Perth-Dubai: 2 Out Of 20 Ain’t Bad…

As the title may infer, in the past 20 or so hours I have had a total of 2, restless hours of sleep. Which is better than the last time I flew red-eye; a total of 50+ travelling hours ended in ne only getting one hour of sleep under my belt… Suffice to say I was a tad tired when we got home from tour in 2013!

At time of writing, it is 11am in Dubai, and a sunny 20 degrees Celsius. I have so far succeeded in not getting lost changing terminals, watched a poor man get stuck at the facial recognition passport scanning point for at least ten minutes, Skyped the family with questionable success, and eaten an almond croissant larger than my face (I kid you not). But let me start with last night’s flight in detail.

Or maybe even one step back – what I did with the rest of my time in the Perth airport! As I knew I would be stuck in a chair for some unreasonable amount of time later in the evening, I decided to explore the airport. It was way to hot and expensive to even think about getting the bus into town and exploring, so I stuck with the cool air conditioning. I tested out some comfy curly couches and took a terrible selfie to prove to my darling sis that I was still alive.

Amazingly healthy nachos, and they didn’t cost an arm and a leg!

I had some yummy, GF (gluten and guilt free!) nachos for dinner, received many questionable looks on my quest for a power point, and regretted every possible second of my Hydrolyte-induced torture (turns out Apple Blackcurrant flavour isn’t as yummy as my darling sis believes!). After an over-priced coffee and many yawns later I was finally on the plane! I found myself next to a lovely Scottish couple, on their way home after spending Christmas and New Years with their family in Australia. They kept me sane during the flight, and I hope that they return home safely to Scotland.

It’s my plane!

 

After we landed in Doha, Qatar, I only had enough time to say goodbye to my seat partners and visit the loo before I was off to Dubai! I was in the exact same seat as my previous flight, only the plane was half empty – a bit weird to see as I’m used to planes imitating sardine tins.

Dubai. A lovely, enormous, sandy metropolis, and my home for the next three hours! It is a little warm here for my liking, but I’ll be in the nice, cool weather soon (come at me Paris). Since my official, free airport Wi-Fi expired, I managed to hijack another free lot of Wi-Fi, and that’s what I’m using to finish writing/uploading this post. P.S. I think a couple just walked past me speaking German… or maybe I was just replacing wheat they were saying with the lyrics of the particular part of Elisabeth das Musical that I was listening to… Who knows?

Aerial view of some part of Dubai… I dunno, we flew over it?

 

I think this is going to be my longest post… Just! Over 550 words so far, the last one was 500+ so it’s close. And I haven’t even mentioned my terminal issues! Okay it sounds worse than it is, though it’s the first time I’ve felt nervous on this trip… I dunno, you try catching a dinghy old bus with a bunch of blokes you don’t know, and you try and not feel nervous!

Anyway, I arrived in Dubai’s DXB super huge airport that could easily fit my city in, and I arrived in Terminal 1. After discovering that I had indeed just left baggage claim area and all signs were pointing to methods of transport, I resorted to a fool-proof method of locating yourself; ask the nearest security guard! After confusing him (and myself if I’m honest) with my dodgy question wording, I eventually got instructions to the shuttle bus to Terminal 3. After all, isn’t it obvious that Emirates would have it’s own terminal? Nah, not at all… Well it does… And it’s the biggest, shiniest one… We know who has all the money now!

So after finding the Emirates terminal, I checked myself in, checked my luggage and explored… Well, found the nearest toilet and coffee shop. Which happened to be a Starbucks… Where I acquired the enormous almond croissant. Which was bigger than my face… Until I ate it. It was yummy. Half my blog is going to be about food, and the other half is going to be me doing stupid things and failing in general… Enjoy! I keep telling Sherrie I should become a comedian if this linguistics stuff doesn’t work out. But that’s for another time.

That’ll do for this post. Next update will be from my hostel in Paris, France. Get keen!