Skip to main content

Flying Emirates

The prospect of spending the next 16 hours in not one but two airplanes is never an appealing one. But as I board my Lisbon Dubai Emirates flight suddenly the anxiety fades. There are so many mitigating factors. The smile on everyone is contagious! My seat has space and my screen is impressively larg. I only get annoyed by all the announcements in the beginning of the flight but that is only because I want to see the cameras. 
As we take off i watch the beauty of the front camera as we speed through the skys. But it is really the under plane camera that makes it all a notch above. One of those mments worthy of a picture we see the landscape below us marked only by the shadow of the airplane. We are excited to try and recognise the places we pass by and I am already excited to think of how beautiful the landing back in Lisbon will be. 
After my short take-off nap, which I have since I joined banking in 2004 and never left me, only to get interrupted by vague attempts to keep my 3 year old still when we take off, I look around. What will I do now. I dont have to rush or optimize. My seat has its own plug and usb charger, i can work the hell out of this flight. I know it sounds weird, but flights are always a premium place to get charity work done and I also did not benefit a lot of this since I had a baby. Only peppa pig and Amazon Video have provided some short periods in the more recent flights. But in long flights, there was always the limitation of the battery time in the laptop. My ultrabook started at 7 hours but the heavy beating iI gave it the last few years have reduced this. My own plug. How exciting. 
So let me sit back and enjoy some music before i plug the pc on. The headphones bag brings a label. Another little extra that must have no cost and which I would have paid for in some early morning flights when I was a banker and flight crew would insist of making me jump out of sleep, not realizing i had just slept as much on my chair as on my bed before getting on the cab, where I probably also got 20pct of my sleep for the night. Small labels for do not disturb, wake me up for meals or wake me up for duty free to put on your chair. Not hard to make things a notch simpler. So i finally head on to choose my music, the "e" on the ice that we can enjoy on board. And the selection is endless. For simplicity i hit the uk top charts to find that they have all the uk top charts since 1952 with news from the year. I am hooked. I start in 2015 and will see which one i get to next. 
It is just the beginning of the flight and my expectations are already high. B is excited as he puts his first movie. I cant help but blog and share this. I dance to the sound of Uptown Funk and promise I will try and make the most of this forced holiday.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Time is what makes us different

I heard what is likely to become one of my top 3 favourite quotes on a podcast on Friday. "Time is the only real democratic asset. We are all awarded the same time, it is what we do with it that distinguishes us".  Now, I recognise that most of us need to work with survive and that is not democratic throughout. But on an equal opportunity basis, this is an interesting way of putting it. For many years I did not understand why MS thought my resume was so interesting. In fact, they chased me during the entire recruitment process, even though I had no idea of moving to London or Finance. I wanted to be a consultant and stay in Lisbon forever. But traditional consultants in Portugal saw nothing in me, and MS did not let me go. When I started screening resumes and hiring people a couple of years later is when I understood why I was different. TIME.  I was truly different about what I did with my time. Not necessarily the basics - choice of degree or anything. But really ...
1 comment
Read more

Short one: D-Day

It is D-Day today :-) I took out the braids, and the clock is ticking. Bernardo will be in Maputo in two hours. We have plans for the weekend and so much to catch up on. I doubt I will be blogging soon, hehe
3 comments
Read more

Blogging

I have not written in a while. As I hit the bottom I was afraid of what might come out and what might be registered in the web for eternity. But it does not matter. As I go through this stage I know that writing is probably one of the best things I can do, and keeping things inside one of the worst. And short of re-starting my book (or books) any time soon, as they feature about 27 in my list of things I wish I could do, this is just as good.  People used to write diaries, now they blog. I reas on facebook that people used to be upset if someone read their diary, now they get angry if no one reads their blog. It is a funny phenomena. I must say that most of times I think no-one is reading, so why bother, and even those reading won't miss it amongst all other things they surely read. But then a comment comes through, an email reminds me of something I wrote and I know that someone out there comes and visits my home away from home. For good or bad :)
1 comment
Read more