The last three mornings I’ve asked for boiled eggs and each time adjusted my order slightly hoping that they would manage it. No more luck this time, and I simply smiled and thanked this morning like the others. We checked out and got ourselves a a taxi running with meter and headed towards the airport.

It’s a interesting thing about Manila taxi drivers and their meters, some get thoroughly offended when asked if they can go by the meter while others considers it to be the default. Usually the meter price is around half of their fixed price and since we last night found out that the terminal fee (required to be paid before departure) of Manilla International airport was about 25€ for us both (which is about the price for one domestic flight including all fees) we needed all the pesos we could get.

We had cleverly checked in on KLMs homepage yesterday to get some decent seats and got ourselves all good and comfy as the plane had left the ground. Apparently something was broken with our entertainment screens though, they were pitch black and could not be fixed. We kindly took the offer to be re-seated to slightly worse position but with working screens. 14 hours daytime is a long flight without any entertainment.

There was something not right with the entertainment system, after a spontaneous reboot (with roughly 10 minutes left of the movie) and later a crew-initiated one it seemed to work decent at least. As we hit the ground we were both in zombie-mode and didn’t think to look under the seats we’d originally had for my nice hat. That struck me as we were relaxing in the lying chairs at Schiphol.

After some hassle I managed to get it back though, not sure that I’d needed the extra hour that KLM kindly given us in connection time though. While waiting to board the final leg of the trip one could spot that the lot of the travelers now were from Sweden, the main clue being the amount of tax-free alcohol carried.

We of course got three very happy males from Sweden behind us. As my iPod saved me from most of their drunken blather I sat back and thought about the average impression I’ve gotten from middle-aged white men from northern Europe during the trip. There are exceptions but they are way too few, the general picture was not looking good. But who knows, perhaps things are different in India, Chile?, or perhaps Bolivia? There are plenty more places to go, people to meet and fun things to do before the final judgement is passed on this world of ours.Oh, and by the way – guess if it was cold when we got back? What you see in the background is actually snow. The cab costed about 40€, it feels great to be back home 😉