abu dhabi – Drifting Clouds 片雲の風

EY 470 AUH-SIN Y B777-300 seat 54K

March 12, 2008July 31, 2015jpatokalLeave a comment

Another three-hour layover at a time when I’d really much prefer to be sleeping. I picked up a few bottles at the tax-free, noted to my surprise that Romeo & Julieta No.2’s are appreciably cheaper in EY’s in-flight sales than here (US$11.50 vs US$15 for box of 3), tried and failed to find a local souvenir that didn’t involve dates, and then hacked on my laptop for a few hours.

I’m starting to kind of like AUH though. The two-layered squashed-octopus shape means it’s really compact and easy to get around, and the bizarre blue-green tiles roof-fountain-structure pulls off the rare trick of making a terminal really stand out: there is no way you can possibly mistake AUH for any other terminal anywhere. It’ll be a real shame if the new Etihad terminal here is just another soulless box of glass and steel.

I’d picked my seat on this flight carefully. Conventional wisdom says seats at the back of the bus are bad, because it takes a long time to disembark and because the turbulence is worse, but I knew I’d be in no hurry in Singapore (my Access Card would get me past any immigration queues and I’d have to wait for my suitcase anyway, and turbulence doesn’t particularly bother me — I find it oddly relaxing in a “yay, I’m flying!” way. Etihad’s online seat map showed that the back of the plane has two rows with only two seats on the window sides, so I picked the second to last row: this way, I figured I’d guaranteed full recline, I’d have some useful extra space between my seat, and I’d have a fair shot at nobody sitting next to me.

Once in my seat, I realized that the extra space was virtually nonexistent: on eg LH 747s, it’s enough to stretch out both your legs, but here there wasn’t really appreciably more space than the other rows. And yes, the seat next to me stayed empty, but with a load of no more than 40% there were plenty to go around and a few lucky guys — including the guy in 53K — got a whole three-seat row to stretch out on.

Drink and cracker service rolled around soon after takeoff, but it took close to two hours until they got around to lunch. Here’s the menu:

Asian glass noodle mixed seafood salad

White fish masala, biryani and harissa vegetables
Saffron vegetable lasagna with basil tomato coulis
Singapore hawker’s chicken laksa yong tau foo

Ginger and kiwi fruit mousse
Strawberry coulis

Cheese

Tea and coffee
Hot chocolate

Note to the menu writer: if you’ve got two “coulis” in one meal, one of them atop lasagna at that, you’re trying too hard. Indeed, the crew did the right thing and reduced that down to “fish, vegetable or chicken?”, and I opted for the “chicken” as it just sounded so bizarre. I wasn’t disappointed: the entree turned out to be a collection of tofu, fishballs, shrimp and, yes, chicken on a bed of thick rice noodles with a sauce that was half laksa, half rendang, with coconut shreds, laksa leaf and plenty of spices. I suspect this might be a bit much for people unused to Southeast Asian cuisine, but for me the end result was delicious, and even the noodles had stayed firm instead of degenerating into sogginess. Full points to Etihad for ingenuity!

I watched No Country for Old Men, which isn’t very good in-flight fare because it demands your full attention, but it does certainly deserves its Oscars. I also realized that Etihad’s headphones, which are excellent for economy (solid, padded, cover the whole ear, comfy) also incorporate noise canceling — I’d just gotten a broken set on the DEL-AUH flight, and this time too the wiring was flaky enough that turning my head was enough to flip the canceling on and off.

And then to bed. Even us economy class plebs got socks, eyeshades and earplugs, and even the brown blanket seemed a little fluffier than what you’d usually get in Y. Two seats with a liftable divider ain’t too bad, and while they never turned the cabin lights off, I managed to contort myself into a semi-sleeping position and catch a few Z’s.

The menu had promised us a “refreshment” prior to arrive in Singapore, which I figured would be the same sandwich-and-juice deal as on the RUH flights. But nope: we were treated to cups of frozen-solid Haagen-Dazs instead.

Disembarkation, immigration and baggage claim went fast enough: the only problem was that the handle I used to pull along my diving gear-laden suitcase had been knocked cleanly off. On my previous trip, the same beaten-up old Samsonite had lost a wheel, but off it was to the baggage claim office. Sorting out the claim took a while, and I was told to expect a call sometime within a week — I was thus rather surprised to get a call on Saturday morning for pickup, and even more surprised to get the fixed bag on Monday. They’d even replaced the top handle as well!

