Rantings Diversified

I arrived at my local airport at 1500 it took an entire 15 minutes to get my ticket and go through super security, extra check, we think you’re a terrorist kinda’ checking me out.
Ugh!
They were working on our plane the whole time I was there. We took off almost an hour late.
Window seat just watched light patterns go by.
Atlanta.
Rush, rush, rush. Some right seat, non-captain kinda’ guy was too too helpful. He saved me time. He pointed my ass in the right direction.
I got to Gate One-One Echo and watched person after person get told they have the wrong important paper stuff or that they have to go back to some unknown ticket counter before being allowed on this A-360 Atlanta to Paris flight.
Worried I was. So it’s my turn and I step up to face little miss you ain’t even getting’ nowhere near this fricking airplane if I have anything to do with it.
So I hand over all my important paper things as well as my new and shiny and as yet unmolested passport. Well she just went off pounding away at her keyboard like she didn’t like it. Not a sound uttered forth until after a few very long, tense minutes passed she stopped with her typing and turned and looked at me. Right through me she was staring. Her look simply mocking my vain attempt to get on her beloved airplane with the seemingly correct…….Here ya go says she and hands me back all my important paper stuff as well as 2 new ones. Boarding passes for this flight and the next. Woo Hoo! I was so happy that as I got in line and was yelled at by some French guy in an Air France uniform for being a bonehead and getting in the 1st class boarding line. I turned to him and said. Merci. I guess I look Merkin ‘cause he about dropped his jaw.
Crushed in this plane worse that I have ever been stuffed into an airplane in my life. But I was a part of ROW 28. Yes the old infamous row 28. With the exception of a few missteps when we first took off I think we handled ourselves pretty well and upheld that long standing tradition of row 28. Now I have the forking Deutschlander on my left and the weirdo French girl on my right….Geez! I’m sweating my pitooties off (and I don’t even know what a pitooie is) and she is shivering. Yo yippy freakin’ skippy! She probably has some strange infectious disease or other that is only spread by contact on airplanes. I gave her my blanket. I wasn’t going to use it. She said thanks.
Meanwhile old Herr Deutschlander seems to need both his seat and half of mine. The ignorant fecker. So the flight goes for 8ish hour’s right and I’m stuffed between theses two. Ok, so if I sit bolt upright with my legs spread open and the person in front of me leans their seat back, well I’m fucked. Airbus A360’s were not designed with me in mind. Believe you me. I’m sweating like a pig while frenchy-girl is shivering next me.
Food comes. Cool. It was some kind of dead chicken or something. I freaked out when I saw shrimp in my salad. Stewardess guy said no problem and took it away. He said there was no more shellfish in the food. Whew!!
As I start in on my so called dinner I notice that frenchy-girl is watching my every move. This is starting to bug me a bit so I turn and stare at her. Didn’t help. She was just way too interested in watching me eat. WTF?.
No matter how much I tried I couldn’t sleep. So I followed along with the animated video of our airplane winging its way to Paris.
We got there.
Up and out of that tin can, POS, oversized, greyhound bus and when I reached the terminus I was armed with the info on my next flight. There it was, up on the Departures board, Foxtrot four-four. Cool beans! I start following the signs for Terminus F and as I turn a corner the forkin’ hall way ended at a bus terminal. Well the sign on the bus did say Terminus F so I got on and rode all the feckin’ way to F-land (it was a half hour ride!) wherein I had to go through security again. This time it was French securite. Well, shite that was a breeze. I all but walked right through. Now I had to run the gamut of duty free shopping. Well I actually had time to spare at this place so I walked around a checked out the shops. If these prices are duty-free then the hell with the EU. A bottle of Jameson’s was 25 Euros. That same bottle at home is 22 Dollars and last I checked Euros were trading at $1.40ish.
OK, so I check in for this the last leg of my flying adventure. We walk and walk and walk until we come to a staircase which we descend, slowly. At the bottom is a nice young lady double checking our boarding passes and our passports.
On to yet another bus. Oh BTW we were only bus number one of many many more to come. You see a Boeing 777 is one big ass airplane.
I find my 26C looking seat and it turns out to be an aisle seat. Cool beans. It’s better than being stuffed between again. Or so I thought.
Well Mrs. Indian Lady and her curly headed little spawn came up to me and pointed out that the two interior seats were theirs. You know that international sign language of grunts and nods and vague hand movements that seems to transcend all cultures and languages. They get settled as I do. You see at this point the world has yet to come unraveled.
The big-ass airplane began filling up with people and right about the time it was bursting at the seams they appeared. Bienvenue, Mr. and Mrs. Johnny Skobie from West London with their two daughters Scarlet and Olivia. Oh this was a site to behold! He was decked out in his finest Trakky Daks with the obligatory white Addias runners. She on the other hand may have been attractive in a different world. She was wearing a pair of blue jeans either painted on or three sizes too small with a huge red belt and a T-shirt kinda’ thing with little straps that didn’t even come close to covering her stomach. She was a skinny little girl with a fat belly. Yes, she was pregnant, again. God Save the Queen.
We take off, albeit an hour late. Let me tell you a Boeing 777 is a really large piece of metal and plastic powered by two of the biggest jet engines I have ever seen.
Once in the air Mrs. Indian Lady and Spawn promptly go to sleep. The Skobie clan didn’t but Johnny instead pulled out his Sony PSP, plugged in his ear phones and became oblivious to the world crumbling around him.
Unfortunately for me the slumber of Mrs. Indian Lady and Spawn didn’t last very long. Once spawn awoke that is when all in this particular area of the plane learned, with full force and volition, the meaning of the word hyper-active.
This freaking kid didn’t stop moving nor did he shut up the entire flight. It was a seven hour flight! Meanwhile directly behind me was Mrs. Skobie attempting to corral her two kids. She wasn’t very good at it. They ran around the plane mostly unattended. My favorite part was when one of them was bugging dad for crisps and he just handed this three year old a can which she promptly opened and spilled all over the floor. This is where Mrs. Skobie started into the act of yelling at Johnny ever ten minutes or so. JOHN-AY! JOHN-AY! So it went for most of the flight. For awhile I thought this guys name was John A. You see, dear readers, she couldn’t be bothered to reach the 3 feet that he was from her. No! She had to yell at him.
So I spent this lovely flight with a hyper-active five year old beside me and the family Skobie directly behind me.
The saving grace to this flight was the beautiful stewardess whom I chatted with the whole way. She is from Lyon but lived for a bunch of years in Atlanta. She had a perfect French accent but when she spoke English she had a perfect American accent. She was very nice. At one point late in the flight she came up to me and whispered in my ear……..”I’m really sorry you got stuck in this seat”. She was referring to my nearby passengers. That was very nice of her to say.
And so went the first leg of my sojourn.
I arrived in Dubai at 2330 local time. I cleared customs and walked outside at 15 minutes past midnight, a mere 24 hours after first checking in.
Coming soon, Episode 2 Post Landing, parts 1 and 2 and Episode 3 The Return.
So stay tuned.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 9th, 2008 at 07:29 and is filed under Arabian Daze. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.