16 Dec 2011
Outbound
So 28 hours later (or what felt like half of my life) I made it overseas. As usual I flew with Emirates. I’ve never ever minded the Dubai transit because Emirates rocks for me. They have amazing service, their tickets are exceptionally affordable, their Business Class lounge is epic and Terminal 3 pays homage to Starbucks. And even though I’ve only ever been able to peer through the frosted glass doors of the Mecca that is the First Class lounge… the word on the street, is that it’s pretty mind-blowing.
Unfortunately this time I was in economy. Sitting in front of quite possibly the largest man alive. So large, that I couldn’t recline my seat… because his knees kept getting in the way. And in the battle of economy class seat vs largest knees alive, the seat came off second best. I was also opposite the bathroom… at the back of the plane (which on Emirates doubles as the kitchen). It was my own fault, I didn’t check-in online, ahead of my flight.
In case you’re confused, this was not my seat. By the way, what kind of a sick joke do the airlines play when they make economy passengers navigate through Business Class [duvets, champagne, leg room], in order to get to their seats? Just rub salt in the wound why don’t you.
Oh and someone had also stolen my overhead storage space, [people who do this, should be shot.repeatedly.] so this meant that I had to go off and steal someone else’s. Unfortunately I picked and nicked the storage space of an irritated German man, who proceeded to have an explosive conniption about his baggage space rights. I’m glad they didn’t win the war.
So in the worst seat on the plane, made considerably worse by Big-Knees McGee, the flight then experienced turbulence to end all turbulence. The skies over Africa were clearly ticked off I was leaving and they weren’t being remotely polite about it. This all added up to no sleep on the first leg of the journey.
Dubai Airport was full of Christmas (more than happy to disown cultural heritage for a quick duty-free sale or two) and bunches of Americans who kept mistaking the arabic lettering for Chinese. Considering the nightmare financial situation it’s in, I noticed there’s quite a lot of building going on around the city. Anyway, I had Louis under one eyeball and Vuitton under the other and I looked like I had been beaten with the tired stick. I was really looking forward to a KO on my next flight.
But the aeroplane gods had other plans for me. They sat me next to a chatterbox, textile manufacturer from Pakistan who felt the need to get to know me. Despite the fact that my headphones were in, my eyes were closed and I was only replying in monosyllabic noises, he pressed on with question, after question, after question. He fell asleep for about 30 minutes (the best 30 minutes of my life), he then woke up and proceeded to profusely apologise for falling asleep and being bad company.
But before we even left, [ in fact we were taxiing to the runway], a passenger decided now would be a fabulous time to have a heart attack. FYI a heart attack is not a quick procedure on a plane. My heart did go out to the passenger and his poor family, but after about 25.5 minutes, I experienced a complete sense of humour failure. Particularly as Babah from Pakistan thought this was a sure sign that we were meant to have a deep, meaningful and enlightening conversation about the textile industry. I wanted to bash Babah from Pakistan with my in-flight mag and then pelt him with plastic cutlery.
I was a very unhappy monkey.
My horridious mood escalated quickly when the afflicted passenger, all 4 members of his family AND their luggage had to be escorted off the plane. This meant they had to dig around in the hold for about 40 minutes while they sifted out their luggage. They then lost members of the family (don’t ask me how, it was not exactly a large plane). The comedy of errors continued when they couldn’t get the passenger out of the airplane doors, because there was a problem with the in-flight hospital bed. They finally got him and his family safely off the flight. Hooray! They then had to ID every single piece of hand luggage on the flight. Not Hooray!
While this was going on, I had a 2.35 hour staring competition with a piece of tarmac, punctuated by Babah’s conversational wizardry. Oh the things I can now tell you about the textile industry, I won’t even have to fabricate anything (see what I did there).
I then arrived in Germany. [Looking fabulous like the woman up there. Except not.] And I couldn’t find the baggage carousel. AND I couldn’t remember what the German word for carousel was. This was pretty soul-destroying, because the entire conversation was centered around me finding the whereabouts of this mystical, luggage carousel. A carousel which only seemed to handle the baggage of characters from the C.S Lewis books. In my quest, I kept trying to communicate in German.. and French kept coming out. So with a Scotsman to my right, a lady from China on my left and a German/French mashup of Hobble communication, we eventually found carousel 12 and I finally found my bags, as well as the delivery entrance to Narnia.
The fun had arrived.
