On the Road

The Dubai airport is BUSY all day, every day. I know this because recently I have been at the airport at the oddest hours.

On Thursday, I traveled to Turkey for 2 days of meetings. My flight left Dubai at 3:45am. I called the taxi at 1:30 and when I arrived, the place was heaving! Upon getting out of the taxi, there was a Canadian man standing there talking with another taxi driver. Apparently, he had just left his passport in the back of a taxi and was trying to find out how he could get the taxi driver to come back. He used my phone to call the central help desk (I could have told him this would be an exercise in frustration). Eventually, I needed to go to my flight for check in and last I knew he was heading down to the Taxi Office at the airport to hopefully get more assistance.

The queue for my the check in area was huge - extending down the concourse. Apparently, there was also a flight going to Africa because my queue was full of Africans with HUGE piles of purchases and bags on their luggage trolleys. I was starting to get a bit worried because the line wasn't moving at all - and with this many people ahead of me I didn't know how I was going to get checked in in time. While standing there, I noticed a few impatient people jumping the queue to the beginning and I was starting to get a bit peeved. After the 3rd or 4th person, I wandered up toward the front of the line, too. Good thing I did. Turns out I wasn't in line. The long queue of people I was standing with were very early and couldn't even check in for their flight. They were just "pre-forming" their line for when it was their turn.

After two days of meetings, I returned to Dubai on a flight that arrived at 5am. Once again, the place was so busy. Things never stop there. Unlike at home, there seem to be no noise reduction hours or anything like that. We should know, we live under one of the flight paths. Especially in the evening, we seem to have quite a few flights overhead. Just this morning I heard a flight coming around 4:55am - probably the flight from Istanbul.