Here's my greasy-ass hair. (And if you look closely, you'll see the beginnings of my mustache coming in that makes it look like I need someone to clean my top lip with a hot washcloth).
We landed in Dubai on Wednesday around 7pm local time. We got off the plane and headed all the way across the ENORMOUS Dubai airport. We finally got over to immigration on the other side of the airport and Meredith realized that she no longer had her passport with her. Since she needed it to get on the plane, we figured that it must have just fallen out of her bag and was somewhere on the floor of the plane.
So we found a security desk and they called the gate and the woman at the gate said she'd go on the plane and look for it so we should just sit tight. Ten minutes later, she calls back and says "Well, I just went through the whole area you were sitting in and it's not there. Sorry." DOH!
We spent the next several hours trying to find someone with enough authority to let us reboard the plane and search ourselves - but we had no luck. Three hours had passed at this point and we'd just learned that our plane had been refueled and would soon be headed back to JFK. If we couldn't figure out a way to get the passport, we would end up spending the next two nights in the airport until the US Embassy opened back up, and even then, there's a chance that they'd make us fly back to NYC. Ugh.
Every time we found a new person willing to hear us out, they'd call down to the gate and they'd end up reaching the same woman and she'd just be like "I searched the plane. I'ts not there. I'm not looking again."
With the plane's departure growing ever closer, I finally figured it was time to stop dicking around with the airline and try to get in touch with Bernadette. I called her cell and she was worried sick about us because she knew that our plane had landed four hours ago (and that we were on the flight). She was worried that something had happened and we'd been arrested. (Dubai is notorious for its draconian drug laws - they sentenced a British man to FOUR YEARS IN JAIL because they found an amount of marijuana that weighed less than a single grain of sugar stuck in the sole of his shoe!).
We explained the situation to Bernadette and she was immediately like "My boss is a very powerful man in this country. I'm on the way to the airport now...I'll see what I can do."
So: the flight takes off uneventfully; we've been in the air for about an hour, I'm kicking back in my seat, watching some reruns of The Office on my little Jet Blue tv set, and then a flight attendant comes down the aisle and drops off a little goodie bag o' snacks! I looked up to thank her, and although I only caught a glimpse of her before she continued down the aisle, I realized "I KNOW THAT LADY FROM SOMEWHERE!" Now mind you, I'm that guy that ALWAYS thinks he recognizes people from somewhere, but after racking my brain for a few minutes, I realized that the snack-totin' flight attendant was...
Being little rules. This little kid that was sitting in the seat in front of me was seeing the world from 30,000 feet for the first time and it was clearly blowing his tiny mind.
...and after a bit of futzing around, I managed to set up a custom "vivid color" profile so that all my pictures would turn out super-saturated and cartoon-y looking (which is the way I like 'em!).
As soon as the plane was in the air, I took out my cam and began dicking around with the manual settings. I was playing around with the white balance in this pic...
Time-elapse video of the plane approaching the airport and then landing in Orlando! It's really cool to see how the wing-flaps move when the film is sped up. (Features extra-special "surprise ending!")
