Almost there / 28th, 29th and night of 30th

Alrighty - the worst thing about travelling in south-east Asia is to get there. I hate economy-class, especially if you need to sit there for 7 and 12 hours.

However, we picked emirates, and the onboard entertaiment is as great as promised. From DUS to Dubai, we had 2 single seats in an Airbus 330-200. Not noisy, descent food and good choice of films - it's a bit more tight room for your legs then in a Lufthansa plane.

From Dubai - we almost missed the plane, as it was announced as Singapour all the time. But nowwhere on our bookings with emirates they mentioned a stop-over there. So we barely made it to enter the plan as almost last ones - to find out a 1 1/2 hours delay on taxi due to heavy air-traffic.

Every seat had a great VOD system, with hundreds of movies, TV shows, radios and (Multiplayer-) Games embedded into your front seat. The machine was a new 777, the LCD clear and sharp. I watched Deja-vue, The fontain, A night at the museum and several Scrubs, Simpsons and Friends Shows.

The side rows have three seats each - fortunatly the japanese guy next to me disappeared after start until departure.

Experienced asian service at Thai airways last year, the personell at Emirates needs some training. The staff has not payed enough attention, we rang the service bell several times for drinks and no reaction at all. There was no smile and an overall rough and stressed atmosphere at the service people - and doing 4 rounds of service in 11 hours flight is just not sufficient. I'd suggest to go and let their service managers fly sometimes with Malaysian ihr Thai-Airlines - see what good service in economy can happen with trained service (and lots of booz!)

So we did the stop-over in SIN for 1 1/2 hours, departured in KUL finally on monday 12:00 am. Bit of a kerfuffel to get the hotel send over some shuttle at 1:00 am, but we made it - at 2, we layed in bed, showered and partially happy - looking forward to 4 hours sleep to get to our next station the next day.

Over KLCC terminal (the low-cost one for Airasia), we have booked a flight to Langkawi until thursday. We're about to meet Thomas, his GF and Arne in Sunset resort. Plans are to get some scooter, shopping as it's a tax-free district, beach, sun and possibly get crowded by local tourists. 1st may is a public holiday as in germany - labor day. 2nd too - but something different Which I can't remember. So it may happen we got some company there - but totally don't mind. PLenty of chance to get to the quieter areas later. So I packed my bottle of schnaps and let's get prepared for our summer holidays - in Malaysia 2007!!