Airport, and then off to Jakarta!

We left in the morning, near noontime, to fly out to Jakarta to meet my relatives. I haven’t seen them in 7 years, and I can’t wait to see how they’ve become.

Funny thing though, the airport had the most inconvenient customer service I’ve seen so far. There was no one available at the ticket counter until 1 hour before the flight, and they close 45 minutes before the flight. So that left us with 15 minutes of window time to check in and get our boarding passes. Note that there were 5 families together in our group. With 15 people total and an average of 2 check-in bags per person, the process was lengthy. Moreover, they had a crazy rule that the weight must not be more than 15 kg, or 33 lbs. This was much lower than the American standard of 50 lbs. So we had to take certain items out and take them as carry-on. But the dilemma didn’t stop there, as another rule stated that each person could not carry more than 1 carry-on. Already, at least half of us had 2 carry-ons each person. Luckily, all we had to do was to hide them from view and just sneak them in. Some security they have. But it didn’t stop there. This particular airline we were taking doesn’t assign seats. That means passengers must rush to the gate, hoping to be in the front of the line to get their seats. Essentially, the availability of seats was on first-come-first-serve basis. Wow! In the end, we managed to get that, and we got a group of seats within close proximity. So then we were off to Jakarta!