I'll need to comb my hair

Lest I get too acclimated to the western hemisphere again or that I actually deal with the litany of house projects that have piled up, I left town again.   

This is my second visit to Dubai, where my younger brother lives and works as an airline pilot for Emirates Airlines. Among the perks needed to attract skilled labor to come live in the desert 9,000 miles away and where the temperature averages 118+ degrees during the summer months are airline benefits extended to their siblings, which is not the norm for airlines in the U.S.  And those benefits include mightily discounted guaranteed reservations.  I won’t share the actual cost because it will make you hate your siblings or your parents (in the case of only children) for not choosing to work for Emirates Airlines and making you eligible for cheap international airfare.

Emirates is an airline built around a goal to have the finest in-flight service on the planet. And god bless them for that.  

 Exhibit A:

I’m not sure it’s accurate to say this was my “seat.” It just doesn’t seem reasonable to give this the same name as the thing I sit on while riding a bike. I think “large personal flying space” or “alternate reality” is more correct.  I had two touch screen devices, a mini-bar, a seat that reclined fully to 180 degrees, and so many visits by the in-flight crew to check on my well-being or to give me stuff that I was almost embarrassed.  I swear to you it felt like Christmas morning with the amount of anticipation that I felt every time I so much as caught a glimpse of a flight attendant in my vicinity, particularly prior to takeoff and shortly thereafter when the flights attendants were handing out stuff like they were on a parade float. And they smelled so nice. Sometimes I wanted them to swiftly pass by just so I could smell the pleasant breeze.  Among the freebies:  Champagne, warm towels with a hint of lavender, noise-reducing headphones, a wine list, cologne, razors, toothbrushes, and slippers. I also got a comb. People who live a business class life comb their hair. I haven’t combed mine with anything other than my fingers since 1996 so the comb made me a little self-conscious that I might be out of my league and unable to relate to my fellow passengers, though I felt certain that I could play it off. Worst case, I could walk down the aisle with the comb conspicuously placed in my hand, go in the bathroom, and then sit there playing with the different cologne dispensers for a few minutes. “That under-dressed man is in there combing his hair,” they would think to themselves. And then they would go in the bathroom after me and comb theirs. Solid plan.

On one passby the flight attendant asked me if I would like a mattress for my seat, and of course I said yes which was followed by a few seconds of us looking at each other oddly until she eventually said “you’ll need to get out of your seat so I can retrieve it and lay it down.” Damnit. My rookie-ness was beginning to show itself. She touched a button on a console in my personal flying space and the door to yet another compartment within my suite emerged, this one containing the mattress, which she laid on the seat and then wished me a nice rest as she pressed another button which changed the lights in my flying space from standard "reading light yellow" to a soothing tint of blue.  I was ansty to get back into my suite because I wanted to start searching for other buttons and compartments that I had missed on my first sweep.  I was disappointed in myself that the mattress compartment and yellow-to-blue light swap option had eluded me. I'm typically a thorough person.  Business class was challenging my self-identity.

The flight attendant checked back within a minute to ask if I would like to be awakened for the mid-flight snack services but also offered that if I chose to sleep through those services, I could always go to the back where there’s a lounge with the same snacks.  I thought to myself that she’s insane if she thinks I’m going to sleep my way through this luxury, and then I had another thought:

The lounge? On an airplane? 

Normally when I hear the word “lounge” I think of a darkly-lit place with velvet-clad booths and Barry White music where maybe my parents had a first date. Clearly I would have to reframe my paradigm of the term “lounge” during this 12.5 hour trip.

This aircraft was the Airbus A380, the single largest type of passenger aircraft on the planet. Depending on an airline’s layout preferences, it can seat about 550 people total on its two levels.  In the case of Emirates Airlines, the entire top deck is for First and Business class, and at the back of the top deck is a lounge. I just had a moment as I typed that last sentence in which I thought to myself that few people reading this are going to believe me.

The lounge area had a tall narrow hutch-like cabinet with a stack of mirrored shelves that presented food in glamorous ways that made me afraid to touch them, like they were on display more than available for eating. Cute little sandwiches cut into all the shapes, bruschetta with fresh mozzarella, warm cookies with fancy Swiss chocolate, raspberries on little skewers with a drizzle of balsamic.  This mirrored food tower was opposite a full bar, also with a mirrored background, and if you stood in just the right place, you could make it look the flight attendant working the bar had a never-ending series of bowls of olives sitting on her head. I robbed the photo below from the internet because I could not muster up the humility to take my own photo on-board and reveal my identity as an Emirates business class virgin.  I needed to hang with these people.

