No Switzerland for me this year :(

... and it's totally my bad: remember about 2 months ago I said I was reeling in shock at what I was going to have to pay for my planned trip to Malaysia & Switzerland (with a tentative addition of Italy)? Well, I kinda sat on it until last week, and to my horror discovered that while the price for the US->Malaysia and Malaysia->Switzerland flights had risen as feared, the cost for the Switzerland->US leg had shot up to over double -- almost triple! -- what I'd seen two months ago.

As a result, I made the decision to forgo the Swiss leg this time around. This means I won't be seeing my niece until perhaps a year from now. What a bummer. From the pix and vids my bro & sil have made available (see right!), she is growing up FAST: when I first/last saw her about a year ago, she wasn't even crawling yet, and her gums were threatening to start teething. Now she's blabbering in five languages, skips up the stairs, and has her molars coming in. What will she be up to in a year's time??! :(

This also means that I'll be in Malaysia for a little under 3 weeks, in time to catch Rachel perform at the Dewan Filharmonik Petronas (if my mother managed to get me tickets!) on April 27th, and to attend a huge St Mary's school reunion that's being held on May 2nd. There will be time for some meet-ups with former work colleagues, schoolmates, drinking buddies, etc, but they need to book me! :D I'll then hop over the causeway to visit for a few days with my fellow St Marian who recently moved to Singapore, before making the long journey back to Springfield in mid-May.

The cost: about USD 2K*.... ~so~ much more reasonable than the 4-6K I was looking at 2 months ago... just ignore the missing European plans, waaaaaaaaah! :( On the bright side: I have TK-217 and PLX2010 to play with / plan for (I'll explain soon!) ... But there's also another cost to consider in relation to all these plane trips... I'll discuss this in my next post: stay tuned!

*NOTE* I'm waiting for the catch, but have yet to find it... one reason it's so cheap (and yes, I cringe at the fact that 2K is "cheap") is that priceline.com found me a one-way that costs less than USD 1100 (the other sites I tried started at over USD 2K!). It was valid for just that one particular day of travel - searches for surrounding dates returned USD 2K prices too. It's a Wednesday departure, dunno if that factors in somehow. But I won't complain! (Until I find out I get no luggage allocation or something, who knows?!)

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