Nasi Lemak is, of course, one of the most well known national dishes of Malaysia. Other dishes that I would consider representative of our beloved country would be satay, roti telur, char kueh teow, and of course, bak kut teh. But today, lets concentrate on nasi lemak.

glorious nasi lemak with egg, ikan bilis, peanuts, chicken, and sambal

The last nasi lemak I had was the in flight meal at Air Asia X from KL to Melbourne just a little over 2 days ago. While most things Air Asia isn’t exactly awesome (flight was delayed for almost 2 hours, seats aren’t exactly recline-able), I must say that their nasi lemak is one of the bests out there.

AAX meal with nasi lemak and water – RM 15

Ikan bilis and peanuts come in separate container to ensure freshness and especially the crunchiness, with fragrance rice, curry chicken, half a hard boiled egg, and sambal that isn’t exactly spicy but carries all the flavor you’d expect. This nasi lemak isn’t just good compared to other in flight meal from any airlines, it is good even when you put it next to any good nasi lemak you get.

It is so good that Mellissa wanted to order one for the 1.5 hour flight from KL to Krabi. The RM 15 meal used to come with the nasi lemak, a bottle of water, and a Chunky Kit Kat the last time I had it, but it seems like the Kit Kat is gone now. Bad economy calls for cost reduction perhaps?

If you’re flying Air Asia, be sure to choose the nasi lemak. I’ve tried 1-2 other meals, they are not exactly very palatable (can’t remember what I had, but I didn’t finish it)

feels like you’re 2075 meter high, Air Asia in flight portable entertainment

The flight from KL to Melbourne takes about 7.5 hours, genius ol’ me forgot to bring a book for the journey and only had an hour’s worth of videos on the blackberry. So I bit the bullet and ordered the RM 30 in flight entertainment since they have Watchmen on it, among a few other films.

Turns out, the portable entertainment module is actually just a customized version of Archos 705 media player. A free al cheapo version of earphones is provided (and for you to take home), but I used my own since I had brought a better one anyway.

The player worked pretty well and I watched almost 2 movies on it. Battery’s supposed to last 6 hours but mine somehow went flat after 3, luckily the stewardess provided a replacement after some explanations from my part.  Time goes by so much quicker with there’s an interesting movie or two to watch.

Tags:  air asia,  nasi-lemak

Posted by KY | 34 Comments »

Some of you might know by now that the days of rushing to board an Air Asia flight just to get “good seats” is over. The low cost carrier actually assign seats by the time you check in. No need for that Xpress Boarding gimmick anymore, a relief, right?

Well, maybe.

You see, now there is this wonderful offer from Air Asia aptly named “Pick A Seat” service. For RM 25 per person, you get to choose the hot seats (first 5 rows, and the 2 rows next to emergency exits) that comes with extra leg rooms.

Well, we figure our legs aren’t exceptionally long, so we chose the standard seats. On the way to Bangkok, everything was well good. On the way back, we got this little surprise thrown to us by the airline.

Despite checking in together almost 3 hours in advance, we were assigned SEPARATE SEATS 19A & 20A.

Naturally Mell and I thought it must be a mistake, so we asked the ticket issuing officer if we could be seated together. The answer was very simply, no.

The seats were assigned randomly by the system and can’t be changed. You can however, pay RM 25 for hot seats if you want to be seated together (the RM 5 “standard” seat arrangement deal was not explained)

We then went to the sales counter (there was no customer service counter at Bangkok Airport for Air Asia) to state our case and tried to get it all sorted out without avail. The lady politely asked if we want to have the hot seats, or we could talk to the ticket issuing lady again. Ding dong.

We weren’t exactly very happy with their explanation of how their system works, and why we can’t get seats that are next to each other cos they are already “assigned”. I even asked them to show if the seats are all assigned to those who paid extra with no free adjacent seats anymore, but of course my request was rejected.

So we boarded the plane and seated separately. Apparently there were quite a few parties who had the same treatment. People started exchanging seats as soon as everyone boarded the plane, and we eventually moved to a row of empty seats at the back of the plane.

What I want to know is how that seat assignment algorithm in their system is written.

Tags:  air asia,  bangkok

Posted by KY | 69 Comments »