It's a long story but basically there was some major miscommunication between AirAsia employees and 14 passengers missed the flight to Vientiane on Thursday even though we were all sitting in front of the gate and repeatedly asking about the flight status. I once again went into "you have to be effing kidding me" mode and berated the poor AirAsia employee, Zul, who was lying to our faces and claiming they had paged us over the loudspeaker repeatedly. I demanded to speak to his manager, Sudirman, who was actually a really nice guy. Turns out they were very understanding after I explained the situation in detail. They put all 14 of us in a hotel in KL for the 2 nights, since the next flight was not until today (Saturday), and pay for all of our meals and hotel transfers in the interim. Our bags flew to Laos, and then were to be returned to us later that night at our hotel. So we went to the hotel, and after eating some dinner, I was on AirAsia's website on my iPod trying to make a booking to fly to Langkawi next weekend. Even though I had just vowed to never fly AirAsia again only an hour earlier. It's just so much cheaper than any other airline - I guess you would say we have a love/hate relationship. But on the site, every time I entered in everybody's information - names, passport numbers, etc., I would be at the very last step and the site would have some sort of error and I would have to start all over again. At this point we had been drinking wine for a while and I was basically just complaining about AirAsia to anybody who would listen. And then something crazy happened. A car pulled up, and the driver's side door opened, and who steps out but Zul, the same AirAsia employee who had screwed us over in the airport just a few hours earlier, and he's got our bags. It's probably a good thing that I was happily drunk at this point, because I made amends with Zul and shared my bottle of wine with him and we laughed about the whole thing, as I continued trying and failing to book the flight to Langkawi and getting more and more upset with the AirAsia website. Zul and his buddy ended up sitting at our table and hanging out with us for about an hour and we had a great time. Now, imagine this whole thing from Zul's perspective: in the daytime, he sees me at the airport and I am just flipping out at him and saying horrible things about AirAsia. Hours later I am at the hotel, laughing and drinking with him...but still saying horrible things about AirAsia. He must have such a bizarre picture of who I am as a person. Maybe this is why everyone hates Americans.
Anyway, we ended up having an amazing time in KL, met some incredible people along the way as we were all stranded. Five Australian girls, a Brazilian woman, a Laotian student, two Thai girls, and an English girl...and then us four Americans. We spent a night hanging out in KL's Chinatown and later had a feast at a great restaurant in Little India where the "menu" consisted of me walking back into the kitchen and pointing to all of the dishes we wanted. The food was served on leaves and there was so much that 4 of us did not come close to finishing...and the bill was 44 ringit (~15 USD).
The Aussie girls changed their plans and headed to Bangkok, but the other 9 of us are now about to (hopefully) board our flight to Vientiane.
And I'm back in the SAME gate that I flew to Seoul from back on New Years Day, which was my last awful AirAsia experience. It's funny how everything seems to come full circle.
Location:Jalan Klia S4,Klia,Malaysia
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