Hello There: Rainy and Gloomy

I am back in Hong Kong. Been wanting to pen down my recent flight back, and as usual, procrastinate till now. It was such an eventful one.

First, the flight was supposed to be at 4pm, Sunday. I received a text that morning around 8am informing the flight will be delayed to 5.55pm, which means more time with my family, more food. Arrived at the airport around 4pm, and proceed to check-in, only to find out the flight further delayed to 630pm.

They gave me a SGD25 voucher to be used in selected cafes/restaurants (quite limited). I wanted to drink my last cup of local kopi-o in wang before flying but 10000 people were queueing for seats. Thinking the food court in the terminal had coffee and toast, another chance for my kopi-o, i happily hopped through the custom. Guess what, the food court area was under renovation. bleh. Luck is not on my side. In the end, I had a americano and beef wrap from Bakerzin. The beef wrap was actually quite yummy. The sky outside looked good too.

I managed to board the plane around 6.35pm, I took it as a good sign. I should arrived in Hong Kong around 10.45pm. It was a full flight. Beginning of the flight, the flight was shaking a little. After 40 minutes or so, the flight was flying smoothly. I took a few photos of the beautiful sky. Will share that later.

The food was quite good and the movie selections were not too bad. On and off the plane would start to shake a little, but everything was pretty normal. 45 mins before the scheduled touch down the pilot came on air and announced that due to adverse weather the HK airport is very congested and we would need to circle for 20 mins before we can start our descent, the 20 mins kept getting extended and eventually became 1h 30mins of hovering. The passengers grumbled about the delay but nevertheless continued on with their in flight movies. Non of us were aware of the thunderstorm that was waiting for us at lower altitude...

The descent began with its usual share of turbulence before escalating to sudden dips and flashes of thunder lighting up the dark storm clouds we were flying in. The engines were making disconcerting sounds and the couple behind me started discussing about the tragic MH370 flight at the most inappropriate moment. The turbulence were getting from bad to worse before the pilot decided to divert from the usual SG->HK flight route and cut in to China before returning to HK, probably to await the storm clouds.

After the plane touched down on the soaking wet landing field, there were signs of relief from the passengers. The 'delays' that were plaguing us on this flight wasn't over though, the pilot came back online and told us that we could expect a 30 minutes delay because there were 7 more planes ahead of us waiting to dock... before he came back on air and corrected himself... there 15 planes ahead of us! That being said, another 30 minutes gone.

Keen to have a drink, I was heading towards the DFS stores to buy a nice bottle of scotch to remember this eventful flight but all the DFS stores were closed (miss the 24hrs DFS stores in Singapore!).

Lucky for me the airport express trains were extended and I was able to catch the 2nd last train and made it home. To commemorate the fact that I made it back alive, I threw a little sinful "celebratory" party home with junk food and beer!