The airline first announced that Business Class was now boarding. At that point in time, I kid you not, I have never seen anything remotely like what I saw. Virtually all of the people that were waiting in the gate area... a couple hundred, I'm sure, crowded into line in the walkway. And when I say crowded, it's because I can't even come close to thinking of a word to describe it. And I use the term "line" very loosely. It was seriously like cattle being herded. At that point in time, I had serious questions about how we were ever going to be able to board the plane in a timely fashion, let alone find any overhead storage space.
One thing I've learned over here is that there are some cultures that can not even comprehend the concept of personal space. AT ALL. They will seriously be all up on your back while you're waiting in line. I often wonder if, for the lack of a better way to describe it, someone ripped a really stinky SBD (silent but deadly) fart, if a little more space could be created. Alas, I can't accomplish that task on demand, so I may never know. Anyway, there are tons of people waiting in a huge, jumbled mass that doesn't even come close to resembling a line, and the gate attendants are literally SHOUTING for people to form a line and allow the people whose row numbers have been called to board. Not a chance. I'm not sure if it was just a language barrier, or if people just really didn't care. I seriously thought there might be a revolt. They called for families with children 5 and under to board. Praise God. Seriously. And then I sort of internally freaked out trying to figure out how we were going to get through all those people. Against all of my better judgement, I decided that since we were already sitting on the ground reasonably close to the front of the herd... we would just enter at the front of the line. Turns out, it worked, and we were able to leave the herd behind.
We found our seats... we had the four in the center section, and the aisle seat right next to them. I was worried when I saw our seat assignments online that since there was a wall (bulkhead?) behind us, we wouldn't be able to recline our seats at all. I was pleasantly surprised to find we could. The girls were also thrilled to find little pouches in their seat pockets.
The little pouch contained a sleep mask, some earplugs, a pair of socks, and a toothbrush with a single-use thingamajig of toothpaste. I can not even describe how awesome they thought these were. Until the flight attendants dropped off a little activity bag for each of the girls. It included things like cards, a puzzle, colored pencils, a game, a coloring book, and stickers. Way more awesome. Even more exciting, though, was that THESE little beauties were on the back of EVERY seat.
Photo found here
Seriously? Best. Thing. EVER. They were entertained for the vast majority of the 14-hour flight. There were movie choices for adults or children... there were even games that they could play with the little phone/handset thing. With the exception of a few times I had to grab coloring books and crayons out of someone's backpack, these kept my children completely entertained.
No one ate dinner. I don't even know what it was, except that it was "vegetarian" because they ran out of chicken, and no one wanted fish or lamb. The flight attendants felt sorry for us, I think, and were sweet enough to find other snacks and stuff to feed the girls.
Everything went well for about the next 8 hours. For some reason, my children had the insane ability to stay awake for the entire day up until this point. As they started to fall asleep one after the other, things got really pleasant. For a little while. Then, bless their little hearts, they were just so uncomfortable to be sitting and trying to sleep that Hannah and I tried to come up with creative ways to keep them happy. I would hold one on my lap (yeah, there was so much room for that!) Hannah would trade her seat with one of them. At one point in time, the two littlest were laying (or is it lying? I can never remember that rule) next to each other in on the seats in between us.
About an hour before we arrived, I called Caleb from the airplane. That was fun... I was trying to be as quick as I could because it cost $6 a minute. He had told me before we left to go ahead and get the internet on the plane so we could keep in touch while we were in the air. Only... no internet on the plane. I HAD to speak with him because he was hoping to have our preliminary residence visas waiting for us at the airport, and I would have to have them stamped at immigration, along with our passports. I needed to know where to pick them up. So I tried to be really quiet while talking to my husband from something like 35,000 feet in the air.
Anyway, we made it. Finally. We got off the plane, got through customs and immigration, got our luggage, and found Caleb. We walked outside, and I gasped. It was so hot and humid, it literally took my breath away.
After about 10 minutes in the humidity, I decided that I would not be able to have bangs in Abu Dhabi. So I'm growing them out.
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