EY 316 RUH-AUH Y B777-300 seat 26D

March 12, 2008July 31, 2015jpatokalLeave a comment

A brutal flight time, as departing from RUH at 5 AM means getting up at 3 AM. Check-in and immigration were uneventful, although I was disappointed (but not very surprised) that the immigration guy couldn’t tell me when my visa expires. Why, you ask? Because Saudi visas don’t state this date: instead, they just have the date of issue and the number of months it’s valid. The catches are that 1) these are Islamic (lunar) months of 28 days, not Western months; 2) business (non-working) visas appear to have a restriction on how many days within that period they’ve valid; and 3) it depends on the visa type if the days start counting from date of first issue or date of first arrival. Gah.

Same plane as last time, but much lower load, maybe 20% in economy. I watched through that creepy safety video again (I think the dead white eyes of the characters are to blame), devoured the sandwich and juice tossed to us after takeoff, and attempted to sleep.

EY 315 AUH-RUH Y B777-300W seat 19C

February 28, 2008July 31, 2015jpatokalLeave a comment

Again a short hop and an almost unnecessarily luxurious plane, but while similar to the A346 in appearance, the seat pitch was an inch or two more generous. This was a relief: I’ll be flying back to SIN in one of these (or at least am scheduled to), and that inch will make all the difference. Today the usual complement of Filipinas was joined by the lovely Kyeong-Soo from Korea, who pacified us with a tasty chicken or veg sandwich and a small bottle of juice before leaving us to giggle at the inane antics of Juste pour rire, Montreal’s ripoff of Candid Camera that seems to have a remarkable hold on transport operators the world around, ranging from business class on Garuda Indonesia to the buses of SBS Transit in Singapore. The plane was equipped with the same IFE system as the A346; it was just turned off, and no headphones were passed out.

My stomach was still bubbling discontentedly, and it was approaching 6 AM Singapore time, so I did my best to zonk out — not entirely successfully, but soon enough the 80-minute flight was over and we landed at King Khalid International, quiet as ever in the middle of the night. Having purposely booked a seat towards the front of the plane, I reached Immigration well before the queues formed. My suitcase was out almost surprisingly fast, and the irritatingly persistent taxi tout waiting for me outside Customs turned out to be the first guy in line at the official taxi rank. I negotiated his ridiculous initial offer of SR160 to a somewhat more reasonable SR80 (still a good 25% premium on the official fare), and we zoomed off down the desert highway to Riyadh.

Wahhabalinese Adventures 2: Abu Dhabi

February 27, 2008July 30, 2015jpatokalLeave a comment

Abu Dhabi is not one of the world’s great airports by any measure, but its quirky terminal seemed downright snazzy after the swirling chaos of DEL. Midnight is rush hour at AUH, but I had no problems snagging a seat from where I could contemplate the utterly bizarre mushroom-shaped spout of lime green and blue tiling that dominates the terminal, although any notions of Zen serenity were blasted out of the water by the endless loop of really, really loud trilingual announcements about vol eh-ygrec trois-trois-cinq a Casablanca or whereever. We’d rolled past Etihad’s future home Terminal 3 on the way in, but despite a few planes parked up to it’s still several months away from completion and Abu Dhabi has, inevitably, already started designing an entirely new airport expressly designed to put those young whippersnappers in Dubai in their place.

Etihad’s slogan is “The Airline of Abu Dhabi”, which left me ruminating. Sure, that’s an undeniable fact, but what do they mean by it? If they mean that Etihad is good because it’s associated with Abu Dhabi, I don’t think that line of argument will quite fly, as for most people “Abu Dhabi” is the faintly ridiculous-sounding place in the middle of nowhere (see also: Timbuktu, Ouagadougou) where Garfield regularly mails obnoxiously cute kittens. Alternatively, they might mean that Abu Dhabi is good because its airline is Etihad, but this has pretty much the same problem — when I told a colleague that I was flying Etihad via Abu Dhabi, her genuine reaction was “Where the heck is Abu Dhabi, and what on earth is an Etihad?” (Etihad, for the record, is Arabic for “United”, and with Air Arabia and Emirates completes the trio of large airlines using all components of the name United Arab Emirates.) Either way, it’ll take another good ten years until these guys get over their name recognition problem…

