From Dubai to New York

March 7, 2007 Link Amma's Grace

Our stay at Mahima Chechi’s house was truly a blessing. We were able to sleep, rest, eat (Annika ate much more than usual), and generally relax. Annika and Mom slept for many hours in Mahima chechi’s room. When she woke up, Anni said that she had never felt so peaceful before…

Uncle and I didn’t sleep… I got my guitar and just strummed lazily, browsed the net, and walked the dog Scooby. Uncle talked with Jeyram Uncle about all sorts of interesting topics, kept up his e-mail correspondence with the doctors here, and also walked Scooby.

Walking the dog around the neighborhood gave me the feeling that I was in Berkely – the two places are very similar, with the exception that here, the streets were wider, houses bigger, and nobody else was out and about. It was a winter evening, so it was just a slight bit cold, not chilly though.

At midnight, Mahima chechi drove us back to the airport. We had yet to get two of our boarding passes for the next flight, which left at 2am. They insisted that we take four bottlse of their spectacular fresh juice. Only later did we think about the security implications.

At the check-in counter, there was quite a bit of confusion, as they had no idea, it seems, that we were on the flight. Apparently, only one ticket was shown on their computers. After we showed the lady there our two boarding passes, she straightened them out. But Mom and Uncle Jeff still did not have boarding passes. We were there for quite a while, shuffled back and forth between different counters – the lady sent us to the waiting-list counter, then called us back and gave our case to a guy next to her, it went to somebody with higher priveliges on the system. Eventually they had all but uncle Jeff’s sorted out, and the system wasn’t allowing her to enter it. Another complication was the hand-written and heavily corrected “ticket” which we had from Kochi…

At last that was done. Emirates has this “Depart on time” thing, which means that the flight door closes 15 minutes before the plane leaves the gate, to ensure that it leaves on time. All passengers are advised to get there more than 15 minutes before departure; if you are less than 15 minutes before, you can’t board the plane. Well, our plane was scheduled to depart at 2am, and it was now 1:20am. We still had to go through immigration, security, and find the gate, before 1:45am.

We went through immigration (again, they take their time,) made it to security (I don’t clearly remember if security was before immigration, after immigration, or both) and hurried onwards towards the gate. At Security, the bags went through the scanner. Annika was watching the screen as they went through, singing a song to herself. When the juice appeared, the security guy looked long and hard at it, then turned to Annika and said “Nice singing” and let it through!

We finally reached the gate at 1:55am. Lucky for us, there were a whole pile of people who were hitting the last minute, and the line for boarding pass checking was quite large. And who should we meet there at the end of the line but Andy! Supriya’s Husband!!! He had come on the flight from Trivandrum, and so didn’t have such a long layover.

At the flight check-in, they were checking passports, ticket books, and boarding passes. We all went in a group. In the ticket book, they had to find a green slip which was the actual ticket. Underneath that was a pile of red slips, which was our copy. When we got there, we handed him all of our things. Uncle Jeff’s didn’t have a green slip. After looking at it a bit, and looking at us, he said “Namah Shivaya!”, validated our boarding passes, and let us through with a smile! We still had the Juice, in a bag as a carry on.

At the final checkpoint, the entry to the ramp to board the airplane, the official there intercepted our juice (I don’t know how he found out) and said we had to check it in. Well, what can we do? He gave us a baggage slip for it, and we left it at the gate.

Annika and I had the last two seats on the left side of the plane. For some reason, the back of the plane was constantly about 5 degrees colder than the middle section. Uncle Jeff was in the middle section of the plane, and mom was just a few seats ahead of us.

The boarding was extremely long, and there were some other delays. We finally got clearance forDuring takeoff, the roll seemed to me to be extremely long… longer than any other that I’ve been on, but we finally took off.

The flight was uneventful. We went north over Europe, east over Greenland, and south over Canada towards New York. Since we were travelling east, the Dawn was very long, lasting about 5 hours, eventually catching up to us over Canada.

As we were flying south over Connecticut towards JFK airport, I kinda dozed off. After about 15 minutes, when I looked at the screen showing the path of travel, I was surprised to see that we had made a huge loop – from over the Long Island Bay, we turned back and went North almost to the north border of Connecticut! Then the pilot made an announcement – due to high traffic at JFK, we were being redirected to Boston International Airport. We could go to JFK and wait for 90 minutes in the traffic queue, but we didn’t have enough gas to last that long. But then we looped back, and headed for JFK… We ended up doing a huge loop over Connecticut 2 times, and finally got permission to land at JFK.

The weather was not really good. As we came in for the final approach, the clouds weren’t clearing. It was only when we were about 20 ft above the runway that we could see. On top of that, it was raining! But we still had a safe landing.

Afterwards, I spoke to the pilots a bit, and they told me that it was only luck that we were able to fly straight in to JFK – airline up-there’s had pulled some strings and gotten us direct clearance!

As we approached, Anni and I noted a new notice: the same blurb about “depart on time” saying that you now had to be 35 minutes early, not 15. We attributed this to our late departure (1.5 hrs late) but Mom and Uncle Jeff said it probably came as Airport-specific regulations for John F Kennedy airport.
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