Somewhere after midnight we were woken by a guy wandering up and down yelling 'Melbourne'. Turned out that they had changed the departure gate, which seems to be very common in Dubai, and they had sent someone to wake all of the sleeping Aussies. Very thoughtful, though I'm not sure that I thought so at the time. So there were mums trying to wake kids and get them to sleep walk down the concourse to the new gate.
Into the holding pen Dubai style, and finally on board, to find that we were in kid's corner. There was a solo mum with four kids under 8 in front of us, and another solo mum with 4 kids next to us, though they were older. Trying to get them to sit with seat belts on and tray tables up was a circus, and at one point they all seemed to be either crying or throwing a tantrum, but it settled down once we were airborne and the kids could fall asleep on those passengers around them.
Apart from that, it was an uneventful 7 hour flight to Kuala Lumpur in another Boeing 777, where all the kids who weren't crying had to be woken so that they could cry while they were disembarked. By then it was after lunch local time, and even though we were on the same plane in the same seats for the final leg to Melbourne, we had to get off and take everything, so we could lug it all through security and back on to the plane.
Then the day got worse. While we were in KL, we texted Ashley to arrange a time for him to pick us up, and got a message back saying that his car had been stolen last night. Luckily most of his sound gear wasn't in it.
Back on board to find that all of the mums and kids were going all the way through to Melbourne, so another round of tantrums as they were buckled in to their seats for take off. However, it was a fairly uneventful 7 1/2 hour flight, and we arrived on time at 2am.
It's hard to make a day of flying interesting, so here are some random facts picked up from the Emirates channel.
- somewhere in the world a plane takes off every time you blink
- there are 60,000 people employed at Dubai airport
- on average, each one of those people smiles 17 times an hour
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