To Dubai

Our adventure to Dubai began Wednesday night with a hectic night of packing. I had class until 5 that day, but I stayed even later at school. Despite this month-long adventure, I decided that I would try to keep up with one of my classes long distance. In that class, we are currently working on a children's wear project. I needed to finish the dress so I could mail it to my brother before we left the country. He's (or more likely, my wonderful sister-in-law is) going to take pictures of my niece wearing my dress for my project. In the rush to mail the dress before we left, I didn't even take a picture of the thing!

When it comes to packing, we had done little more than set out the items purchased specifically for the trip - a supply of prescriptions, vitamins, a few things from the office, and a collection of sewing supplies I thought I would want. Not all my sewing supplies, of course, as I was still taking them to school and using them at home. We had talked only in the broadest outlines of what clothing I would need to pack - it's hot, but a certain (rather high) level of modesty is required in public. And we planned to do some shopping locally after we arrived.

Wednesday night was a blur of laying out clothing and organizing it into different suitcases to ensure that no bag would incur an over-weight charge. Craig picked up sushi on his way home from the office, so we didn't have to cook dinner. He took my package to the post office to mail to my brother. We dashed around the house to prepare for our absence - emptying the fridge, taking out the trash, and accomplishing other such chores. At least we have a little practice for that, what with our "vacation" home in Kansas.

We went to bed way too late to get up at 4 a.m. on Thursday. But we rolled out of bed, checked the house one last time, and schlepped our bags out to the waiting car. We had five suitcases to be checked, plus two backpacks and one laptop case to be carried on. We brought three laptops. I have my mac for my school work and my PC for...yes, Sims 4. That's right, I lug around a heavy gaming laptop just for one game that my gaming friends don't even recognize. Don't judge, I love it.

Our first flight was scheduled to be 5 hours and 30 minutes from LAX to JFK. Craig was upgraded, so I had to sit by myself. But one of Craig's previous assistants had the brilliant idea to book me in the aisle seat and put Craig in the center seat, so that when he's upgraded, I'm not stuck in a middle seat. Since learning that trick, I've come to expect an aisle seat.

Boarding was a bit of an adventure, at least for other people. One lady got two rows past me (to row 27) before realizing that her seat was in row 20. Because people were packed in the aisle all the way to the door, she had to convince some random guy to lift her roll-along bag over his head and help her get it back to her row. Before we finished boarding, another 8 people had to pull a similar maneuver because they had missed the memo that the overheads were full. They had to work their way back to the front with their huge bags to check them, through the people crowded in the aisle who had heard the announcement.

I had a Luvo wrap on the flight, because that's what is served in Delta Comfort+, but I forgot to take a picture of it. I slept for about an hour. And we landed in NYC fifty minutes early due to tailwinds.

We had slightly more than three hours in NYC, so we stopped at Buffalo Wild Wings to get something to eat. Air travel, I've decided, is actually about eating. You eat the food served on the plane (or at least the tolerable bits) because you're bored, trapped, and you might get hungry. You eat at every opportunity during layovers because the food on the plane was so unsatisfying. And you eat when you get to your destination, because your body has no idea what time it is.

Craig gave me his business class seat from NYC to Amsterdam. This should have been a 7 hour, 21 minute flight. I took pictures of the food served on the flight (mostly for mom). Enjoy with me.

Dinner began with this appetizer:

I cannot even begin to describe how disgusting this was. There was no description of this item, so I don't know what it was supposed to be. But the stuff in the bowl tasted like rotten tuna fish that had been smoked, then infused with artificial smoke flavor, and mixed with pickle relish. I hate the taste of fake smoke. And I hate anything pickled or vinegary. So this was bad. And did I mention that the fish tasted rotten? So I ate one of the saltines and saved the other packet for a snack later.

The actual meal started with a tasty mushroom soup (I love soup on a plane, there's something rich and decadent about hot soup in that setting.). The salad was a pile of lettuce with tomatoes and pumpkin seeds. I ate the soup.

Then this..."smoked short ribs, cornbread, and greens." In the description of the "smoked short ribs" they forgot to mention that the meat (which had the consistency of poorly cooked brisket, for whatever that's worth) was coated with black pepper. I took two bites and gave up on this dinner as a lost cause. In fact, I got the packet of saltines I'd set aside earlier and spread them with butter and called it dinner.

But dessert is always a winner - cheese, fruit, and port. Even if only one of the cheeses was worth eating, I enjoyed every bite of that cheese! It's little wonder I'm always hungry when I travel. Looking back at these photos I realized that I basically ate 3 saltines, 2 table crackers, a small wedge of blue cheese, a strawberry, and a handful of grapes.

After meal service, I went back to say goodnight to Craig (because he always comes back to visit me when we aren't flying together). Then I curled up and slept until they started breakfast service. Which was this:

It looks decent in the picture, but cooking eggs on a plane is just a terrible idea. No matter what, the eggs are always rubbery. The hashbrown cake was pretty tasty. And the orange juice was good.

We arrived in Amsterdam nearly an hour early. Again, the tailwinds had pushed us on our way. We expected to have a two hour layover, because that's what TripIt told us. In addition to that extra hour due to arriving early, we learned that we actually had a nine hour layover.

We decided to try Yotel. We booked a room for six hours. We showered and went right to sleep, stretched out on a cozy double bed. The room itself was little larger than the bed, but it was exactly what we needed. I took a short video of the room.

We woke up an hour before our rental of the room had concluded. But we were both so hungry and thirsty that we decided to leave early. We walked the length of the airport trying to decide what to eat before we settled on starting with Starbucks. After our caffeine fix and two large bottles of water, we were able to decide on a place to get a meal. I got tomato soup (in the blue crock) and croquettes with brown bread. Soup isn't the same when you aren't on a plane, I guess, but the croquettes were a nice change. You can see the remains of our Starbucks run in this picture as well. Craig got a burger, I believe, which you can barely see.

We boarded for Dubai. For this 6 hour, 34 minute flight, I was supposed to be in Economy Comfort while Craig was in Business. I was in economy and I wasn't even on the aisle. This didn't turn out as bad for me as it might have been, but I do feel a little bad for asking the man on the aisle to let me get up three different times during this flight. I cannot stand feeling trapped and always end up getting up more frequently when I do feel that way.

For dinner, I choose the chicken and rice. Suffice it to say that it wasn't good. And I didn't try the custard dessert item, because I didn't want to get sick and it didn't have ingredients listed. The blue box held a block of cheese, two crackers, and a chocolate. I ate about half the rice, a few bites of chicken, and the contents of the box.

Having already spent over ten hours in the air, I did something unusual on this flight - I watched a movie. In fact, I watched three movies - Pitch Perfect, Pitch Perfect 2, and Boychoir. I've seen the two Pitch Perfect movies before, but watching them back to back was nice. Boychoir was a really good movie, but a tearjerker. Actually, I cried at various times during all three movies. This is why I don't watch movies!

We arrived in Dubai shortly after midnight, local time. It took a long time to collect our bags, but passport control and customs didn't take too long. We were met by a driver who brought us to our hotel / apartment. He dropped us off at the hotel part of the property, and we took a golf cart ride to the apartment building.

Our apartment is on the 11th (top) floor of the building. The elevator only goes up to the 10th floor. So we have to get off the elevator and take the stairs to our floor. I have a video of our apartment (note that it has two sets of interior stairs - four steps to the kitchen on one side and four steps to the bathroom on the other side):

The video is really dark because I took it around 2 a.m. and we hadn't found all the light switches yet. I have another picture that shows the view out our window a little better: