The trip here…

Life-boat and Manby Apparatus by Joseph Mallard William Turner

NIKON D700 and no lens info shooting f/3.2, 1/50 s, ISO 800 at 42 mm. Taken at 2009:06:15 05:22:18

I spent a day in London before coming here and got to stop by the Victoria and Albert and Science Museum. It was fun. I love museums.

However, let’s talk about the trip over here for a bit. If it isn’t bad enough that I had to spend three consecutive nights sleeping in an uncomfortable airplane seat in a fully upright and locked position, I also extended my streak of bad flights.

Over the course of my 4 flights in 2 days, I’ve come to notice a few things:

  1. Why am I always in between the biggest people on the plane? I’m not exaggerating. Of the 8 people I had sitting next to me(1), 3 required seat belt extenders and 2 were short, thick Indian guys who were too buff to have their arms by their sides. And I’m not a small person.
  2. I had to sit next to a grandma for an 8 hour flight who would just let it rip every so often. I’d look at her and she’d just look back and smile. I wasn’t sure what to do at that point. What am I supposed to do?
  3. Every single flight I had was late. Coincidence, causation or just association?
  4. What’s so great about Emirates? Overrated.

And the real kicker: on the very last leg of the flight (Dubai to Cape Town), I was sitting in row 21 on an Emirates flight. If you are unfamiliar with the Airbus 380-800, row 21 is the row directly in front of the first (economy class) restroom. I was sitting next to another grandma when I got a whiff of the more terrible smell in the world. Like I had learned on the previous flight, it’s best to just such it up and pretend you can’t smell anything. So I tried–for 15 minutes. I looked around and everybody (including myself) had their nose in their shirt like a class full of 3rd graders.

It was absolutely horrible. I wasn’t sure if it was vomit or torrential diarrhea. Turns out, it was both. Apparently, somebody was ill and doing his business in the restroom behind me. He got so sick from the smell of his own waste, he started vomiting in the sink. In an effort to clean it all up, it spilled over into the aisle and the rest of us got to enjoy it with him.

Let’s just say it was an incredibly long 7 hours.

Footnotes:
  1. I was in the window seat for two flights. [↩]