Today is December 4, 2010, and so
begins my long journey home. Literally. From Doha I will be flying to Riyadh,
Saudi Arabia, for a quick stop-over to pick up more passengers and then fly up
to Frankfurt, Germany. After a layover in Frankfurt, I’ll fly direct to
Seattle, arriving about mid-day (yes, technically I leave here and arrive home
the same day, it’s just an extra-long day).
Once I get
home I have been promised lots of help from family and friends to keep me awake
until late in the evening in order to counteract jet-lag. We’ll see how well
that goes.
Here's map to show you where I'm going:
So here was
my original plan: my first flight takes off just after mid-night Doha time, but
back home it is about mid-day, so since I want to start readjusting to Seattle
time, I want to stay awake on the first flight, and sleep for part of the
second flight.
This plan is
also supposed to help me stave off the inevitable boredom of being stuck on a
plane for over 15 hours by sleeping during the middle part of my traveling,
which is often the roughest in my opinion since you have been traveling for
hours already and you still have hours to go. At least I’ll get to stretch my
legs in Germany a little.
However, there
was a fatal flaw in my plan: I greatly overestimated my abilities to keep
myself awake on a plane when my body is telling me that I should be asleep. In
my defense, being on a plane meant that I couldn’t deploy some very important
“staying-awake measures,” such as drinking large amounts of highly-caffeinated
beverages or doing physical exercise. Staring at a little movie screen just
doesn’t cut it.
I also have
to tell you about my traveling companion.
After
getting to my gate in the Doha airport, a group of gentlemen sat near me and
were speaking German to each other (turns out they work for Lufthansa which was
the airline I was booked on). One of them noticed my henna and said something
to me about it. Now, my German is pretty limited and while I can say simple
greetings and count to 20, I have no idea what he said to me, other than the
word “henna.”
My confused
look must have given me away because, while I tried to figure out what language
to respond in, I did catch that one gentleman said something along the lines of
“she doesn’t speak German” (yes, my German vocabulary stretches far enough for
me to understand that much).
I told them
I spoke English and the one gentleman started to chat with me in English. Once
this guy discovered that I also spoke Arabic, we switched to that as our
primary language. We also discovered that we both spoke French and from that
point on, we spoke primarily in Arabic with French being our second language
and English was our last option.
We had a fun
conversation in the terminal and then it was time to get on the plane. Since we
were stopping to pick-up more passengers in Saudi Arabia, the aircraft was
pretty empty when we got on and my new best friend came to sit next to me.
This turned
out to be a great test of my language skills as he is fluent in the three we
were using (plus German and I wouldn’t be surprised if he knew others) and I am
only conversant in Arabic and French while my English is a little spotty. ;) Keeping
up the conversation became progressively harder as my brain fell further and
further asleep, but I was proud of myself since I only had to slip into English
occasionally.
Eventually
it was too much for my brain to take and I had to sleep. I’m not very good at
sleeping on planes but at some point I guess you don’t have a choice.
When we
arrived in Frankfurt, there was a light dusting of snow. Not surprisingly, it
was very cold which was a bit of a shock after being in warm weather for so
long.
 |
| Arriving in Frankfurt! Can you see the snow? |
Being early
in the morning, not many people were in the airport. The airport staff were
nice, especially considering every time they said something to me in German I
usually responded with, “Sorry, what?”
Here’s a
picture of me sitting in the airport:
And a couple
hours later on the plane to Seattle, here is my view out the airplane window:
The
green-stuff they are spraying is to de-ice the wings. I think it’s probably
green so that they can see where they have sprayed and where they haven’t, but
I thought it looked weird. Remember, I’m pretty short on sleep by this point.
I got an
empty seat next to me on the way home, so I could curl up and doze on and off,
no more Arabic-French-English conversations to pass the time. I also discovered
on this flight that I have an uncanny ability to wake up any time the flight attendants
come by to offer food or drinks, whether I’m hungry or not and no matter how
quiet they are being.
 |
| Almost home! |
At one point
I noticed that the flight status, which you can check on your personal monitor,
said that we would be arriving quite a bit earlier than scheduled. That made me
happy since it meant a shorter flight, and of course seeing my family sooner.
;) However, as we got closer and closer to Seattle, I noticed the expected time
of arrival moving back and back. This is incredibly disappointing to observe.
Every time I checked, it seemed that the flight time stretched longer until we
actually landed, which was pretty much the original scheduled arrival time. I
don’t see why they had to get my hopes up, but oh well!
I made it
home! In one piece too, with all my luggage! That is a real miracle, not losing
any of my luggage.
My family
met me at the airport and a couple of my friend threw me a welcome home party.
And so ends
the saga of Isabelle’s voyage to the Middle East.
And here
sits the last entry of my travels.
Thank you so
much to all of you who have read any of my blog and a special thanks to those
of you who have read all of it! Thank you also to all of my wonderful hosts: my
experience would not have been nearly as amazing if it were not for all of you!
Finally, thank you to my family and friends who supported me on my trip with
prayers and stories from back home.
A very special
thanks to my family who has supported me so much. To my mom, who let me fly half way around the world for three months
even though she hates it when any of our family travels; to my dad, who helped set
up my trip and who has been an amazing support with this whole process; to my brother-in-law, who provided me with hours of entertainment; and to my sister, who encouraged me to write this blog and who
I have promised to bring with me on a trip around the region someday. I love you all very much. :)
