The KL

I'm in Kuala Lumpur. In fact, I spent the night here. That was kind of an unexpected version of this trip, but Malaysian Airlines, which is quickly earning the title in my mind of 'biggest struggle of an airline I've dealt with in years,' has taken about 57 hours to complete our supposed 10 hour trip to Saigon. This has resulted in us being in Kuala Lumpur. Which has resulted in me calling it The KL. Which has resulted in Everett threatening to punch me.

So, yesterday we waited for three hours in line at the Melbourne airport. That is no exageration. In fact, by the time we'd stepped away from the counter, it'd been three and a half. Finally, after our flight had been "delayed" for 19 hours (some people call that cancelled and rescheduled, but Malaysian Airlines is really positive) we boarded flight 128.

As we walked onto the plane and to our seats in row 36, I noticed something. There were three people I'd seen in line that I didn't want to sit near and they were no where in sight. Until we got to row 36.

In our seats 36 d, e and f, Everett, Laura and I were literally sitting in the middle of the axis of insanity. Walking up to our seats we all busted out laughing because what else can you do when you know that you're about to sit for 8 hours right next to the most obnoxious people, possibly on the planet, but definitely on the plane?

To our left was a little girl who ran around like a crazy person, holding a stuffed bunny in her hand and then punching people in the face with it for most of the flight. At one point, I looked over and saw her mother sobbing crying. I could only assume this was because she bore this child. (I later discovered they were on their way to a funeral and felt kind of bad. But only kind of because that discovery came about 30 seconds after her kid punched me in the stomach.) The girl actually threw the bunny across the plane at one point. I've really never seen anything like it. In the states, I'm pretty sure the plane would have stopped and forced them to get off. I wanted to do that.

To our right was a woman who was best described by Laura as looking exactly like the manicurist in the movie Legally Blonde. She was blond, busty and extremely loud. She kept doing this exagerated yawning thing to the extent that at one point little, sweet Laura sat up in her seat, pulled her hot pink eye cover off, dropped an expletive and turned to me saying that she was going to kill her, "like literally kill her." It's also worth noting that the woman was wearing camo from head to toe, had insanely long french tipped nails and a husband the size of my pinkie finger.

In front of me was the best though. Sitting in front of us was a kid who the entire Melbourne Airport had wanted to kill. He'd been screaming for hours. And it didn't stop. My favorite part was when his mother, who was sitting in the seat in front of me picked him up, shook him and then lifted him over his shoulder so that his face was about 6 inches from mine as he screamed at the top of his lungs. I screamed back. I'm pretty sure I looked like the crazy person at that point.

But alas, we're here. We're alive. Miraculously, none of us killed anyone on the plane. And now we're about to catch a flight to Saigon. It's a short one. Hopefully we'll survive.