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!

An active silhouette

Last week's photo theme was silhouette.

Spending so much time at the Relau Sports Complex, it occurred to me that one of the silhouettes there might work for this theme. :P

Digging out my coin collection

I did not check my Euro collection before leaving for Europe. So when I was there, I just saved some coins that looked like I had never seen before. As a result, I came back with:

1. An Italian coin that I thought I didn't have, but did.

2. An Austrian coin that I thought I had never seen before, but in fact I already had the same design at 1-cent and 5-cent denominations. But this inadvertently completed my collection for that country because the one I found was 2 cents. :)

Austrian coins are the one in the column "A" (if you don't recognize the flag - I don't)
The new coin is the one sticking out a bit.

3. A German 2-cent coin that I didn't know was German, but it turned out I had the design only for 1-cent, so it turned out well.

Germany is the column with "D", for Deutschland

4. I kept a German 20-cent coin just because it looked so shiny and new, even though I knew I already had the design. Turned out I only had the 10-cent denomination (though this one, I definitely had seen loads of it when I was in France…I just wasn’t collecting all denominations at the time, because my friend only gave me the collector’s book at the end of my stay there). Then I realized I had put the old coin (the 10-cent coin above it) upside down. I didn't know Brandenburger Tor at the time… Now I totally know which side is up! :P

The shiny 20-cent coin is in the middle...the coin above it is upside down. And below it...there is no coin, just the image waiting to be filled :P

And when looking at the leftover coins that I didn't bother specially saving, I found that Belgium had changed their coin slightly. Hmmm... Why did you do that? Want to make things more difficult for collectors? :P

Spot the difference!

I also found that I had a German 1-euro coin that was shinier than the one in my book…so I guess I can swap that out.

And while going through all these, I found that I have a commemorative coin from Queen Elizabeth's 80th birthday in 2006 (my trip to UK was in 2007; I had forgotten when, but I looked it up :P )

This trip also gave me a commemorative 2-euro coin from Berlin, and a Latvian coin (Latvia joined the Euro club  in 2014, after I left France), so I am happy about those.

And also some Danish coins... I didn't get any from Poland or Sweden because those were only day trips and I didn't exchange any cash; we only used cards!

A dramatic weekend

Before I get to posting photos of my trip, I need to write about how the universe seemed to be conspiring against my return to Penang. (there were no serious events, but there were so many little things…little “signs”, if you will)

It started with my luggage bag. It has a simple combination lock to hold the zippers in place so that they wouldn’t move so easily and open the bag. After I packed, I somehow inserted the zippers into the lock…and then moved the combination…and then I realized something was wrong.

The zippers were not supposed to go into the lock unless the combination was correct!

Too late, I did not know what the combination was when I put the zippers in. So now one zipper was stuck, unmovable in its lock, while the other one had somehow fallen out, so it was free.

(Here I guess what happened was that I had somehow moved the combination while the lock stayed in the “unlocked” position. I am not sure how that happened, but it must have been when I first opened my luggage at the hotel… I had moved the combination after unlocking it, simply NOT to have the lock in the “unlocked” position. So much for that…I guess that backfired on me.)

It was already rather late and I had to check out. So I decided I had no choice but to handle that later. I finished the rest of my packing and headed for check out. While waiting for my friend to check out, I started trying out a few combinations (3-digit lock, 1000 possible combinations), hoping to hit the jackpot. I tried numbers in a row (just changing one digit), jotting down what I had tried, so I would not need to try those again if I really ended up trying the 1000 combinations later.

Here I was thinking, I would be spending the whole journey home thinking about how to open the lock when I get back. Because the other option would be to ruin the zipper to open my bag and get my stuff out first. (I doubted that I would be able to try 1000 combinations after a 24-hour journey from Berlin to Penang)

Then as we sat in the hotel lobby (my friend was finishing up a drink that he didn’t manage to finish the night before), my friend suddenly recalled something that he had read about cheap locks before…we can see how some notches appear when we turn the combination. From there, we can find the correct number to unlock it. And. It. WORKED!

Whew! That was such a relief…

(wow, so much written just for the “first episode”... :P )

Then we called for a taxi to the airport. (we asked the hotel receptionist to call one for us; they did it with a simple push of a button :P )

We waited for a while but didn’t see a taxi come…Then we asked the hotel receptionist about how long it would take, and he said it was supposed to have arrived. No matter, he would call another one. It arrived in less than 5 minutes…so probably we missed the first one because we did not expect it so quickly!

After that it was off to the airport and all the way to Doha airport.

Upon arriving at the lounge, we put our carry-on luggage in their lockers so that we wouldn’t need to carry them around. Those lockers have a combination lock that we set ourselves. There is also a card inside with the locker number, and we would take that card with us, and put it back after we retrieve our luggage.

Just before leaving the lounge, I went to get something from my bag to use in the washroom. (without taking my bag out) After coming back from the washroom, I entered my combination and pulled at the door handle…and my hand slipped right off.

Here I need to explain what the door handle is like. Instead of an actual “handle”, it’s more like a flat piece of metal sticking out. The metal is a vertical plane, and we need to really grip it properly so that our hand won’t just slip off the metal. (My hand had actually slipped a number of times before when we used that lounge on the trip towards Berlin.)