At any rate, the booze selection in AUH Tax Free was pretty good, although obviously for this leg of the trip I had to limit myself to window-shopping. An hour before my flight the gae number popped up and I headed down to Gate 22, which turned out to be a bus lounge, dominated by a colorful but orderly procession of Indonesian ladies going to work in Saudi. In the bus on the way to the plane, one of the younger women knelt on the floor and wordlessly pressed her head into the lap of a motherly older veteran. For one, the terrors of the unknown; for the other, resignation to the known.

EY 211 DEL-AUH Y A340-600 seat 43A

February 25, 2008July 30, 2015jpatokalLeave a comment

On my last day, the trip from Noida to the airport was (much to my surprise) over in barely an hour, leaving me with a rather too-generous four hours to kill at DEL. The Departures floor is under such heavy construction that I could barely recognize it, one of the check-in desk rows (Row 1) already reworked into the 21st century, the others still falling apart. I’d arrived so early that Etihad hadn’t even started checking in, but after I’d completed one circuit of the terminal looking for them, I spotted a bunch of unlabeled checkin desks with their monitors turned off… and a stack of Etihad luggage tags. Bingo. They’d just opened, and I got sequence number 002 for DEL-AUH, with sequence number 270 for AUH-RUH. How does that work?

Construction prevailed at the immigration desks (over in a jiffy) and the airside had been transformed to such an extent that I could only gape. Gone were the plastic bucket chairs, gone was the Flamingo duty free shop where I used to buy my Indian wines (better than you’d think), gone was the ITC lounge downstairs, even the security queue had transmogrified into something new. In their place were lots of construction hoardings and drilling noises, and I shuddered at the thought of having to spend four hours here. But there was a sign pointing to the Clipper lounge upstairs, and having done my research on FlyerTalk’s India forum I headed up with my Mastercard in hand. Now, in America gold Mastercards are included in boxes of cereal, and even in Singapore the income requirements for one aren’t too lofty, but in India they’re apparently still beyond the means of the hoi polloi — which is why Mastercard graciously offers free use of the Clipper Lounge for every holder of a Gold, Platinum, Titanium or World mastercard. It was still before the evening rush, and aside from a few JAL pax I had the blessedly peaceful lounge (and its fridge full of Kingfisher beer) to myself.

An hour before departure I headed out, and back in the less rarified realms of the terminal the security lines were as bad as ever, with powertripping jawans doing their best to harass the poor bunch of workers heading to the Gulf, barking at them for not waiting at the yellow line (as if they could read the signs) and emptying out every last slip of paper from their pockets. Once they were finally done with them, white sahibs like me were promptly passed through and I headed to Gate 3 to board my first Etihad plane.

The good news was that it was, indeed, the promised Airbus 340-600; why they’re operating a smallish long-haul plane on a low-yield short-haul route like DEL-AUH, though, is beyond me. The plane looked nice, all muted tones of desert tan (shades of Emirates), but the seat pitch was surprisingly cramped, with sharp bits of the seatback poking into my knees no matter how I moved my legs. Fine for this three hour flight, but I’d definitely steer clear of this plane for a real long-haul. The IFE screen was big and the headphones were unusually high-quality, but the interface was kinda slow and clunky, although there was a largeish (if dull) movie selection and an immense library of music — minus, alas, any ghazals. And no sign of the rumored in-seat power plug.

The bad news was that the plane was packed to hilt and 95% of the passengers in economy were workers headed to the Gulf, who aren’t exactly a frequent-flying bunch. Sitting as I was in the back, there was a constant jingle of “bong! bong! bong!” tones as people fiddling with remote controls unwittingly punched at the stewardess call buttons and little lights blinked on and off above the seats. Etihad also certainly didn’t bend over to serve this constituency of its passengers: all announcements and printed matter were in Arabic and English alone, with not a word of Hindi, and only one harried flight attendant appeared to speak the language. At least remarkably creepy safety video, which turned those 70s-style safety card cartoons into 3D computer animations of corpselike ghostly figures stoically enduring oxygen loss, crashes and evacuations, was probably equally incomprehensible in any language…

