday night there confirmed the first and put paid to the second. I flew in from Singapore and got to the hotel around 6 PM and went down to have a Barossa red and a cigarette in a small outdoor eating and smoking area. I was pretty taken aback when a very attractive young woman asked if she could join me, she sat down before I could reply and borrowed my lighter. She was outgoing and very pleasant, acting as if we'd known each other a long time. I enjoyed her company and our conversation was one of those typical of strangers - our jobs, our spouses, our children, our travels and so on. Pretty soon one of her colleagues came over, about my age, and joined us for a smoke. Nice fellow, a jewelry maker. Turns out that they were both with a jewelry manufacturer and having their Christmas 'do' at our hotel.
Pretty soon the pair invited me to join their table inside. Eventually I was persuaded and joined the group for a drink. I was impressed not only by their friendliness to me but by how genuinely fond of each other they seemed. I was also struck by their ability to slam back alcohol. This wasn't going to go on for long, at least not for me; I was tired and my capacity is increasingly greater than my ability to metabolize excessive amounts of alcohol in a way that doesn't leave me a wreck.
So around 9 or so I begged off, wishing my new friends the best for the holidays, including frenetic sales of their jewelry, and went up to my room.
I read and dropped off after about half an hour, reflecting again on how peaceful a city it was -- a Saturday night, I'm in the very center of the place and the streets are sparsely populated and quiet.
About an hour or two later I awoke when a bomb went off. I shot up, out of bed and onto the floor, completely lost. What had just happened? Where was I? What city?
It wasn't a bomb because within seconds there was a repeat of exactly the same noise that had brought me up and out of the bed -- it was a huge bang on the wall I shared with the room next door. This time I identified that it was a body making that noise. Someone was either throwing themselves against the wall or being thrown against it. The latter seemed more likely unless my neighbor was a masochist. I figured out he wasn't when I heard a woman screaming, obviously not happy at being flung against the wall. There was also a man's voice, slurry, obviously alcohol-fueled and mean sounding.
I picked up the bedside phone and rang the front desk but there was no answer! (I later learned that every person on the 16th floor where i was lodged had been awakened by the 'bomb' and had, at the same time, decided to call downstairs.)
Meantime, the noises from next door were getting louder although the man had tired of throwing the woman at the wall. He must have been doing something even worse, however, for all of a sudden she was screaming and crying for help! This was too much, I opened my door a crack and looked out into the hall. About half-a-dozen other doors were open and sleepy guests were peering out. The fellow across the hall, with more presence of mind than me, told me that he had rung downstairs and security were on their way.
Well, security did arrive in the person on one beefy fellow with an ill fitting blazer and a two way radio. He knocked on the door of the room next door to mine, the source of the screaming - I was still hanging out into the hallway, holding onto the frame of my door. There was incoherent male yelling in response to the security officer's knock. He radioed down for back-up which appeared in the form of another beefy fellow in another ill fitting blazer. At that point, after further knocking, the perpetrator (notice how watching TV police and legal dramas helps my vocabulary when describing these situations?), clearly this time, told the security officers that he had a gun and they should go away.
Security took this new information on board and left, quickly. I, and this was stupid, shut and locked my door. As I did this, I noted that all the other doors on our floor were shutting as well.
Okay, I was now in my room but quickly realized this was a mistake. I was next door to a maniac, who said he had a gun, and the evidence showed, unarguably, that the walls were paper thin and certainly could not stand up to a random bullet.
I assessed my situation. I did not want to go out into the hall, who knew what the idiot might decide to do but my bed faced the paper-thin wall which was all that separated me from my violent neighbor. If there was a consolation in what was clearly a desperate situation for your hero, the female in the piece seemed to be better off, the volume of her cries had subsided and she was just mewling (from the nasally sounds and sniffling, I could imagine she really needed a tissue at this point; not really something attractive to contemplate). But, while the female's situation seemed to have improved, mine position was dire. I was in a room whose walls might as well have been made of cardboard for all the protection they afforded me.
So, ratiocinating like mad, I mentally coughed up the concept of 'field of fire' and, like lightening, calculated that the field of fire in this case definitely included my bed and most of the room.
If I'd been truly awake I probably would have gotten into the bathtub but instead pulled the one chair in the room into the far corner, against the outside wall, taking up as little as I could of the arc of the field of fire. I sat there, heroically assuming the protective fetal position.
Eventually things next door calmed down, the male in the piece was just muttering, mostly obscene things which rhymed with duck but involved physiological impossibilities. The female had dried up or drifted off -- she was clearly as liquored as he was though not as prone to violence.
Finally, about twenty minutes after our brave security team had precipitously abandoned their post, the police arrived. Within a couple of minutes the situation was resolved. The male next door was arrested, escorted out, unarmed (in fact, he had not had a gun at all), and the female was taken downstairs and checked out.
The moral of this story? Adelaide is not boring, you can never tell when your Saturday night there could get truly lively.
Now, please excuse me, I'm traveling again and need to curl up in my chair and go to sleep.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
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