A jungle in the airport

Here’s a short one about the KLIA jungle.

Upon reaching the satellite terminal, we were greeted by this sight.

There are trees in the airport!

We went up to take a look.

Then we went back down and went inside (initially I thought we needed to pay to visit it, but turned out it was free, no one was even manning the entrance).

There were some paths inside.

It was actually slightly smelly inside (bird droppings?). It is totally under the open sky, so I’m not sure whether they need do anything to maintain the plants, like watering, etc.

I like this photo :)

All in all, it was pretty small, and then we went out (there is one entrance and one exit).

the exit (the entrance looks similar)

Why we shouldn't put off taking photos

I’m surprised I haven’t posted about my kokedama before. It was from a teambuilding event last year (September 24th, from my photos), and even though I have been caring for it in a “minimalist” way instead of the recommended way (I dump it in a plastic box and pour some water sometimes just so it won’t dry out), it has been surviving pretty well.

This was how it looked in May (unfortunately, the last photo I have of it green).

Then I guess I stopped taking photos because it was simply growing quite well, with new leaves on top once in a while.

When I came back from Berlin, it was thriving, with rather big leaves on top. I was going to take a photo, but put it off because I simply had too many things to do!

I didn’t expect that it would dry out in less than two weeks…

Last week I already noticed it being dry, and poured more water into the container. Somehow the water dried out pretty quickly (hmm…now I have a thought, was the container leaking?). But it didn’t seem to work…this is how it looks today.

And I suddenly noticed a snail…see it in the corner? Is this what killed the kokedama? (as long as it’s not me… :P )

I had a thought that maybe the snail drank up all the water (I'm not sure how much snails love water :P ) So I poured water into the container again. The snail came out.

A church in any kind of structure...

...is still a church.

When I received the photo theme of church, I was wondering where the nearest church was.

Google Maps to the rescue...there is actually one at Golden Triangle, and also this one that I often see on my way back home from work.

Not the usual kind of buildings that we associate with churches. That said, I'm glad I managed to get the cross into the photo. :P

How do the Western lounges compare?

As promised, here is the second part about airport lounges…mainly about the Qatar lounge and a bit about the Berlin lounge.

By the time we reached the Qatar airport, I was extremely tired, not having managed to sleep on the KL-Doha flight. It was late night (local time), which meant early pre-dawn Malaysian time. Still, we took a look around to see where our departure gate was located before heading to the airport lounge.

I saw a cute teddy bear and told my friend that I was going to take a photo of the teddy bear. He said, “oh, the big one”.

I didn’t even know there was a huge teddy bear (probably a permanent fixture?) in the Doha airport.

So ugly. -_-

The one that I wanted to take a photo of was this!

More small teddies in the shop. I would have gone in and browsed (and given a few of them a squeeze :P ) if I weren't so tired.

Nothing much else to see (no cute stuff :P ), we headed to the lounge. We had an overnight layover so we looked for a place to sleep.

There were quite a lot of people in the lounge. It was difficult to find a place where we could stretch out and rest. Then we found the pods.

I took the first photo of the pod where I was about to sleep…but then couldn’t sleep. I was about to nod off but was worried about my luggage disappearing while I slept, and somehow couldn’t actually fall asleep. Then somehow I recalled seeing a luggage storage when we were walking around earlier looking for a place to sleep. After storing my luggage, I felt better about going to sleep…but couldn’t fall asleep any more. -_-

So I walked around and took more photos.

the pods, from the "outside"

Because of this, I held on to my boarding pass when I stowed my luggage away

The lounge cleared up a bit after 2am…probably because that was when most of the transfer flights flew out. (Our return flight left at 1:50am…we were probably one of those people :P ) So I managed to find an empty space...still didn't manage to sleep.

Visited an empty washroom and snapped photos of how lovely it looked. There were cloth towels instead of paper towels by the sink. :O And a large laundry basket by the sink for us to drop in the used cloth towels. How many do they have to wash each day?!?

