Leaving on jet plane (part 2)...

I figured I should get this part written before I forgot about the really fun parts of it.  This is part 2 of our trip all the way from the US to Abu Dhabi.  When we left off, we were sitting in O'Hare Aiport, and we had just finished our $100 dinner while sitting on the floor near our gate... waiting anxiously to board our flight.

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.

 



Leaving on a jet plane (part 1)...

So I started this post about 9 days ago, but never quite finished it.  It's actually not the most pleasant thing to try to use your laptop on a plane when you're 6'2" and have pretty much zero leg room to begin with.  I finished the post after we actually arrived in the UAE.  This is a pretty long one, so be warned.  Without further ado...

Today's the day.  The one for which we've been waiting for MONTHS.  We are leaving Seattle and flying to Abu Dhabi via Chicago.  Today is going to be a long day.  And when I say long, please know that I mean LONG... four hour flight to Chicago, three hour layover, 14 (yes, I just said FOURTEEN) hour flight to Abu Dhabi, UAE.  I don't like to do anything for fourteen hours.  Not even sleep (unless I'm really tired) so today is going to be a challenge, not only for me, but for the girls.  I guess the good thing about all of this is that I won't be driving 14 hours, which is most definitely worse.  Add to those fourteen hours an 11 hour time difference, and we're just begging for chaos.  Anyway, you get the point.

So here's what it looks like in our hotel room right before we get ready to take the shuttle to the airport:

I realize this photo is small and of extremely poor quality, but it was taken by my phone camera in a poorly lit room at 7 in the morning.  Cut me some slack.

While I love my husband dearly, it was probably a good thing he wasn't in my physical presence while I was packing.  I probably would have punched him in the face if he had been at all near me. (All said with MUCH LOVE, honey!)  He kept telling me from halfway around the world that I needed to pack lightly, and that I didn't need to bring much with us.  How do you pack "lightly" when you're moving to the other side of the earth with your four kids?  In all, we managed to get all of our stuff in 7 120 liter bags and 5 backpacks.  I, myself, am pretty impressed with that feat. 

Fast forward to the first four-hour flight.  It was pretty uneventful.  The whole flying thing was fresh and new, nobody complained.  I was pretty happy about the Sprite served to my girls in those awesome little plastic airplane cups... no lids, of course... perched precariously on slippery tray tables ready to douse the nearest little lap with sticky goodness at any moment.  I actually asked the flight attendant if we could just have 1 whole bottle of water that we could share between the five of us.  She looked at me like I had 12 heads.  Apparently, the water bottle police don't allow a whole water bottle (with a LID) to be handed over on an aircraft.  Or maybe they do and I just asked someone who was having a bad day.  Either way, I'm so happy to announce that there were no spills of liquids on the flight to Chicago, and we arrived safely and on time.

I don't know if you've ever flown through O'Hare before, but the international terminal is a separate entity there.  Meaning, you have to take an elevated train to get to that terminal.  That was fun for the girls.  It accelerated at neck-snapping speeds, all while I am nagging the girls to hold on to the pole so they don't go flying to the back of the train car.  That very well could be the only time I remind my girls to hold onto a vertical pole.

We arrived at the international terminal and the girls are starving.  We have to check in with the airline flying us to Abu Dhabi before we can go through security, again.  Yep, you read that right, we got to go through security TWICE on this super awesome long day of travel.  I digress, though.  When we go to check in, they are weighing all of the carry-on luggage.  The girls are all okay, my backpack, however, is jammed with my laptop, an external hard drive, my camera and a couple of lenses, medical records that we're hand-carrying over, and miscellaneous other heavy things... none of which I wanted to place in my checked bags.  I'm proud to announce my carry-on bag weighed twice the legal limit.  Fortunately, I met an awesome supervisor named Mike who, after asking enough questions, concurred that none of the stuff in my bag should be checked, either.  He graciously allowed me to place a few of the things in my bag into my girls' bags, which were all underweight, and that brought my carry-on to only 10 kg instead of 14.  And he signed a special little tag saying I could bring it on the plane.  My personal, heartfelt thanks to Mike, again, even though I'm quite sure he'll never see this blog. 

Next step... security... again.  I will say that although the line was long, it went pretty smoothly.  Except Hannah had water in her brand new water bottle, I didn't take my external hard drive out of my bag (I didn't know I had to!) and my hands had to be swabbed, I'm guessing to check for residue of some sort?  I don't really know... I just kind of try to keep my mouth shut and do what they tell me to avoid any long delays.  I thought for sure the water bottle was going to have to be thrown away, because there was no way I was going to go empty it myself and go to the back of the security line.  This has happened to me before, and those were my options... throw it away or leave security, dump it out, and go back through the line.  Well, surprise of all surprises... the TSA agent dumped it out herself and ran it through the screener again, and let us take it.  Another big deal seeing as how that was the FIRST time that bottle had ever held water.  Thank you, TSA lady with common sense!

I mentioned before that my kids were starving, so after I get my shoes on, we decide to go eat.  Except there don't appear to be any restaurants after security.  Seriously, I about lost my mind.  Of course, there were the standard little stores/kiosks that had snacks and bags of chips and candy bars and stuff.  Not a single solitary restaurant.  There was, however, a sandwich stand right by our gate.  They also had cups of not 100% fresh (one or possibly two day-old) fruit and yogurt with fruit and granola.  Five little meals, five bottles of water, and $100 less in my wallet later, we were snacking on the floor by the window by our gate.  It was awesome.  I had to keep reminding Hannah to have a positive attitude because I was kind of reminding myself as well.  After we finished eating, we had just enough time to run to the bathroom in two different shifts so we don't have to take all of our crap with us.  Then it's time for the real fun to begin... it's time to board.  I'll continue that part of the story in part 2.  If you made it this far... thanks for reading!