Leaving on a Jet Plane

So, then, the proper blog posts...

Friday 7 November 2008
Heathrow Airport, Terminal 3

So here I am, in Heathrow Airport, waiting for my plane to depart. And because this is the UK, there is no free wifi. So I have the joy of writing this in Word instead of uploading it directly to the interweb. Never mind.

Of course I lied there, it's not actually Word, it's Open Office's Writer program, which is much the same as Word but instead of paying £300 or so, it's completely free. Which is nice. For some reason every time I write the words “the” or “there” it seems to want to auto-complete it to the word “thereafter”. I've no idea why, but isn't that part of the fun? No? Well, I guess you have a point.

I'll turn it off at some stage, once I find out how.

So, then. Airports. Heathrow Terminal 3 isn't exactly one of the best. I mean, it's not as bad as Zagreb, where they allow those social lepers known as smokers who can't confine their habit to drinking establishments (i.e. anti-social smokers) to smoke inside. And given that the terminal is one big room with no air conditioning, you're not looking at a particularly nice environment to spend the next hour or two of your life.

So Heathrow's not that bad. But it does have other problems. For example, Zagreb has free wifi. At Heathrow, you can buy airtime but you're looking at 4 GBP for an hour at least (some providers charge 6 GBP) which is so much of a rip off it's not true.

Seeming as you can get a month's web access at home for free, or at most about 20 GBP, that's quite a difference. Even if you pay, you get about 700 hours for that price. At 20 GBP that's 0.03 GBP an hour. Yes they have to pay for routers and high bandwidth if loads of people are using it, but still. Every other country I've been to recently (that's The Netherlands, Croatia, Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand (and the United Arab Emirates for a handful of hours)) has free wifi coming out of their ears most of the time. To quote Bernard Manning, it's a fucking disgrace.

To be honest, that's the only real problem with it. I just wanted to have a moan about it not having free wifi.

Anyway, so I'm flying Air India, which is a first for me. What's it like? I know you're dying to find out, so I'll tell you.

Well, it's a bit hit and miss. The good points are that there is a fair amount of space. When they dim the lights after take off they cycle through rainbow colours for a while, and it makes you think you're in some kind of mellow disco. When they came round for the first round of drinks, I asked for my usual gin and tonic. They then proceeded to throw a bunch of those mini bottles of gin that they use at me, and a couple of (large) cans of tonic. Party time!

The bad points are that the seat cushions are as thin as a yoga mat, so you have bits of metal sticking into you, and it makes sleeping a bit of a chore as well. Then the food isn't great. The main meal – chicken curry of course – was just about ok, everything else was a little below par. And the TV / movie selection was very limited, and the map thing didn't work which is a big loss for me as I like to know which obscure state or unpronounceable city I'm flying over.

However I did get to watch the film Juno which was hilarious. The main character is like my old boss Shannon and it's very sweet at the end. I was laughing like a fool on more than one occasion and had to stop myself unless I made too much noise!