There was a period of time toward the beginning of the flight when I was a little panicked about what to do. There was a lounge, 11 episodes of Modern Family available on the personal entertainment system, a bunch of Academy-nominated and vaguely familiar sounding movies, more buttons and compartments to find, a comb with which to experiment, and I had to strategize about how to accomplish all of it.  On a busy day in my usual life, I often make an hour by hour plan for what needs to get done and when. I can’t believe I just admitted that but now that I did I feel better and I’ll probably start drinking more but Gato Negro is cheap so that's okay. I’ve never applied my hourly planning approach to a flight. Sometimes I make a list of work stuff I’d like to accomplish on long haul international flights but never have I planned it out hour by hour. But Emirates Airlines had overwhelmed me with options, and to gain some sense of control over that feeling, I had to plan.  First priority: drop the items from the list that were not dependent on being on that amazing aircraft.  That moved “visit lounge," "smell the flight attendants," and “watch Argo and Silver Linings Playbook”  up on the list and “comb my hair” and “sleep” down on the list.  “Modern Family episodes” would fill in for any unanticipated free time. I really didn’t know how much time to allocate for looking for more buttons and compartments, for example, so when that took 10 minutes instead of 30, that left room to spare for watching an episode. At work, I usually fill these unexpected brief moments of free time with eating Goldfish out of the snack bin for the nature center in which my title is "director" but clearly someone else does the work (thank you, Nicole and Kristen). 

I underestimated how much time it would take to go to the bathroom, and this threw me off schedule. The slow down occurred for lounge reasons. I had to walk past the lounge to get to the bathrooms and there was always a different selection of food each time I passed by, and I felt compelled to assess whether the ingredients in those foods could be purchased at a regular grocery store.  Saffron-infused cupcakes. Tahini eggplant kebabs.  You get the idea. Another element that slowed me down was the social norm in the lounge area on interaction with fellow passengers. I couldn’t just casually stroll by with my comb and go directly to the bathroom.  This was a club, clearly. And as a new (and temporary) member I had to undergo the initiation. I never joined a fraternity in college, but the feelings that emerged with the prospect of interacting with my fellow business class travelers on Emirate Airlines are what I associate with being an uncertain 18-year old trying vainly during pledge week to please-oh-please just fit in and plaster with me with embroidered Greek letters.   

Flight attendants, or “cabin crew” as they are more often referred to by a lot of international airlines, are easy for me to talk with.  My father is a retired airline pilot. My younger brother is currently a pilot; remember he's the source for this trek in Emirates Airlines fantasy world. My older brother is a pilot in the Coast Guard. My mom continues to defy her age and her peers and still works as a flight attendant, though she has matured (marginally) from those early days when she started in the 1960s when she would compete with her co-workers over who could shove their body most snugly in the overhead space. As a child, my mother adopted a favorite prank that included a piece of fake snot about 12 inches long that she stuffed in her nose in a wad, pretended to sneeze, and then it would just hang there while everyone in the near vicinity moved away, grossed out and uncertain about what to do exactly as a foot of snot dangled from her nostril. In one instance a woman went into her bra to get my mom a Kleenex.  The kicker: my mom rarely revealed it was a prank.  She would wrap that snot up in a napkin or Kleenex, and then carry on.  This wasn’t something she would do at kids’ birthday parties for a joke or in private settings only, mind you. They occurred most often in restaurants. Nice restaurants.  

She was/is also a master of the so-called “little white lie” though you might argue with her liberal definition of “little.” Telling your toddler son to lay collapsed in her arms so we could get to the top of the wait list at a busy restaurant because “he needs food with his medication” may not qualify as “little” in the big book of lies. To this day when I call her there’s a 50/50 chance she will pretend not to understand English, using a language she made up, and continues the charade until I either hang up or threaten her with the worst assisted living facility I can find when she's older, or by proclaiming that if she doesnt drop the charade I will start calling her by her first name and reserve the title "Mom for my dad's second wife, who he married when I was 35 years old.

Anyhow, the point I was on the road to making is I can speak the language of “airline” and know that the term “deadhead” isn’t always in reference to Jerry Garcia and when someone “works a turn” they are not referring to an act of prostitution but instead to the scenario when a flight arrives at its destination and then turns right around and goes back to where it came from.  So the easy entry point into lounge conversation would start with cabin crew. 

I met a really, really nice cabin crew member who is doing what so many ex-pats do in Dubai: work a ton to make a lot of money with the intent to return home within a decade or so. In her case, she is from the Philippines and working to save money to send her two sons to school, who remain in the Philippines and live with their grandmother.  She’s not living in Dubai to create an opportunity for her own self-indulgence – as many people here appear to be doing-- but instead living abroad and away from her own children so they will be able to attend university because, as she stated often, their education is the most important thing to her in the world.  “I know they are loved and nurtured,” I remember her saying, perhaps concerned that I was passing judgment on her decision to move away from her children. I loved her convictions, and that led to some talk about my work at a university and my small non-profit that supports education in Kenya, and then someone overheard the conversation, and next thing I know, I stood in a small circle of four people, none of from the same country but all in whole-hearted agreement about the importance of education for the well-being of ourselves and our world, and two with reasonably well-combed hair.  

I arrived Dubai mostly exhausted and jet lagged despite the 180-degree seat. Argo and Silver Lining Playbook were both amazing movies, I found a compartment right under my arm rest that held more pillows, the white wine that was fourth on the list of eight was delicious, and I shouldn’t eat a raspberry skewer and eggplant tahini at the same time.  

Over and out.  More soon on the actual Dubai visit.