Farewell, Middle East

Our last morning in Dubai went by in that cliched blur everyone is always talking about. I scrounged up free breakfast at the conference (it's good to have connections) before packing up our stuff and checking out. Apparently, we are hard core troublemakers, because it took almost as long to check out as it did to check in. They lost some paperwork (through no fault of ours) and the poor girl at the front desk (new, I hope, despite the fact that we had seen her when we got here) was on the verge of tears. The same guy who helped us when we got here helped the girl out, and we eventually made it out the door and into a taxi. Our taxi driver then had some issues with his meter, which wasn't resetting from a job call he had gotten just as we got into the car. So his solution, being obviously an IT genius, was to sit on the side of the road until it fixed itself. Amazingly it worked, and we made our way to the airport in plenty of time. Luckily, daytime is not the busiest time of day at Dubai International; most flights come in and out between the hours of midnight and 3am. So our noon flight, while full, was leisurely.

Unfortunately, seating was slightly Laissez-faire and on the verge of chaotic. A man sitting in front of us took it upon himself to move to the back where nobody was sitting (because those rows were, in fact, for the cabin crew) and became incensed that he was asked to move back to his original seat and threw a fit. Personally, I would have had him arrested at the first sign of trouble, but the flight attendant showed an exorbitant amount of restraint in explaining to him that he couldn't do that because those were cabin crew seats. And then, they had to remove a mother with a baby from a bulkhead seat, and the only real place open was in one of those contentious rows, which just made this stupid guy even more upset because the mother and baby got an entirely empty row and he didn't. I could never be a flight attendant; I would have just punched him. He threw such a fit that they finally just moved him to where the mother was sitting, which I found incredibly odd because 1) the row in which this guy was originally sitting was not full and 2) the row into which he moved was.

To top it off, the guy next to me was moved to business class (lucky bastard) so there was an empty seat in our row, and I was feeling pretty stoked, when a chic from a few rows back asked if she could move into the seat next to me because "It's along flight and I'd hate to be in the middle the whole time." Which put me in the middle. Generally I don't mind, but the fact that this stupid British woman didn't think of anyone else at all but herself just irked me to no end. You don't move from one full row to another; it's just not kosher. You move from a full row to a non-full row. Did she somehow think that I enjoyed sitting in the middle while she did not? Is she the only one? I hate to admit it, but I took up more space than I usually do on a plane and made it clear that I thought she was incredibly rude and inconsiderate. I was grouchy. I hate going home.

The rest of the time went smoothly, except that Jonmikel was starting to look a bit peeked. We were interrogated a little more than usual upon going through customs in London. Jonmikel had to explain that no, he wasn't unemployed and he wasn't working in the UK, that he worked from home for a US company and that yes, he has been out of the US since September but he wasn't doing anything suspicious, and I had to explain why I ran off to the Middle East in the middle of the semester, that no, I wasn't doing anything suspicious in the Dubai, and all that. It was rather intensive, but I can only assume it was because of where we had been. Though they do now have my photo and fingerprints... just in case.

The plane was delayed, again, and did that fun "boarding" flash once and then "flight closing" thing that had happened on our way out. And again, they looked at us as if we were totally inconveniencing them despite the fact that there wasn't even a gate listed for the flight until it was flashing "gate closing." Nice, huh? Another reason why I will never fly British Airways again. And poor Jonmikel was by this time looking awfully miserable... that ubiquitous plane funk, which I sweat I never got until I met him. Needless to say, we skipped the bus ride from the airport to our neighborhood, and just took a quick taxi instead. Ah, home freezing home.