Sat. Oct. 17 through Mon. Oct. 19: What Day Is It Anyway?

(See more photos at: Susanne's India Adventure)

Saturday mid-afternoon I began the long journey to the Asian subcontinent. I started out from Connecticut (where I'd gone the previous day), taking a shuttle bus to JFK in New York. After about 4 hours, I was at JFK and standing in a very long and slow-moving check-in line at the Emirates airline. I don't know why they don't have check-in kiosks, which every other airline I've traveled with in recent
years has.

The Emirates terminal at JFK is quite nice, with good amenities (even free wireless Internet access, which is rare and greatly appreciated). The flight attendants wear beige pantsuits and distinctive red pillbox caps with diaphanous scarves that drape from the hat to their necks. By 11:00pm, we were en route to Dubai on a modern, fairly comfortable 777. (I was unfortunately stuck in an interior seat, though; I'll never know why Expedia put me through the process of selecting a seat at reservation time if it was a meaningless exercise -- I didn't even realize that my online seat selection hadn't worked until I got to the check-in.)

Emirates has a few really big pluses. Their onboard entertainment system is second-to-none: you can dial up hundreds of TV shows and movies at your leisure. As far as food and service go, this is flying the way it used to be in an earlier era: You receive beautiful printed menu cards listing the delicious food options; you get abundant amounts of gourmet-level food -- with real flatware, no less; and you're even presented with steaming hot facecloths from time to time for freshening up.

Here are the menus I received while on board:

Dinner
Appetiser: Tuna Nicoise - Classic salad with potato, green beans, tomato, olive, and seasoning

Main Course: Yoghurt Chicken - Tender pieces of chicken cooked in a rich yoghurt and spice sauce, served with kaju mutter and saffron flavoured rice, or
Barbeque Beef - Classic marinated beef with a smoky barbeque sauce, sauteed fresh green beans and roasted potato wedges

Dessert: Mango Mousse - Topped with whipped cream and toasted coconut
Cheese and Biscuits
Tea or Coffee
Chocolates

Breakfast
Orange Juice
Fresh Seasonal Fruit
Scrambled Eggs - with mixed peppers and onions, golden fried potato cubes, baked beans and grilled tomato half with herbs, or
Sambar and Idli - Steamed rice cakes, served with a flavoured vegetable stew and fresh coconut chutney
Tea or Coffee

Sounds quite delicious, doesn't it? It was! This is no rubbery airline food, it's up to par with decent restaurant fare, and it is plentiful.

After about 13 hours of flying time (taking us over my suburban Boston home area, the Canadian Maritimes, Ireland, Wales, Frankfurt, and eventually even Baghdad!), we landed at the Dubai International Airport. The 777 even has a live camera mounted in front of the aircraft, which broadcasts images to the screens in the cabin; you could see the plane approaching the runway, and the white stripes of the landing strip as we touched down and slowed.

The Emirates new Terminal 3 is glitzy, posh, and modern, and a shopper's paradise, featuring every luxury brand imaginable (in jewelry, electronics, handbags, and the like). If you're a fan of "Bling," this is the airport for you. I had an amazing Latte Macchiatto at Segafreddo, with a head of milk foam the likes of which I've never seen before. I also had fun browsing an Arabic handicrafts store, which features carved wooden camels, felt camels, paper mache camels, glass camels -- they love their camels! Americans have chocolate Easter eggs; Arabs have chocolate camels! The picture also shows an interesting variant on the Matrushka nesting doll concept: a nested Arab family!

An 11:00pm Emirates flight out of Dubai took me straight to Ahmedabad, India in another 2.5+ hours. At 3:00am local time, I stepped out of the plane and into another day (Monday) and into another world...