Starting well

This is the new Emirates business lounge at Auckland airport: very big and spacious, just like the A380 we'll be getting on board shortly. "So big you can't feel it take off," I was just told. Don't know if that's what I want to hear, it being such an unfeasably large aircraft that getting off the ground seems problematic anyway.
But the lounge is the nicest one here, smelling of leather from the cream armchairs, except down here by the food which is so delicious it's only the knowledge that I'm going to be offered still more once on the way that's stopping me from making a real pig of myself (the only pig in the whole restaurant, that would be, of course).
We have a ninety-minute stopover in Sydney that I wasn't expecting - bit of a shame on top of what I'm told is a 22-hour flight to Dubai. Just as well there's 2,000 hours of viewing in the entertainment system...