Chinese New Year’s Eve

Right now, every Chi­nese across the nation would be hav­ing their reunion din­ner with rel­a­tives return­ing from all cor­ners of the world, cousins, aunts, uncles, grand­mom­mas, grand­pas, grand-aunties, grand-uncles, great grand­fa­thers you name it. Chi­nese house­holds dec­o­rated with lanterns, ang pau’s, and greet­ing cards. Fire­crack­ers blast­ing every­where, fire­works bloom­ing across the sky­line (at least back in Kuch­ing, ‘cos it’s dead quiet here in Ipoh). Mobile phone net­works should be con­gested with sms mes­sages right now, tele­vi­sion sta­tions air­ing noth­ing but chi­nese new year musi­cals, spe­cials and ads. Ah, there’s no other moment like Chi­nese New Year’s eve.

Later this morn­ing, we endured a four-hour drive from Kuala Lumpur to Ipoh which usu­ally takes less than three hours. At one time, we took about one hour just to cover 20 Kilo­me­tres, with speeds about 10-15Km/h. Every sin­gle car on the high­way had a whole fam­ily in it, all head­ing back for the mil­le­nium old Chi­nese tra­di­tion of the reunion din­ner. Grand­par­ents would be wait­ing anx­iously in their homes, call­ing every half an hour on updates of the traf­fic, while prepar­ing tons of del­i­ca­cies for that big night.

Gotta love the speed.

Reunion with cousins. That’s me in blue, and my sis­ter behind me. Mua­haha, noth­ing beats granny’s cook­ing XD

Now let’s turn back the time to say, yesterday.

7:30P.M.

Our neigh­bour, Mr.Ooi and fam­ily friend, Betty, dropped us at the air­port — I would say, on time. Two cars were needed to trans­port us to the air­port — 6 lug­gages and boxes plus four pas­sen­gers. We bid farewell to our Kuch­ing folks on the newly-opened-to-public ele­vated depar­ture lane in the Kuch­ing Inter­na­tional Air­port. From up there, we could see blooms of fire­works spring­ing up across the night Kuch­ing skyline.

The new KIA ter­mi­nal was just breath­tak­ing. If you haven’t been into it, I’d say it looks noth­ing like the old ter­mi­nal. It’s roof design is some­what sim­i­lar to KLIA’s famous ‘umbrella’ shaped roofs. Now the inte­rior, well I’d bet­ter leave it to pictures:-

Drop offs

Check-in counters

Wait­ing lobby crowded with passengers.

8:30P.M

We got a pleas­ant suprise when we saw the air­craft fer­ry­ing us to KL was a Boe­ing 777–200. It is eas­ily my first time in a triple-seven. Other air­crafts I’ve been would be in a 747 trice, to and fro Lon­don and also in a Air­bus 330 once on a return trip from Japan. Count us lucky for get­ting a 777 flight. Beauty eh?

8:50P.M. — 10:20P.M.

Inflight and land­ing. Noth­ing much. Just mess­ing around with those inflight enter­tain­ment while enjoy­ing some seri­ously good MAS catering.