May travels- the first leg (updated)

The long travel started when the taxi arrived at 3.30pm to send me to KLIA. Flight will take off at 5.55pm. Because of my 3 visits to California last year on Cathay Pacific, Cathay had upgraded my Airmiles frequent Flyer card to Cathay's Marco Polo CLub (by invitation only). As a result, I was accorded almost all the Business Class perks, like access to the Cathay business class lounge, checkin in the business queue and having my baggage tagged as business class priority, thereby ensuring that they popped out of the baggage carousel faster. This sure made my travel a little more comfortable and enjoyable. No looking around the airport for places to sit and relax. Now I have access to refreshments, TV and a big open space to link on wirelessly.

More than 20 years ago, I made my first visit to Philadelphia. Then, I had to go there for a mgmt review with my manager from Singapore (although I was only a support engineer then). The flight then went from Singapore to Seoul to Los Angeles, through Chicago Ohare airport to Philadelphia. The fligh encountered delays, especially at Chicago Ohare where we were stacked almost 7 layers, waiting more than 1 hour before we could land. Taking off saw along queue of planes, thereby enduring another delay of more than an hour. I remember that one of the pilots gave up waiting in queue and just walkied off the plane, leaving it in queue without a pilot!!

This time, the flight for me went from KLIA to

Hong Kong and landed in Los Angeles to clear immigration. Once cleared, took a connection from LA to Chicago and onwards to my final destination - Philadelphia. I think I must have seen too much of the insides of airports. The only thing that caught my attention was this joint outlet between Burger King and Starbucks in the Los Angeles airport. KLIA still lags behind most of the international airports in term so of outlets. Most of KLIA shopping outlets are located in the satellite terminal. KLIA seems to be going for brand image, having Harrods, Montblanc, Dunhill, etc. They even have chains like Mango, though I wonder who would be buying from the airport Mango when they can get more choices of Mango, Zara and similar in shopping complexes.

The hotel that I stayed in was quite comfortable. At the very least, it was much better than that pathetic excuse of a hotel that I stayed in in Beijing. As I arrived early (checkin was suppose to be at 3am and I was there at 10am), I was upgraded to an available suite with 2 rooms, a kitchen (fully functional) and a hall. The rooms were on a split level, i.e. the second room was on a second level. Kitchen came with Fridge, dish washer, all the utensils for cooking, including pans, plates, cups, knives, etc. And of course as in all American hotels - a coffee maker.

Someone read this and fedback that there was not enought photos. So I am updating this with additional photos and writeups :) .Here is the unit that I was staying in. Each block has 4 units and I have the top right hand unit which is a duplex.

With all the built-in facilities for cooking, the hotel had also thought of providing convenience to it's tenants. They have microwavable meals available in what they term as the Market. Sure is convenient if one needs a quick bite. For many longer term tenants, they could also pop into the mall which was just a bout 1.5 km from the hotel. There are food outlets and supermarkets everywhere.

Last but not least, the reason for the trip to Delaware - project Pongo. Here is the Pongo team - CE Assist managers from the 3 regions WW, the product support managers from the factory (Little Falls, Santa Clara and Waldbron), LFS Quality manager and a Six Sigma Black Belt consultant, along with a representative from Finance and the WW Customer Support Manager.

Well, I start to go back on 10th May afternoon (US time) and arrive in Shanghai on 12th May afternoon.Will look forward to that as I have only been sleeping 3 hours the first and second day. The third day was better with 6 hours sleep.

Akan datang.... the second leg!!