This was the first time I had ever been to Zhulyany airport. All my previous travel in and out of Kiev had been through the larger Boryspil airport, so this was a new experience. Like with O’Hare in Chicago, the city of Kiev had grown around Zhulyany, so the shuttle went from cityscape to airport with very little transition. It’s a small place, too, so it was no trouble finding the check in counters or anything else. I kind if I liked it; it had a much more relaxed feel than the hubbub of Boryspil.
There were lots of new experiences in this trip for my wife. She has only been on an airplane a couple of times, and only domestically going from Boryspil and Donetsk. I don’t think that checking in was very different for her, other than having to show off her spanking new international passport. (I think I got to see her new passport — and driver’s license — within about 20 minutes of our reunion.) Everything after that was a bit different.
In addition to the security screening, there were also stops at customs and passport control. I think she was a little disappointed when my passport got stamped, but hers didn’t. I was trying to point out that it was because I was leaving the country (Ukraine), but I don’t think she got the whole in-out thing until we got to Dubai. (She also didn’t realize that, as a couple, we could approach the customs etc. desks together, rather than waiting one after the other.)
I’m going to say that waiting around is not my wife’s strong suit, and in retrospect, that may have clued me in to what I would experience on the flight. Somehow, though, she managed to survive the almost two-hour wait before we could get on the plane. (Eh, the drawbacks of international flights…). The last half-hour wasn’t too bad– there was a nifty little wind/thunderstorm thing that blew through Kiev. But the rest of the time was interspersed with eyerolls and comments about how having to be there two hours beforehand is really dumb.
And then there was the flight. Not an overly crowded flight, thank goodness, since I was assigned a middle seat. (My wife likes the window seat so she can look out.) Our flight was with FlyDubai (I hadn’t heard of them either), which is apparently the low-cost carrier that is run by the higher-cost Emirates Airlines. This meant that we had to buy any food or drinks unless we brought some with us, which we didn’t. It also meant that there was little in the way of entertainment in the seat video screens, unless you bought one of the movie or TV packages.
As I said, my wife has been on a couple for flights, from Donetsk to Kiev and back. These flights take just over an hour, and the airlines flying between those two cities are the full-service carriers. This means that just after take-off, you get a drink and snack, and by the time you’re done with that, it’s pretty much time to land. My wife “knew” the flight to Dubai was longer than the flight to Kiev, but there’s knowing and then there’s experiencing.
It takes about 5 hours to get to Dubai from Kiev. This is about the same amount of time as it takes to get from Atlanta or Washington, DC to Seattle or Portland. (I know, because I’ve been on both of those flights.) It’s about half of the time it takes to fly from Portland to Amsterdam, which I’ve also done a couple times now. Really, 5 hours is not that bad… unless you’re with someone isn’t mentally prepared for a five-hour flight. So, yeah, my wife “knew” it was 5 hours, but I just don’t think she realized that meant being in your seat for 5 hours. I suggested we get a magazine or something before we took off, but she said she didn’t need or want one. After a couple hours, I think she might have been regretting that decision.
Since we had the row, she was able to stretch out a little and doze a bit; that was OK. And, for the first time apparently, she got to see a mountain with snow on the top. I wasn’t ready for that; I was sure she would have seen one somewhere, but she says no. We were above the clouds much of the time and there wasn’t a lot to see (yet another reason to have a magazine), but there was a break in the cover when we were passing over some mountains in southern Turkey. My wife looked down, saw the white topped mountains and asked me if that was snow. Then she asked again, just to be sure that I was sure. And then she was very excited.
When we reached Dubai, it was after midnight and the outside temperature was still over 90 at the airport. We landed at the smaller of the two airports, which is still pretty big, and made our way through immigration and customs without any issue. We had a moment or two of delay in locating our ride, as the Arabic man had a bit of an accent, and his pronunciation of her name is not anything I can even approximate. But we got hooked up, and took a 30 minute ride into the city and got to our hotel.
In case you’re keeping track, my arrival in Dubai was almost exactly 24 hours (by local times) from my arrival in Kiev. So, two days, two major world cities, and both times I arrive in the middle of the night.