airplanes!

A brief chronicle of my return to Yogyakarta from Denpassar (Bali)-

To begin, I was greeted--quite literally--at the Bali airport by day of the week welcome mats guarding the entrance to the bathrooms (because everything in Indonesia is tiled there are mats at pretty much every threshold). This one said "Kamis/ Thursday" and it was right. I really couldn't contain myself thinking about the possibilities: who changes the mats? where is the room where they keep all the mats on their off-days? do they ever use them to disorient beleaguered business travelers? were the ones featuring the Japanese anime characters more expensive?

I didn't have much time to ponder beyond this because I was almost instantly greeted by the fact that the men's bathrooms have tropical fish tanks over the urinals. Its like bathrooms where they have the running water/continuous fountain/white noise contraption, but waaaay better.

This trip was also auspicious because it was my first experience with an Indonesian low-cost airline. Let me tell you, nothing instills confidence in a passenger quite like walking across the tarmac to the plane on which the motto "Fly is cheap" is emblazoned to the fuselage: you're ready to strap yourself in and get down to business.

The flight was pretty uneventful except (as is always the case) for the landing. In order to land from the west (Denpassar is due east of Yogya) the plane has to meander its way around the airport and back. Our pilot accomplished this by performing a series of exceptionally slow banks, the type where you can't help but wonder if the limp sensation halfway through has something to do with the engines being on idle. This suspicion is confirmed when he conspicuously guns the engines just as you are pretty sure the bank is really more of a spiral. This happened several times. The great compounding factor is that the runway in Yogya is one of the shortest I have ever seen and so you have to come in pretty low (and get down on the pavement pretty shortly after it starts). So, we hit the runway, the whole apparatus takes a breath, and then you hear the complaints of fatigued steel cables pressed into action. The plane goes bumping down the runway and comes to a stop much quicker than you could imagine. All in all the fun is over much too fast.