yet another layover in Dubai – this time for all of 8 hours… from 1 am to 10am. there’s no point leaving the airport since the malls are closed – so i’ve decided to just roam around the airport for awhile, find a good place to sleep. I’ve pretty much slept the entire toronto to london flight and the london to dubai flight, so i already have no idea where Wednesday went…
It turns out that the Dubai airport has even more stuff than I knew about. I knew about the free internet access, but it looks like they’ve expanded the coverage (but have blocked the smtp server so you can’t send emails unless you use yahoo or google – kinda kills business users…). So since I can’t send emails or even log on to MSN messenger – Yahoo messenger works though – i figured it’s sleep time. So for sleeping, if you wander all the way down to Gate 22 there are some lounge chairs for sleeping and if you go all the way to Gate 23, there’s a whole ‘quiet room’ with rows of lounge chairs with a view of the planes lifting off and landing – I don’t think I’ve ever had to go past gate 2o or 21 so I never even knew the room was there.
Even better though, is that Emirates provides free meals depending upon the length of your stopover. With a min of 4 hours you get one free meal – but lucky me with the 8 hour stopover was entitled to dinner and breakfast! Basically you just go to Safar Restaurant at gate 17 and show them your boarding passes – food wasn’t bad – typical buffet style with about 10 items. Considering that if I would’ve chosen to have the longer layover in Heathrow, I would’ve ended up spending another 20 quid on food there, this ain’t a bad deal!
The only prob with this airport is the the ‘smoke-free’ policy… they keep broadcasting that the airport is smoke-free, but then they have all these smoking areas which aren’t enclosed so kinda contradicts – with everything so modern here, the 70s style smoking section is wacko…
ok roaming is over – i’m going for a Costa Coffee – bestest coffee chain in the world (sorry second cup, sorry timmie, sorry starboy…).
Next stop… the motherland…