The hand lotion is AWESOME. ♥

There was even a games room.

While walking around, I actually found another sleeping area, which needed bookings (I was told I couldn’t go in because the pods were all occupied and wouldn’t be free till 7am…too late for me). Later on, still unable to sleep, I decided to take a shower (earlier was planning to sleep first and then take a shower after waking up).

Sorry, MAS lounge, you lose.

At around 6am I think, they started serving hot breakfast at the restaurant. So I got myself some. In general, nicer food than in the MAS lounge. :P Though nothing to shout about. (but it was not self-serve...someone was there serving us which items we wanted, so I was slightly embarrassed about asking for tiny amounts)

from the hot breakfast serving area

cold ham

croissant...that is not really like a croissant, but more like sweet bread

yoghurt. Not bad.

Then we tried some drinks from the menu. One each, since these were strong…

Bailey's Irish cream for me

I liked it…but it was really quite strong and I had to eat a bit in between sips.

My friend tried a Malibu (the clear liquid), and got some pineapple juice to mix with it (there were a few different juices in dispensers for us to self-serve).

our drinks

On the trip back, I tried a ginger ale that I didn’t manage to try on the outward trip since I didn’t feel like drinking carbonated drinks (they have mini-cans, 150ml I think).

There was a queue to go into the restaurant (peak flight transfer hours?), and we joined the queue (we gave our name and waited for them to call us when a table was free).

This time, I guess it was the late night hot food instead of the breakfast hot food.

not bad...but both the lamb and the beef didn't come with much sauce, so I felt it was too dry

taboulleh. Not nice.

a mocktail, called Sunrise if I remember correctly

This time, I tried Cointreau liquor. I wanted to try this because I had eaten Cointreau-filled chocolates before, and liked the orange taste. But this was disappointing because I couldn't taste the orange at all.

This time there were a lot of desserts! (there were none during breakfast, if I remember correctly…or maybe the late-night guests finished them and they weren’t refilled at that early hour)

One gripe, however, is the size of the desserts…they are too big! A quarter of this size would be enough so that I could try more…

As it was, I still took three types (none of which I finished…sorry :( )

a sort of chocolate cake and a lemon meringue pie

a matcha mousse thingy

Lemon meringue pie was not good. The chocolate cake was good (a bit too rich), and the matcha mousse was extremely good. At first I thought I would be able to finish the matcha mousse because it was not too rich, but I still gave up at the end and left a bit on the plate.

Now for the last part about airport lounges, here is the Berlin airport lounge. There were quite some people there, so I didn’t dare to take much photos. It was a pity because I would have really liked to take photos of their liquor, wine, and beer selection; there were many kinds, and all self-serve. What’s good about self-serve is that we could take as little of each as we wanted, to try. This is what I did with Mozart chocolate cream and another lemon-flavoured liquor.

Mozart chocolate cream is the best…it beats Bailey’s Irish cream. Probably because of the thick Belgian chocolate taste. ♥ I went back for a second serving (we made one serving about 1cm in a paper cup…not that much), encouraged by my friend (he was like, “you like it, and it’s your chance to drink it now”, haha)

When going to the Berlin lounge, we were confused because we didn’t go through customs first. We were like, then we need to leave the lounge with enough time to go through customs. We checked the airport map, and even asked at the information counter, how do we get through passport check later? They told us that it was after we exited the lounge. We kept worrying about there being a queue at customs later…but it turned out that there was a special counter just for our passport check when we exit the lounge.

this was our customs, after exiting the lounge (photo taken outside, after going through the passport check)

Discovering airport lounges

I decided to quit being perfectionist and start blogging about parts of my trip before I finish filtering through all the photos! In a way, that would be quicker because I would write about the parts that I have just filtered photos for, instead of coming back to them later and trying to remember everything all again. So what if I mis-sorted some photos and find out later after I’ve posted? I’ll just add them in…or leave them out.

