Thursday 9 November 2017

Dubai Airport

I am just writing up my blog in Dubai Airport!I am very lucky I wasn't travelling yesterday because there was a strike in Catalunya but it wouldn't really be accurate to call it a strike, it was a form of anarchy. Young students blocking roads and the high speed railway, preventing people getting to work. If this is the new Catalunya, I want nothing to do with it and I am well out of it.
The atmosphere at Girona Station was still very tense this morning but my train (the AVE) was running. I caught an earlier bus in case I had to switch to the regular train. When I take a flight from Barcelona Airport, I usually start out by catching the same bus at 8am from Celrà because all flights leave between about 2pm and 4pm. To Kyiv, Bogotá or Dubai. For Dubai at 14.50, I had loads of time.
I treated myself to a business class ticket on Emirates. The aircraft is an Airbus A380 - big! I had a headache, caused by stress I think, for most of the flight (6 hours) which was a shame but, now that I'm in the Exec Lounge in Dubai Airport, it has gone. I need to get some sleep between here and Bangkok, the seat goes flat like a bed, I'm sure you've seen photos in adverts.
I have an Emirates loyalty card which entitles me to free wifi on the plane. It is not a big deal, anyone can do it, the card level is the lowest but I still qualify. Otherwise only 2 hours are free.
It's now 1.30am local time which is 3 hours ahead of Spain so it's still only around my regular bed-time and the flight to Bangkok starts boarding in about one hour. I certainly wouldn't like to transfer between flights here if I was short of time - the airport is enormous. Part of the journey between the arrival gate and the departure gate which is where I am now was by train. And there was a great deal of up and down in escalators and lifts. It took at least 40 minutes. And the boards showing the departure gate kept on refreshing which made them almost impossible to read. The flight time to Bangkok is about the same as from Barcelona, about 6 hours. It is an A380 again. The flight coming here was far from full and one could detect that the captain didn't use full thrust to take off because it was relatively light. If a plane is full, one can imagine the pilot pulling the throttles hard back!
I arrive around mid-day in Bangkok, the morning will arrive very quickly because I am travelling west to east, so it may wake me up. I can survive on very little sleep and I am affected far less by jet-lag than earlier in my life. I have no idea why that is!
It would not be accurate to call this a lounge, it is so big, it took me 10 minutes to find a bar. It is on a higher floor level and basically stretches along the whole width of all the gates in zone A.
I'm going to stop writing now because I'm really tired. The headache stopped me from sleeping on the flight here, I needed 30 minutes. But I am sure I will sleep on the way to Bangkok, I will even change into my pyjamas so it feels like a real bed.
M. if you are reading this, it was a little too late to send an email so I'll write tomorrow from Bangkok! 
By the way, I'm writing this on my little "trasformer" laptop. It is an Asus with 10 inch touch-screen which detaches but I use the keyboard a lot so the two parts normally remain attached. But it's really cool if I'm showing photos to someone because I just pull the screen off and hand it to the person. I have a larger laptop for my hotel room but that's in my suitcase checked in for the whole journey, so I won't see that till I arrive in Bangkok.

 

1 comment:

  1. Have a good trip Steve - without headaches of any sort

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