So I am fully convinced that my hand kept slipping off because I had just used their (awesome) hand lotion in the washroom. The light on the locker had already turned green after I entered my combination.

After I failed to open the locker a few times, the person at the locker area came and asked me whether I had forgotten my combination. I told him it was probably because of the lotion, but I’m not sure whether he heard me; in any case he was already opening the locker for me. I had just taken the item from my bag less than 10 minutes ago; I guess he remembered me!

As I joined my friend (who had already taken his stuff out), I told him, “I really have no luck with locks today,” and told him the story. Here was where he said, “They don’t want you to go home!”

Then we made our way to our boarding gate, which was something like A10. As we reached the gate, we saw a long queue…but was surprised to see that the flight was not ours, but another one later than ours. Checking the nearest display for boarding gates, we realized that our gate had been changed to B7 (if I remember correctly). And not only that, the status was “last call”.

PANIC.

There was more than half an hour before departure. Last call?!?!

We sped all the way to B7. (not running, just fast walking, otherwise I would have run out of energy before reaching) It was like going from almost the end of the A terminal to almost the end of B terminal. I think my friend might have gone even faster if he weren’t with me…I did tell him to just go ahead, because he could tell them that I was on my way, and that would be fine.

When we reached B7, they were already boarding, but with a lot of economy class passengers left to go. I was panting as I reached the counter. The man there greeted me and asked, “How are you?” (the irony…was that included in the standard greeting or did he ask that because I did not look fine?) I had to catch my breath before I could reply to him “I’m okay”, and I deliberately added, “You all changed the gate?”, to which he laughed a bit.

As we were going to the new boarding gate, my friend and I had remarked again, “yeah, they really don’t want me to go back…”

Why didn’t we notice the gate change? Because there were way too many connecting flights in Doha, it seems… In the lounge, we had checked the departure display at least twice, but our flight did not show up. It was leaving at 1:50am, and the last few flights that showed up were also leaving at 1:50am. And after those last few flights, the display switched to the first upcoming flights again. So we just went to the gate that we had checked earlier (before going into the lounge).

Fast-forward to KLIA…things seemed to be going smoothly now. And then…just before departure for Penang, there was an announcement that they had to change a wheel on our plane, and that it would take 20-25 minutes. This was when we had all already boarded. Here I started thinking, “This is blog post fodder!” But at the moment I could only recall our sprint to board the flight from Doha, and asked my friend what were the other events that had happened to make us say something was conspiring against us. He couldn’t recall it immediately either, but he did mention that “there was a lot”. After a while, I recalled the two luggage incidents and told him so. Then he mentioned that the first taxi also went missing! (Still remember it from earlier in the post? :P That was such a small thing that it would have been totally forgotten if not for the other events.)

After the first announcement, there was another one saying that they would need another 15 minutes. And then…finally we took off!

It seems that they flew more quickly. As my friend said, the stewards and stewardesses seemed more stressed, and had to serve us more quickly. We also had less time to finish our in-flight satay… :P

In the end, even with all the incidents, only the last flight was delayed...by maybe half an hour? So the trip schedule actually went according to plan despite all the hiccups!

These dramatic episodes made me recall another airport drama that occurred before…I mostly remember being extremely jittery on the bus to the airport, and my name being called on the PA system. Reading back my old blog posts, it seems like my memory merged the events from my Vienna and Munich trips. I’m actually glad I didn’t recall all these before my trip to Berlin, otherwise I think I would have been quite worried about the flight that I would be taking from Copenhagen to Berlin! As they say, ignorance is bliss...

A "back to Malaysia" Photo Friday

After the previous Photo Friday bumper post, here is the "normal" one for the past week.

The theme was restaurant. I stupidly forgot to snap a photo of one of the multiple restaurants at one of the multiple airports that I passed through last weekend, and on Wednesday I started panicking about where to find a restaurant to take a photo of (without going out of my way). Luckily I happened to spot this "new" restaurant ("new" because I don't think it's very new, but I seldom walk past that block of shops) near Pisa Corner.

I have finally moved all my Berlin trip photos to my computer. I have a whopping 1099 photos...with minimal filtering, so that number probably includes some useless, non-touristical photos as well. But it still means there's a fair thousand of trip photos to go through...can I finish in six months? :P

Overdue photos coming up!

It's about time I posted my overdue Photo Fridays!

I spent four weeks in Berlin, and have been snapping the photos but not posting them here. So here's a bumper edition with those four photos.

The theme that I received just before I left was home.

The most appropriate photo for the occasion was to show my home for the upcoming four weeks. So once I arrived in my hotel room, I snapped a photo of it. (well, I would have done that even without this theme... :P )

Spot the kitty!

The following week's theme was school. I didn't see many schools as I went around Berlin, but one morning while walking around, I spotted a colourful kindergarten.

Then came the theme eyes. One night we walked by this poster of a play... Those are some scary eyes! It wasn't until I zoomed in with my camera that I realized the eye was actually a QR code. Before that I thought it was a diamond!

Here's the full face on the poster:

(A scary face too, don't you think? :P )

The next theme was silver. This was when I went to Copenhagen, and from my hostel, I present you: A silver staircase to... the bunk above mine.

Very highly polished indeed, wouldn't you say?

Other photos of Berlin will have to wait...there are plenty, more than I have time to handle, I feel!