First up: the flight to Berlin. It is made up of three legs: Penang-KL, KL-Doha, and Doha-Berlin.

The first two flights are operated by MAS, and the last one by Qatar Airways. It’s a partnership, so it means that our luggage gets checked in the whole way. Good!

(I doubt this post will cover the whole trip all the way to Berlin…there are too many things to post about.)

It was my first time flying business class. My first business trip… previous flights were all economy class, either paid by JPA or ourselves. So this is where I discovered…airport lounges. (so this post shall be all about airport lounges…the airplanes can wait :P )

Penang airport’s lounge. Small, but there were quite a number of people inside, so I didn’t dare to properly take photos.

Got some food. Not much choices.

Then in KLIA, there were three MAS lounges. We didn’t go to the domestic one since our flight was international, but we did go there on the trip back, right before our flight to Penang. (no photos of that one…at that time it was packed! We did find that the food was basically the same as what we had in the satellite lounge.)

Before going to the satellite lounge, we stumbled upon the regional lounge first. Seems like that’s the one to go to if we were to fly to Asian countries. We asked the person there which lounge we should go to, and she told us to go to the international (i.e. satellite) lounge because the facilities there were better. We asked whether we could go in and take a look. At the time, the lounge was empty, so I could take photos easily. :P

The satellite lounge was just above the aerotrain to the international terminal.

And right opposite it, was the KLIA Jungle (more on that in a separate post).

This lounge was definitely bigger. There was even a separate section for first class; I have no idea how it’s different since we couldn’t go in there.

Again, there were some people around, so I couldn’t take photos freely. Though since the lounge was huge, there was plenty of empty space around us, as you can see from the limited photos that I took. The lounge is at least twice as big as the area you can see here…mostly different types of tables and chairs.

Food wasn’t that great either. :P

The eclair (the red one) was not good.

cookies with sparkling wine
By the way, trying to find out the difference between champagne and sparkling wine, I found out that champagne is sparkling wine, and sparkling wine is champagne only if it comes from the region of Champagne in France. Ah...so that's it!

The best were the cookies…and there’s an anecdote about that. As I took a cookie for the first time, a man came up to me (not Asian, not “white”, speaking perfectly good English) and told me that I should take more than one, because they were extremely good. I laughed and said that I would just try it and come back later if I wanted more, and he said that he was coming back for more after trying it.

After that, I decided to take two instead of one…and yes, I did go back for more. :P

There was a noodle bar serving hokkien mee that day, and I didn’t try it. But on the trip back, they were serving Sarawak laksa, which was better (I mean a better option for me, since it’s not something I can find easily in Penang). And we had a longer stop, so I took it twice; the portion was small, which is good.

These cakes were the good ones on the trip back.

There was even a sleeping area in the lounge…but it looked rather uncomfortable if you ask me. :P There were separate areas for men and women; this is of course the women's area.

We didn’t need to shower on the outgoing trip, but on the journey back, we used the shower since it was after two 6-hour flights.

They gave us that basket with the towel when we said we wanted to shower. I think my friend said he asked for a toothbrush as well.

I happened to have a credit card that gave access to the Plaza Premium Lounge at KLIA, so on the outgoing trip I went to take a look. It was extremely packed (those who don’t have free access can actually pay for access); so I didn’t stay very long.

When I checked the lounge info online, it said that they had an “amazing view of the airport runway”, so I took the opportunity to snap a photo (the sunset lighting is nice :D )

The food didn't look that good either, so I just took some cake and tried some beer on tap. (not that good to me :P )

I managed to take this last photo after the lounge cleared up a bit (some people must have left for their flight). The MAS lounge definitely wins over this one.

And I think I should stop here…the post is getting long enough. The next post will be about the Qatar lounge, and then we can have a comparison between KLIA and Doha Airport!