1. Flying to Singapore

20kg weight allowance is a joke! Especially if you are semi-emigrating to another country. I’d spent my remaining days in Scotland at my parent’s house packing and unpacking my suitcase. I’d even had it on the bathroom scales a bunch of times to test it’s weight. None the less it was always floating (excuse the reverse-pun) around the 29kg mark. How the hell are you supposed to fit your entire life into 20kg? I’ve no idea. If you also take into account that I had to take a couple of text books and my kilt then you’ll realise that I had no chance.

I was departing early on the 28th Dec and my parents were coming to the airport with me. Not to see me off, you understand, but because they just happened to be flying off to Spain about 1 hour after we left for Heathrow. As I packed my case for the last time I asked my Dad if there was going to be room in his car for all three of us and our trappings. He said that it shouldn’t be a problem but a while later tried to confirm his reservation at the long stay car park, they had no record of it. So instead he booked a taxi.

It suddenly occurred to me that there was going to be 4 of us in the car now with the bags instead of 3.

“They have estate cars,” was his reply to my concern. So I finished my packing and went to bed.

My alarm went off at 4am and got showered and dressed and helped the folks with their cases down the stairs to wait on the 4:30am taxi. Low and behold, when it arrived it was not an estate but a regular sized car (even though it was a Mercedes) and needless to say there wasn’t enough room. So after lots of footering with the bags things ended up with me in the front and Mum and Dad in the back (I’m bigger than either of them) with my massive suitcase rammed into their sides and there cases in the boot. Mum was not happy but I found the trip to be most comfortable.

At the airport we met up with Isla, my girlfriend, and her family who arrived just before us. We had been seeing each other for 2 years and living together for the last 18 months so she had agreed to come with me on this little adventure. Actually she had been quite instrumental in making it happen, but that’s another story.

Unusually, we had to wait in a huge queue in the foyer. Apparently the airline we were travelling to London with had just installed a new check-in system and none of them knew how to work it. Mind you, the woman at the desk seemed more concerned with her computer than the weight of our bags and seemed to ignore the fact that they were over the limit. It took ages to get through it all but my Dad has about a million frequent flyer miles with that company and pulled some strings to get us into the VIP lounge area. That would have been excellent except we were so delayed by the new check-in software that we merely walked through it as a short cut to the plane. Rubbish. We said our goodbyes to the families and the first leg of our journey had begun.

The flight down was excellent. By excellent, I mean it was very, very fast and therefore over rapidly. It’s not that I dislike flying but I wanted this behemoth of journey to be over as soon as possible and the faster the pilots flew their planes the better. Besides we were now already running late thanks to the crappy new check-in nonsense which had ultimately caused us to miss our take off slot and leave 40 minutes late.

Now although there were some queues and delays at Glasgow, these were nothing when compared to Heathrow. What a disaster that airport is. It’s total chaos. Nobody seems to know what the hell is going on and we spent ages being herded from one “zone” to another.

It began once we had collected our bags from the Glasgow flight and then headed from Terminal 1 over to Terminal 3. As we arrived, I scanned the departure board and I couldn’t see our 12noon flight to Singapore. I got the e-ticket out my packpack and sure enough it said 12noon. Isla was rechecking the board and noticed a Singapore flight at 11am and wouldn’t you believe it, but it had the same flight number as ours. So for some reason they had changed the departure time without informing us and that was effectively making us an additional hour late for this flight.

Meanwhile another airline’s line was merging with ours creating mayhem. Some bloke in a day-glow yellow jacket pretending to look important stood next to us with his hands on his hips staring at the complaints and arguments breaking out in the crowd. “Everyone getting mixed up,” he muttered to himself and Isla (who was beginning to pull her hair out with the stress so far) couldn’t resist and said, “Well sort it out then!”

“How am I supposed to do that?” said the security guard. That really instils confidence in the Heathrow’s upgraded security level.

As he walked off in the opposite direction I grabbed a hold of another official looking person and told him about the change in the departure time. He seemed unphased and said that we still had plenty of time to catch the flight. He seemed decent enough so I took his word but how close we came to not getting the flight.

We ended up waiting for almost an hour to check in. And the first thing the lady said did when we put the bags on the scales was make that inhaling hissing noise that people do when there is a problem. “Your bags are too heavy,” she says. No shit. Between us we were 16kg over and she was about to hit us up for £160 excess baggage charge. However, we laid down the “emigrating” card and she forgot about the bags and started going on about how nice the weather would be in Oz and how she was so jealous etc. So a narrow escape there.

Once that was done we were directed to the departure lounge and this is where things became even more mental. There was the longest queue for passport control that I’ve ever seen as they had a make shift station that everyone had to go through to have their hand luggage searched for liquids. I kid you not when I say that the end of that queue was almost in a different part of the airport and approximately 500metres from the search station. When we joined the queue it was 10am and we only had an hour left till the flight took off.

After a few minutes of worry some women walked past shouting, “Anyone flying at 11am or earlier?” We stuck our hands up and she looked at our boarding passes and told us to follow her. This should have been easy but she had about 30 other people following her and if that wasn’t bad enough she was only about 4 and a half feet tall so it was impossible to see where she was going. Eventually we managed to bypass the liquid station and get straight to passport control.
Once there we had our passports and tickets checked and then we had to put everything through the x-ray machine including belts and jackets. Once through there I thought we were home free and was about ready to start enjoying our trip. But no. There was a separate x-ray machine that everyone had to put their shoes through. By now we are sure we are going to miss the plane as it’s 10:50am and we are in the middle of a shoe free-for-all with about 50 other folk all kneeling down to put their shoes back on and consequently blocking the path out of passport control.

We grabbed our shoes and flung them on as quick as possible as the sign in from of us told me that the walking time to hour gate was 20 minutes! Running time more like. We bolted along people-mover after people-mover and finally we got to the gate where there was… another queue. It seems that everyone else was shafted by the queues and checks and there was no way that the plane was going to be able to take of in time. So finally, at 11:45 we took off.

At last we were on our way to Singapore for a 5 day stop over before heading to Sydney. The flight itself was pretty uneventful but very long so we were glad when we landed. There were no queues here and we were out exceedingly rapidly and within 20 minutes had checked in to the hotel.

The hotel was amazing and our room was on the 31st floor so we had amazing views over the city. We had arrived at about 8am and we were totally knackered but decided to push on through and try and stay awake until at least 5pm. So with that in mind we went on a tour of the city.