Leaving Los Angeles

The adventure continues. This morning I packed til 4:30 am and decided I need sleep because I couldn’t stay awake (on 2 hrs of sleep from before). I woke up at 6:45 am to finish my taxes. I’ve never done them this early before. It was a relief to get them done and gone. Rob picked me up at 8 am and I said my final farewell to my roommates. At the airport, I said my final goodbye to Rob and went off.

At the Cathay Pacific terminal they offered me $400 cash and a business class upgrade if I went on a evening flight. It was tempting, buy my friend Day was scheduled to pick me up in Manila and I had no reliable way to reach her. I would have taken the offer if I wasn’t meeting anyone there.

Passing through carry-on baggage security was scary. Passing one of my scuba bags for x-ray alerted about 5 x-ray screeners. They looked at my bag long and hard and took it to the side to open it up. To my surprise, they took out my dive knife I left in the bag.

A sense of fear and panic ran through my body. Airport police came by, pulled me to the side and had me sit down. About 5 airport police officers surrounded me. Some were asking me questions, gathering info about me, and others were on their radios talking to their superiors. It was frightening as they were really intimidating. I didn’t know what was going to happen. I tried hard to communicate to them it was a mistake.

One of the officers handling the knife realized it was a dive knife based on the locking mechanism and overall look of it. This was slightly comforting since if I really wanted to bring a knife onboard I would have brought one that would be easier to open. As time passed, security was more convinced it was a mistake, and I was starting to relax more. One of the officers even casually chatted with me about diving and the Philippines. He also said that people forget things like this all the time when passing through security.

At the end of the incident, I surrendered the knife to TSA and I we free to go. Hopefully, I won’t have to pay a fine. The officer I was chatting with wished me a good rest of the trip.

Cathay Pacific is a great airline. My seat had a lot of leg room, service was decent, and every passenger had their own private TV monitor. We got to choose from about 50 movies and many TV shows. I didn’t even take out my iPod for entertainment as I got to see several movies I wanted to see before I left. After a 15 hour flight, I landed in Hong Kong International Airport.

It was a nice and clean airport. I had 2 hours layover time to kill so I decided to kill em at the bar “Toro”. Two gin and tonics and a Chinese beer. After the bar, I checked email and notified my friend Day in Manila I was actually coming.

- jason