I was not sure if the damage done to the headlight of my car suggested something inauspicious or perhaps this was just a small price paid in exchange for a successful Europe trip in return. But if we are to explain this in a more logical and scientific way, obviously I would say that my brother’s driving skill was not up to par like Joey, his sister whom we used to call her the most stunning female driver in Kuala Lumpur. The only excuse I could look for was that he was new, he just got his driving license a few months back and the multi level parking lot at our condominium is too difficult or perhaps too scary for him. I have to admit that bad thing happens when you are most unexpected, always at the wrong time, wrong place and wrong circumstance, this time, just when I was about to set off to the airport for my Europe trip.
I took the train at the LRT station with all the frustration, angers and worries that could be easily noticed from my faceial expression and rough behavior until Hansen’s text message came in which goes like this - Don’t worry, enjoy your Europe trip and I will go repair your car before you come back. The text somehow calmed me down and reminded me to enjoy my trip to Europe. No doubt, there were too much things to worry prior to the trip - I was worried that my supervisor would forget that I actually applied for a month long leave and asked me to go for a business trip which I don’t want to at the moment. I afraid I might not be able to step into the aircraft due to some last minute urgent call from my family members. I afraid that I might miss my flight. I afraid this and I afraid that…
“Dad sick quite badly”, another text message came in from my elder sister. See? Wrong news during wrong circumstance. She then mentioned in her second message that he was suffering from a really bad flu and 2 weeks later when I was in London I found out that, that night she actually broadcasted the same message to me, Joey in London as well as Jean in Vientiane. We had had plenty of heart pounding news like this when grandpa was still around and had developed a phobia to pick up calls or to receive text messages from our family members. It was a ‘life threatening’ news about my dad this time. I should have expected things like that to happen because I have disclosed to her something about my trip. Mind you, she used to give me some terribly scary advice that made me feel I should give up my holiday plan. I was worried though but I didn’t want her to ruin my travel plan anymore. I wasn’t going to cancel my trip which I had planned since 6 months ago, with lots of changes to the route and schedule prior. Call me an unfilial son and I wish I would have switched off my phone earlier to ignore the news.
It was 15 minutes before midnight when I arrived at the airport. The airport was quiet as it is during off peak hours with only a few people walking around and most of the check-in counters were not opened at this time. People were either sitting or taking up the whole bench by sleeping on it. I looked for the wrapping service to wrap my pirated Northface backpack which I bought at MBK shopping centre in Bangkok into a shape that would definitely catch everyone’s attention when it would be unloaded onto the luggage belt at Athens Airport 19 hours later. I then walked along the row of check in counters with my just wrapped 22nd century-look-like backpack in hand, trying to look for a seat and eventually settled down at the sitting area nearest to Qatar Airways check-in counter. A family of 5 then came to sit near to me and from their conversation, I got to know that the dad was leaving to work in Moscow. Needless to say, the mum looks very sad and just before the dad left, she woke their daughter up who was already asleep and told her, “Go give daddy a hug, remember the smell of him. Remember daddy’s smell. We won’t be seeing him for a long time…”.
“Daddy, don’t go, daddy please don’t go…”, the daughter was crying when the dad returned her to the mummy and kissed the mummy goodbye on the forehead.
I felt like I had just watched a Korean’s drama which took place in front of me, so real. That is the reason why I don’t like to see people off or being seen off at the airport.
The sky was still dark and all I could see from the window was the halos of the neon lights out there. 4.15a.m, the cabin door was closed on time; the pilot started to reverse the aircraft away from the satellite building and made his way to the airport’s runaway. It is different this time because I don’t fly to a destination that my boss asked me to, I don’t fly free instead I pay for my own ticket, I don’t fly to a country for assignment but I go there because I want to go there. The moment the aircraft was lifted off from the runaway due to the difference of air pressure above and beneath its wings, I felt like I was a bird escaping from a cage, I flew as hard as I could towards the western sky. I imagined my worries - my just damaged car, my unsettled works, my boss, my dad’s sickness, my elder sister, all transforming into some kinds of heavy objects which at last failed to cling onto the body of the airplane, fell onto the earth one by one as the airport became smaller and smaller from my eyesight through the window.
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The rotation of the earth was much faster than the velocity of our air plane though we were flying westward, away from the sunrise chasing from the eastern sky at the back. Dawn. The first ray of sunlight hit on the left wing of the airplane when we were about 38000ft above the Arabian Sea. Then only I discovered that there was a logo of Qatar Airways printed on the tip of the aircraft wing. Beneath, the clouds were very thick, looked like a borderless ocean of cotton blocking the view under. The bluish Persian Gulf came into view when we descended and broke through the thick cloud above. I always thought there wouldn’t be much difference between Persian Gulf and Malacca Straits, both of them loaded with heavy sea traffic and should be equally cloudy, like the color of milk tea. I was wrong then, I could even see the coral reefs at the shallow sea and people were playing water sports near the seaside. It was then desert and more desert before our flight touched the ground at Doha International Airport at 6.40am. The temperature out there was announced to be at 31℃ and from the window, the place looked desolated and hazy.
Doha was not in my plan but spending 6 hours within an airport was definitely torturing so I asked the information counter at level 2 to see if it is possible to go out and he said yes and showed me the way to get the on-arrival visa downstairs. I returned to the place where I queued up to get into the departure hall after getting down from the shuttle bus earlier and enquired an officer there how to get the visa. “It was too much hot out there, all the shops closed, open at night”, this was all I got from the officer who was standing there after the security check try to answer all the inquiries from the transit passengers who had just entered his country. Qatar was then being erased from one of the Middle East countries I would go in the future because I don’t see the point visiting a city which is dead at day time. I heard Las Vegas only comes alive at night time too…
The airport was very busy in the morning; it seemed as if all the flights between Europe and Asia had chosen Doha as the transit point, from and to the destinations that we are most familiar with - London, Frankfurt, Rome, Abu Dhabi, Delhi, Beijing, Hong Kong, Bangkok…one flight followed by another. I then returned to second floor and spotted the one and the only internet point there sponsored by Samsung with around 10 desktop computers in an enclosed booth. Unfortunately, not even one of them worked, I should have known that because there were only a few people using/trying out the computer there and then went away. Subsequently, I spent more than 5 hours within the airport building doing things that I could possibly do. I read my book, I took a nap to adjust to the time difference, I listened to MP3, I stared at the airport runaway, I tried to snap a taking off airplane, I investigated into the heavy hazy out there, I tried to figure out the reasons why the salespersons here are either from Thailand, Philippines and Indonesia, I wished the airport management could adjust the temperature of that freezing cold air conditioner to a level that a human body can sustain, I walked back and forth along the boarding gates, I went downstairs and then upstairs, I did window shopping over and over again, I watched people and figured out there were always jeans and high heels under the burqa of most of the middle east women , I tried to guess whether a particular person is from Malaysia, Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, Pakistan, Dubai, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, Bangladesh or somewhere else.
“Qatar Airways Flight number QR472 to Athens is ready for boarding, passengers are required to proceed to gate number 7 now”, the announcement was repeated twice as soon as my flight jumped to the top in the flight information list shown on the LCD TV screen around 12.40pm. I jumped up from my seat and walked quickly towards the gate and handed over my boarding pass to the staff in charge.
Athens is about 4 hours across the Mediterranean Sea from Doha and this would be the first time in my life time to step on the land of Europe. A place that was so familiar yet strange to me…