Meal service started soon after takeoff, and at least this was Indian style: Goan fish curry, curried peas and carrot, pulao, parantha and two balls of rasgulla. Reasonably tasty if unremarkable, and the carrots were red, so you could tell it was made in India. Drink service was a little odd: we received cups of water before takeoff, nothing immediately with the meal, a juice run after it was served, and then tea, coffee and hard liquors on demand while clearing the trays. Alas, the carbonation in the beer I’d drunk earlier has started disagreeing with the reduced air pressure and my stomach by this point, and while eating dinner helped — oddly, it usually does — I wasn’t quite in a position to appreciate the meal, or the flight, to its fullest. The workers, on the other hand, were enjoying the novel experience, with the jolly fellow in the row in front happily popping powdered coffee creamer into his mouth, like a Western version of paan masala, and chomping away.

The lights stayed on, but I pulled on my shades and attempted to rest a bit. Three hours into the flight we crossed over the coast at Oman and started coasting down to a descent in Abu Dhabi.

Unexpectedly Arabic: al-Episode ﺏ

October 27, 2007January 7, 2015jpatokalLeave a comment

This was my first trip to the Gulf in living memory, and Abu Dhabi turned out to be even weirder than I expected.

Let’s start with the obvious: the city is filthy rich. Not as in “prosperous” rich, but as “ridiculously loaded” rich — a while back, CNN figured that, on average, the net worth of any citizen of Abu Dhabi (who only make under 20% of the resident population, mind you) is a cool US$15 million. This is a city of nearly two million people and vast five-lane boulevards, without even the faintest attempt at a public transport system: the rich are chaffeured around in their Mercedeses, the middle class drive their own humongous SUVs, and the poor like me commute by taxi, which are ubiquitous and ridiculously cheap (metered fares right across the city won’t climb above Dhs 10, or US$2).

The Hilton Abu Dhabi is a bit awkwardly located at the edge of town, but it does have a marvelous sweep of the Gulf right next to it, complete with free (for guests) “Hiltonia” spa/gym/pool/beach complex right across the street. The shallow lagoon between the city and the Marina district’s shopping malls was the temperature and texture of warm spit, but there were enough hot Arabic babes in bikinis (yes, seriously — probably mostly Lebanese/Egyptian Christians) to make up for it.

An interesting twist to the experience was added by Ramadan, the Muslim fasting month. Work thus started at 8 (notionally — few bothered to show up at the office before 9), ran straight through what would normally have been lunch, and ended by 2 PM, when everybody headed home to sleep the last hours of the fast. Abu Dhabi, being rather less uptight than some countries in the region, allows restaurants to keep operating for us kaffirs through the fast (as long as they do so behind closed curtains), but as everybody else was also fasting I went with the flow and opted for “Ramadan lite”: a (big) breakfast around 8 AM before work, and then fasting — no food, no drink, no nothing — until evening. And I have to say, I have a newfound respect for people who stick to the regimen for an entire month, especially those who manage it while working outside in the sweltering heat instead of just sitting out in an air-conditioned office.

But the fun began after the sun went down at 6 PM the first strains of the call to prayer wafted in from the mosque to announce that the fast was over. After nibbling on dates and drinking a glass of ridiculously sweet (but energy-packed and quickly absorbed) juices, everybody tucked into giant iftar feasts. Our spot of choice with my colleague Firas was the unassuming little joint behind the Hilton Baynunah, which had unremarkable if decent food, and truly remarkable shisha (water pipe) that makes your eyes roll around in their sockets as you sink into the cushion with a stupid grin on your face after each puff. (All hail Al Fakher!) So after eating, everybody just sat around, digesting their meals, puffing on shisha and occasionally sipping away at the vast variety of bizarre (and often tasty) juices the Arabs have come up with to replace alcohol. (Tip: lemon with mint; not a few sprigs, but a whole load of leaves blended in. Da-yamn.) For the locals, this continued on all the way to the suhur morning meal before sunrise around 5 AM, after which everybody slept a little more again, and then the cycle repeated.

