Saturday, June 16, 2012

In the waiting area, we noticed we were about the only gringoes. We were headed to Jakarta, but via Hong Kong, on Cathay Pacific. The overwhelming majority of passengers were of Chinese descent. On the plane, we had aisle and middle seats, not usually our favorite. We both like to sleep as much as possible (easy for Crystal, difficult for Justin), and it's much harder in an aisle seat than a window seat. Crystal, who was sitting in the middle seat, also had her personal space invaded by the gentleman in the window seat.

Just before takeoff, one of the passengers noticed that a seat one row up from us was empty. He moved back a couple of rows - it looked to us like he moved away from his wife and kid to sit with one of his friends (or brother, perhaps). His kid a couple rows up, however, didn't like this much and started screaming bloody murder. He was standing up in the seat, facing backwards (towards his dad), pleading for his dad to move back. Did the dad move back? No. Did he even acknowledge his kid was acting a fool? No. The flight attendant basically had to grab the kid and strap him in just before we got to the #1 spot on the runway, which we could tell didn't sit well with her, since her job description doesn't include assuming the role of parent.

Anyway, we managed to fall asleep just before takeoff (Crystal) and just after (Justin). After sleeping somewhere in the vicinity of 7 hours, we still had another 6 hours to go. We could have used any number of electronic devices, as there was an easily accesible plug when the tray was folded down. But the plane had a number of good movies to choose from, so we opted for that, and the ones we watched were good. Justin watched Project X, 21 Jump Street and Young Adult. Crystal watched We Need to Talk About Kevin and Young Adult.

Crystal also watched a show about Komodo Dragons on Rinca, where we'd be going in a week or so. One of the things showed on the program was them swimming, which Mike and Adrienne had asked about the night before. One of the things we were scheduled to do in the Rinca area was snorkeling, and we thought it would be cool, albeit terrifying, to be snorkeling with these giant lizards. We were hopeful - and perhaps it was just wishful thinking - that they wouldn't have any interest in hunting while swimming because of being cold blooded and needing to get out of the water as quickly as possible.