After writing most of this post and realizing it was a wall of text, I have decided to break it up into smaller sections, so that you're not completely overwhelmed. Also be warned this section of the story has no pretty pictures. Just lots of frustration.
The beginning of last week saw Eid al-Adha, or the Feast of Sacrifice. We'd known the holiday break was coming for quite some time, but had been lax on our plans, mostly because I didn't have my passport back or my emirates ID, and we were unsure if I would be able to leave the country so soon after obtaining my residence visa. Yet the stars aligned and I got my passport back with a week and a half to go before the holiday, so Jon and I started throwing around vacation ideas, looking for deals online, including Groupon packages. I was campaigning for a short trip somewhere in the region - Jordan, Oman, one of the local countries, and Jon was unsure where he wanted to go, when we stumbled across a Groupon for a 3 night stay in Sri Lanka. Of course, on further exploration of the site, we discovered that the Groupon only included 2 nights at the hotel, and that the third night was actually the overnight flight on the first day. Gross. I decided that was simply not enough time for a real holiday, and we glossed over the offer, while continuing to look with other travel agencies.
After not having much luck (and receiving SLOW responses - what a surprise!) I decided to email the tourist agency putting on the Groupon trip, as their website stated that they had longer tours of Sri Lanka available. Surprisingly, not three minutes after I sent the email, the phone rang (an unusually quick response time for anything around here) and the travel agent and I began chatting about what was available. We could take the same trip as the Groupon, he said, only stay an extra day, and it would actually wind up being a cheaper per day rate than what the Groupon turned out to be. The extra day was attractive, as the itinerary looked pretty brutal, and after a short discussion we decided to book.
It's pretty crazy that we decided to go to Sri Lanka the week it actually happened - a discussion that could have never happened when we were just poor lowly grad students, and also one that could only happen because it's just the two of us. :)
Saturday rolled around and we spent most of the day relaxing, knowing that we had a 4 1/2 hour overnight flight to Colombo that wasn't scheduled to leave until 11:45p. I was not jazzed about this part of the trip, but figured it be okay, that we'd be able to nap on the plane before we arrived. Sure, we were flying economy and both of us have been uncharacteristically spoiled by business and first class lately, but we'd done this sort of thing before, talked about it, and were okay with the idea. We headed to the airport around 8:30p to give ourselves plenty of time.
Arriving at the airport is where things started to take an interesting turn. We were flying out of Terminal 2, which we figured was just near Terminal 1, the main hub of AUH. Turns out, not so much. Our taxi driver seemed genuinely confused when we told him Terminal 2, which puzzled us, but we soon learned why as we drove past the main hub of the airport onto a side street. Surrounding us were cargo airplanes and terminals, and the signs, while occasionally pointing to T2, also pointed to the police station and service areas. We were beginning to worry our cab driver was very lost when the building finally came into sight - a real afterthought of a "terminal" - and it was PACKED. Packed to the gills with people standing in line waiting to get through security. The lines were LITERALLY out of the doors. I'm not making this up. Jon and I also sort of stood out like sore thumbs, considering the majority of the crowd was Eastern, and we were pretty much the only Westerners in sight.
As far as we can now figure, T2 is the go-to terminal for these shorter, cheaper flights to the Asian continent - including ones that ferry many of the workers back and forth between here and home, as well as providing a major point of immigration. This was a strange place for a few American tourists to wind up. Yet it would only get even stranger as we walked in. Jon and I, being very polite and very confused people, went to move towards the back of one of the shorter lines out the door, when someone in a orange vest who was clearly with the airport approached us and said "Colombo?" When we nodded our acquiescence, he instructed us to follow him, and took us through and around the lines to the front, where two representatives from our tourist agency were waiting to greet us and usher us through the line, straight to security, straight in front of the literal hundreds of people who were waiting to do the same thing.
We were also ferried past people waiting in the baggage drop line, again to the front of the counter, and were allowed to be the first people in line for passport control when it opened (bypassing, again, nearly 50 people who were waiting for passport control to open when we walked up). It was a dizzying experience to be having at 9p. We discovered at baggage claim that there was a flight leaving for Dhaka (Bangladesh) at the same time, which explained the influx of people at the terminal, but it still didn't explain why we were singled out (which we have running theories about). Security gave us a cursory glance-over, and then we were in the terminal itself - a total of 6 gates, a large duty free shop, and a Cinnamon Cafe with a huge central waiting area. We decided to grab a snack from the Cafe which touted what LOOKED like Cinnabon knock-offs, coffee, and freshly squeezed juices (one of my new addictions thanks to the region, where they are readily available and always reasonable). The juice was delicious, and Jon thought his coffee was passable, but the cinnamon roll was anything but.
Other people filtered in who were also clearly tourists heading to Colombo, and we all sort of silently bonded together in one area of the waiting room, some of us chatty, some of us aloof. Finally the time came to board, and we headed to the gate, only to be put on a bus. I've done bus loading/unloading before, but this particular bus took us quite literally all the way back to T1 (which was a considerable ways since we had to pass the cargo area) to board our flight using stairs. No big deal. We were flying Rotana Jet, a fairly new airline whose only current international route was to Colombo/Mattala in Sri Lanka, but who had a great following for local hopper flights between Abu Dhabi/Dubai/Sir Bani Yas Island. It's worth mentioning that Rotana also has a fairly nice hotel brand around here. The plane was new and clean, and we boarded and took our seats - the first frustration, as we quickly learned upon receiving our boarding passes that we were not actually sitting together, but instead across from each other on the aisle. Not a big deal, as I usually take the aisle seat anyway.
Then things took another interesting turn. For starters, between passengers boarding late and waiting inexplicably on the tarmac for several minutes, our flight was an hour late taking off, which I knew would be a bit of a crunch because it messed with our time table upon landing in Sri Lanka. There was also the puzzling aspect of the six completely empty rows of business class seats (which I promise you has an answer, but I'll leave you hanging until later). We finally hit the air about 1am, and the cabin lights were dimmed, and we tried to relax a little... and BAM, 15 minutes after reaching altitude the cabin lights were abruptly turned back on at full blast. Not raised, mind you, but turned back on. I tried to ignore this through my sleep mask until I heard shuffling in the aisle and felt a presence over me, only to look out and see the flight attendant smiling politely and saying, "Meal?"
 |
| My husband was quick witted enough to capture on film, minus sandwich. |
But that's a story for another post.
