I am taking a rather long break travelling to the States for about 3 weeks to visit my son and family as well as do some sightseeing. In fact this will be  my longest break since my university days,  since most of my  breaks were  between 7 to 10 days. The longest was the 3 12-day breaks for my son’s convo back in 2003 , my daughter convo last May as well as in the mid 80s when i visited Texas. This time it will be a 3 week break, and i am taking this opportunity to visit the  Grand Canyon which I have never visited before.

Since not all places will have wifi, and since  hotels charge exorbitant rate for wifi, I may not be able to post regularly. I am going via KL-Singapore-San Francisco route and coming back via the New York-Franfurt-Sinagpore-KL  route, so it is a sort of round the world trip ( At least it is some sort of around globe flight).

I am taking SIA instead of MAS for 2 reasons. First MAS does not fly to San Francisco, and I am stopping by  SF to visit my nephew who is a Cornell trained  architect and now working as a regional planner there.  He was born a Malaysian, studied and grew up in Singapore and became a Singaporean, and now he is a permanent resident in US, doing regional planning for certain regions of California.  He is a clear case of a brain drain.  All these are cases of brain drain (including my children perhaps, but i do hope they will come back one day).

Perhaps we can say  Malaysia is a philanthropist country, we donate so much of talents to all over the world,and  perhaps we should be ‘ proud’ of this fact, and we can ‘console’ ourselves if we lag behind others; it is because of all these Malaysians who have helped other countries grow and so even if we are behind, we should be proud of this!!! Ya?

Second reason is that on SIA long haul flights, there are certain seats in economy class  which are deemd long leg span and you can book this seat at a little extra( i pay slightly over a 100 RM to get a good seat ) , since this is a 20 hour flight, it pays to be more comfortable especially for a six footer like me), and those seats come with power plugs  that you can plug you PC and watch Hong Kong serials and charge your electronic gadgets.

MAS planes do have extra leg span seats at emergency exits but you cannot reserve it and it is on a first come first serve basis, or rather it is at the mercy of the check-in counter staff. . But so far , on most of my travels, they do comply with my request to get those seats ear emergency doors, or those  first row seats facing the bulkheads.  (The partitionis called bulkhead in air travel terms). Bulkhead seats , however can be noisy since they are normally reserved  for families with small kids.

I would only post on and off basis this month. …