Haiku time:
Tee gee four oh four
Seat pitch twenty eight inches
No one hears your screams
TG404 from Singapore to Bangkok is scheduled smack dab in the post-meridiem, which means it’s pretty much worthless for business travel. This has two consequences: as fares are cheap and availability is good, I seem to end up on it whenever I’m connecting out of Bangkok to somewhere else; and because the flight’s passengers tend to be the very definition of “low yield”, TG doesn’t hesitate to field its crappiest aircraft on it. Today, at least, they’ve replaced their previously ubiquitous Airbus A300, held together with baling wire, duct tape and chewing gum imported into Singapore with special permission from the Dutiable, Controlled & Prohibited Goods department of Singapore Customs, with a somewhat less antiquated A330. While I kind of miss the A300’s Commodore 64-vintage sickly beige interior and rotary audio channel selector, which always brought back fond memories of childhood flights when my knees were not necessarily jammed into the seat in front of me, in all other respects this plane is a mild improvement.
Despite Thailand’s generally stunning genetics and the same trowelful of makeup as that used to much success by Singapore Girls, Thai Airways flight attendants are generally not very attractive, doubtless because they received their positions through family connections in the vast, corrupt bowels of this state-owned airline. (A phenomenon easily observed elsewhere in the region, compare Garuda vs Lion or Malaysian vs Air Asia.) The plane is packed to the brim, and while waiting for Porn the trolley dolly(*) to fetch me my inevitable coconutty curry — as they say in Japan: Atsumono ni korite, namasu wo fuku, or “Learn from the stew, blow on the raw fish”, and ’tis a foolish man indeed who eats the “Western” meal selection on TG more than once — I hammer away at my Japanese kanji drills on my laptop like a crack-addled chimpanzee.
(*) Yes, really. It’s Thai for “blessing”.
Drifting Clouds 片雲の風 