This is insanely cool

Good to check first

Stupid SBJ

I really can't jump if $100 depends on it.

HOLY SHIT! Never take anything at face value.

Transformation!

RTL reflections

RTL was tough. Real tough.

Could we have been better prepared for it? It's kind of subjective. The hills were the like we had never seen, but if I can recall correctly, Malaysian terrain is similar. We could have tried to train in Malaysia except we would probably be run over by a speeding truck before we got past the first turn.

Which was one thing I rather liked about RTL. There is a very clear campaign for them to share the road with cyclist of all varieties. They gave you a wide berth. Even when you were riding in the middle of the road, they made a point to overtake you carefully.

However, some of them were a bit too friendly. I know they mean well and were trying to show their support, but when you're riding along and a car blares it's horn at you from behind, it's scary.

Anyway, back to RTL.

Day 1 was tough. I think it was partly due to us not being conditioned for it, partly because we have never rode hills like those and partly because we just did not know what to expect. Our strategy for changing riders was totally off. We were planning to ride 1 hour stretches, roughly 18km per rider. But we got tired too quickly and the hills didn't help.

Day 2 was better in the sense that we were more conditioned to cold, except that it had to rain. Riding in the rain was no fun. Riding in the rain at about 10 degrees Celsius is worse. Riding in the rain at about 10 degrees Celsius wearing only a t-shirt and pants is the stuff of nightmares. But we were more accustomed the the hills and had a better strategy and we got much closer to finishing on day 2.

More to come when I have additional writers juice.

Gah

Haven't posted in a while. Been really lazy lately.

I'll try to post a bit on my trip, but I really should be starting off by basically complaining about China Eastern.

The whole fiasco started with my friend JH realizing that China Eastern had actually postponed our flight by 2 days. We had bought really cheap tickets from a travel agency for a Singapore to New York flight via China Eastern. It was supposed to take us from Singapore to Shanghai, switching to a connecting flight from there to New York. China Eastern has apparently postponed the Shanghai-New York flight by 2 days without informing us.

We panicked. We didn't want to spend 2 days in Shanghai. So we called both the travel agency and China Eastern to seek a resolution. They both pushed the blame to each other, neither wanting to admit it was their fault. Well, it had to be someones right?

I had to ask to be let off early from work to make my way down to the travel agency to get an answer from them. China Eastern had actually stopped picking up our calls and taken the phone off the hook, meaning we couldn't call them. The travel agency wasn't much help, so I rushed down to the China Eastern head office. Some how they were closed at 4.30pm. We headed down to the airport in hopes that the counter there would be open. It wasn't, only opening at night. It was so frustrating and worrying since we had a very short deadline to get things done.

To cut a very long story short, it was only on the day that we were supposed to fly that they traced down the fault to China Eastern. China Eastern was claiming that they had sent out notices that the flights were canceled. However, it was finally realized that they had sent out the notices after we had bought the tickets and more importantly, they did not send it out to people who had already bought the tickets for that day, i.e. US.

It ended rather happily as they had to send us on the next available plane to New York which was Singapore Airlines.

Unfortunately, we were going to come back to Singapore via China Eastern.

Comparing the 2, it was really sad. The difference in the quality and quantity and frequency of the food was amazing.

SQ left me feeling very very full. I was perpetually hungry on China Eastern. The China Eastern blanket was too small, only allowing me to either cover my upper body or lower body and not both at the same time.

Summary, I'm not inclined to take China Eastern ever again, no matter how cheap the tickets are.