On my last night, I wheedled my colleagues into paying a visit to the Emirates Palace, Abu Dhabi’s attempt at surpassing Dubai’s iconic Burj al-Arab (the sail-shaped “7-star” hotel). Dubai forked out $1 billion to build theirs, so Abu Dhabi tripled the budget and spent $3 billion. Here’s a math problem for you: if you spend $3 billion on a hotel with 300 rooms and assume full occupancy at $1000 a night with no running costs, how long will it take you to recoup your original investment?

At any rate, the hotel was (seemingly) right next to the Hilton, and I even considered walking there on the weekend, but in the end we went by car and it’s a good thing we did. Security stopped us at the gate:

“Have you been to the Emirates Palace before?”

“No, we haven’t. We’re just going for a drink.”

“OK. Drive straight ahead, take the second right at the fountain, go around the palm trees, then take the second left at the traffic circle, go up the ramp and you’ll get to the main lobby.”

Yessir. We navigated our way through the maze, deposited the car with a valet and walked in. And walked, and walked, and walked some more. Ever been to one of those 10,000-room hotels in Vegas? That’s precisely what the Emirates Palace feels like, only minus the crowds and the slot machines, and the gold is mostly real. We enquired about places for a drink, and the concierge helpfully suggested the Caviar Bar for champagne or the Havana Club from a cigar and cognacs. We opted for the cafe instead, where tasty Turkish (not even Arabic!) coffees served by an army of pretty Filipinas cost around US$10 a pop, and then set off to explore some more. Tucked away in a corner was a fascinating expo on Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi’s shot at buying itself onto the world map — with a budget of roughly $27 billion, they’re going to transform a barren desert island into a cultural oasis, and they’ve b(r)ought in branches of the Guggenheim and the Louvre to make sure it blooms, with the first buildings scheduled to be ready by 2011. Your oil money at work!

And then it was time to head to Abu Dhabi airport, a surprisingly un-spiffy structure (under renovation/expansion, of course), for my flight back home. I’d blown a few miles for a bump up to business class, which allowed me to breeze through the premium security queue (muahaha) and check in in no time. The smoky contract lounge was pretty crappy, but I managed to spend my last dirhams on some superluxury dates and then sat around in one of the tentacles of this recursive cephalopod while an insanely confusing boarding procedure took place. Passengers were bused to the plane, but us biz/first pax were not allowed to board the buses for ordinary plebs: instead, we had to wait for our very own bus, which meant sitting around on plastic bucket seats long enough to miss the pre-flight champers on board. Yay.

The bird was coming in from Jeddah and, despite thus having a good 10 hours flight time, was one of Singapore Airlines’s regional models without lie-flat seats. I’d figured this out ahead of time (although, it must be said, only after booking my upgrade), but in the end I was very happy I splurged: two hours into the flight, we were diverted to Mumbai for a medical emergency, where we were treated to three hours cooped up in a plane, watching slumdwellers in Dharavi poop next to the runway. Not too bad in a business seat, probably rather less pleasant back in steerage next to the babies screaming their heads off.

Eventually, though, the flight did take off again and we landed in sunny Singapore. And that was the end of this company-paid adventure: up next, Saudi Arabia or maybe even Iran?

Unexpectedly Arabic: al-Episode أ

October 19, 2007January 7, 2015jpatokalLeave a comment

Ending up in Greece in the first place was a bit of a surprise to say the least, but consulting threw me another curveball at 8:30 on Wednesday morning. As I’d already finished what I set out to do, how about going to Abu Dhabi instead — today? Well, umm, err, why not?

So I spent the morning trying to figure out how to get there, booking flights and hotels and packing up and checking out two nights ahead of schedule. There were no sensible flight connections from Athens to Abu Dhabi, but I could take a direct flight to Dubai in the evening and cover the remaining 170 km by taxi. The travel agent offered a choice between Olympic, one of Europe’s worst airlines, teetering on the edge of bankruptcy for years with Greece flouting EU rules to subsidize it while unable to find a buyer; and Emirates, one of the world’s best airlines, with enough awards and devoted passengers to make Singapore Airlines quake. It didn’t take too long to decide. (And the Olympic flight, with a Kuwait stopover, would’ve taken longer.)

