How to turn air travel into productive pleasure
By Parvati Sharma
JAKARTA (JP): Planning a trip? About to embark on a long journey to unknown parts? Don't move until you've read this.
I landed in Jakarta almost two weeks ago after a long and tiring journey which they said lasted twelve hours but I know went on for about three days. During that eternity, I learned some invaluable things which, in the interest of science, I now pass on to you, The Jakarta Post readers.
Let me explain. You get on the plane, you grin sheepishly at the air-hostess who smirks back and waves her hand in the general direction of the toilet, indicating your seat. You wrestle with your fellow inmates for the last cubic inch in the last hand- luggage basket; you sit down, the air-hostess, her smirk growing broader, spills fake orange juice all over you; the plane is unavoidably delayed because the pilot has to pick up a last minute duty-free Poison for his girlfriend; they recite the tired old safety precautions which you ignore again, and the flight eventually takes off as the person siting next to you begins a conversation.
Now you are ready to practice what I preach.
* First of all, never let your neighbor draw you into a conversation. He or she is potentially psychopathic and definitely boring. Be patient. Soon, the cover-girl icicle posing as an air-hostess will fling a pair of headphones at you. Tear open the packaging (use your teeth, it's the only way) and stick the contraption into your ears. Then pretend to be absorbed in the music or film -- whichever is less ghastly -- until the plane lands. I once let my guard drop and immediately a 90-year-old former girls college principal was haranguing me on the moral laxity of The Modern Girl, the cruelty of her son's boss in denying him a raise, a Mercedes, a three-day-week ... and the shameful price charged for tomatoes. Throughout the narrative she gorged herself on chocolates. Nice chocolates, too. Nutty. I know because she spat a fair proportion of them at me. I learned my lesson. On my last trip I suffered through the appallingly bowdlerized, Disney-fied version of The Scarlet Letter, but did escape being besieged by a soccer-loving German.
* Second, never look at the menus the staff hand out before meals. This laughable attempt at providing choice is more than invalidated by the startling disparity between the meal and its name. They offer you beef stroganoff and what you get is beef- strong-enough-to-send-your-dandruff-flying. They lure you into biting into a thousand layer cake and you realize that the "thousand" is a reference to its age.
* Thirdly, no one, not even you, reads on a flight. Reading on a flight means getting your hand-luggage out. This, as any traveler knows, will domino into complicated negotiations between you, your neighbor and the three rows behind, and you'll never get it back up. So quit lugging around that three-kilo copy of War and Peace before it dislocates your shoulder. Buy the kids some duty-free Toblerone instead.
* At transit stops, if yours is a life full of Executive Lounge passes, don't go. The lounge will be full of hyperactive little kids whose subdued giggling will drive you over the edge even if the stale canapes don't. Walk around the airport instead and moan to yourself about the omnipresent no-smoking sign.
* Try and forget all the jazz airline adverts spout about on- board fax machines, telephones, laptops... about the only thing a plane is good for is procrastination -- work on that for a change.
* Finally, don't worry about security announcements, the safety card, the repeated reminders to fasten-your-seat-belts- the-captain-fears-turbulence. Nobody remembers any of that when a plane crashes, everybody's too busy to get out ahead of the next guy. So if you're one of those people whose teeth chatter in stark fear while passengers close by are trying to concentrate on Police Academy XXXVI, STOP IT, before I'm indicted for homicide.
That, at any rate, is my advice on how you too can turn airline travel into an educational and productive pleasure. And if it doesn't work, well, just sit tight and wait for virtual travel -- it can't be too far away. They've already developed virtual food.