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Air Emirates
Wednesday, June 25 2025
location: room 325 (I think), Five Towns Inn Hotel, Queens, New York
After packing up our stuff and checking out from the hotel, we found a few things to eat in the kitchen area (crappy peanut butter on a bagel for me). Then we drove to the place where we would supposedly be dropping off our car before entering the airport. But these affordable airport parking services are constantly coming and going and changing as each tries to outdo the other in terms of cutting costs. What the customer experiences, then, can feel like it might actually be a scam. For example, today we arrived at the place we were directed to which was just outside the gate of a warehouse just outside the airport grounds. There was no signage for any sort of car parking company, so Gretchen called the provided number and was told to wait there. Then some guy came strolling up from behind a building and told us how the service worked. He would be driving us in our own car to the airport and then storing our car somewhere, eventually to be retrieved by the same set of steps acting in reverse. So we climbed into the backseat of our own car and the guy drove us to the airport as if we were in an especially unclean Uber. Meanwhile there was a news segment playing on the radio about the releases of Mahmoud Khalil from illegal detainment by the current fascist regime.
In the airport, we lucked into being led in a line to a just-opened security checkpoint, meaning there was no wait to get through security at all.
We were flying Air Emirates with a connection in Dubai. The female flight attendants all wear tan skirt-and-jacket outfits with bright red godets (that's the term) that make triangular flashes of color when they're moving quickly. In a nod to Bedouins or veils, they each have a long white scarf tucked into their hats. The men wear a suit with a similar color scheme, but it looks entirely western. Our massive jumbo jet was loaded surprisingly quickly, and Gretchen's clever seat selection once again provided us extra room despite the cramped economy seating. Emirates is considered a premium airline, and their shittiest economy class is definitely a cut above other airlines. As she often does, Gretchen had reserved us seats on either side of a middle seat (in this case in a set of three seats against the window on the starboard side centered on the wing). But she'd done this behind an unusual row of seats that only had two seats, meaning one of our seats, the one nearest the window, had no seat in front of it and could be accessed without disturbing anyone at all. Fortunately, the flight was not a full one, and nobody had been assigned the seat between us, meaning we could stretch out into that empty seat and use its tray table and even media screen for auxiliary purposes (a good use for an auxiliary screen is to display a map of where in the world the plane happens to be).
At fourteen hours, this would be perhaps the longest flight we'd ever taken, so in addition to reserving the good seats, Gretchen had brought ambien and xanax, and I'd packed my usual nine ounces of gin. Of course, we started out our flight by watching movies and television shows, and Emirates has an unusually large collection of those. (I was excited to watch Becoming Led Zeppelin, a fairly new documentary that Gretchen had recently seen in a theatre.)
Gretchen had ordered us both vegan meals, though somehow one of these got lost. They ended up giving me a vegetarian meal while they tried to track it down, and it was a surprisingly-delicious Indian curry that was itself vegan (though of the desserts included contained dairy).
While the United Arab Emirates is itself a not-especially-free country, I was finding their national airline to be not only well-run and comfortable, but somewhat enlightened as well. They served lots of vegetarian food to the many Indians on board and highlit charity work they'd done for not only disadvantaged children, but also endangered species. They also made a point about all the languages that the members of their staff could speak.
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