I took the train out to the airport (“next stop: Pallini”), checked in for my flight, gasped when I saw yet another passport queue of Olympic proportions but was relieved to find it fast-moving, and once through embarked on my perennial pre-flight entertainment ritual of “Find the Power Socket”. After my iPod was juiced up, they started boarding and, smiled in by Emirates stewardesses wearing as much makeup as the Singapore Girls but topped off with pillbox hats and poofy token veils, I navigated to my seat in this B777-300ER. (Incidentally, Emirates’ business class seats look absolutely amazing, but that’ll have to wait for another day.)

First impression: people flying Emirates don’t have just Louis Vuitton handbags, but Louis Vuitton luggage. Second impression: pretty tight seat pitch. Not unusually bad, but by no means generous, and reclining the seat makes it slide forward, reducing the pitch even more. The seat lottery had given me an end aisle, next to the toilets (d’oh), but with nobody behind. This was an advantage, because Emirates’ “ice” entertainment system uses a touchscreen, which means people poking at your headrest when they want to change the channel. (Well, the controller does have a dinky joypad as a substitute, but it’s, well, dinky.) That’s pretty much it as far as negatives go, as the system is otherwise amazing: 500 (!) channels of movies, TV programs and audio, with a nice big screen and a very responsive, high-res interface that slaughters poor old KrisWorld. The handset is in the seat in front, not by your side, which makes it oh so much easier to tweak volumes and channels, and stops you from pressing the wrong buttons by accident to boot. The only downside was that the selection loaded was so un-edgy it hurt: not a single movie I was particularly interested in seeing, no comedy that would qualify as even mildly racy, not even a single DJ mix. Well, at least they had “Best of Ayumi Hamasaki” and the latest by the Chemical Brothers — and there’s another feature that just sold me onto EK for my next long-haul flight: free power sockets for every other seat, even in economy!

Getting permission to leave Elefterios Venizelos took a while, but once in flight dinner, somewhat oddly called “lunch” despite being served at 7 PM, was served. This was pretty impressive: we were handed menus, and while this reduced to “lamb or fish?” when the service actually came around, the actual meal was a cut above the usual: a little plate of Greek mezze, a Greek salad (yay, feta!), and “Perch cooked in spetsiota sauce” which was, well, white fish in tomato sauce. It all looked great though, because — and I know this will sound stupid, but it’s true — the containers were all jauntily sail-shaped or triangular instead of square. Of such small touches is pizzazz made. Dessert was a honey-soaked pastry, the only Arabic-feeling thing on the menu (although the menu claimed that it, too, was Greek) and an on-your-pillow-in-good-hotels piece of chocolate. I was little disappointed/surprised not to have an Arab meal option, but it was still pretty impressive to have a menu so localized for a single destination, and overall it was definitely among the best economy meals I’ve had anywhere.

Dubai Airport is a giant construction site, and we were treated to a long bus journey from the plane with not one, but two stops: one for transiting passengers, the second for those terminating their journey in Dubai. Alas, midnight is peak hour at DXB and there was another long passport queue waiting, but at least this time I’d had the foresight to visit the loo first and 45 minutes passed fairly painlessly. My bag was waiting in the pile next to the conveyor belt, I grabbed a sliver of dirham from an ATM and headed to the taxi queue for my onward journey.

The next 150 km were almost hallucinatory. First lengthwise through the even more fast construction site of Dubai itself, past the towering spire of Burj Dubai, the billowing sail of the Burj al-Arab, the Chinese temples of the Ibn Battuta Mall, and kilometer after kilometer after kilometer of the elevated Dubai Metro track. Eventually, though, the buildings petered out and it was just a ten-lane highway slicing through the desert. An eerie tan light as the streetlamps were filtered through the sandy air, an occasional roar from the left lane as Emiratis speeded past in their tinted-window SUVs at 250 km/h, and at almost every intersection the bulbous, cephalopod figure of an oversized mosque, floodlit green and topped with red lights in the minarets staring out into the desert like eyes. Warning signs posted by the side of the road proclaimed: “Beware of road surprises”.

There are three Hiltons in Abu Dhabi, and the second one my driver took me to was the right one. (Later it turned out that, locationwise, I should’ve booked the first one after all.) After an effortless checkin, I crashed into an opulently huge bed at 3 AM, wondering what awaited me next morning.