December 24th, 2007 See you in Dublin

“Are you traveling alone?” I was asked this question again when I checked in for the flight to London at the airport. I said yes and talked more with the girl. People who work at the HKIA are always extremely friendly. I like them.

Anyway, during the 12 hours flight I didn’t sleep much primarily because I didn’t feel well. I watched quite a few films: Spider-Man 3, Evan Almighty, Freedom Writers, Peter Pan and Little Mermaid. All of them entertained me greatly, especially Peter Pan. There were so many underlying themes going on and it was brilliant.

The plane arrived at London Gatwick about 30 minutes late. As someone had told me that I might miss the plane to Dublin, I ran through the way to Immigrations. I was slightly irritated because I was asked too many questions and was thought of as a possible illegal immigrant, and I had always been treated nicely by those officials in Scotland. You would think illegal immigrants would not do something as stupid as going through immigrations with a genuine passport.

By the time I got through, there was a rather static long queue at the Ryanair counter occupying the whole check-in zone. 15 minutes before supposed departure of my flight, I was still in the middle of the queue. We were informed of delays a few times. I was knackered, and worried because I had no way to get in touch with Michael at that point. In the end, the plane departed at 1:20am which was 4 hours late.

I fell into a coma on the plane and woke up to find myself nearly in Dublin. All passengers were tired but it clearly wasn’t over for us yet. We waited at the baggage reclaim area for another 20 minutes before getting the luggage. I walked out at 3:30am, I think. And the first thing on my mind was to get a seat, calm myself down and try to stop coming up with plans to avenge Ryanair.

Michael came and greeted me after a few moments. We walked outside and waited for a taxi in the cold. It was about 20 degrees colder than in Hong Kong but I didn’t care too much - I was too busy complaining about the delay and how long we had been waiting for a taxi.

We got to the hotel and yes, we couldn’t get in! I must say, though, this wait was a lot shorter than the ones I have had on this very day. Hello Dublin, thank you for providing me a bed. Good night.