How to turn air travel into productive pleasure

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.