Our Journey Begins

Our journey to Asia became an adventure the moment Wizzair airline started gradually changing our flight. The original Vienna-Abu Dhabi flight, along with ongoing time changes, was changed via Budapest-Abu Dhabi, and finally to Budapest-Dubai. Since our flight fell during the National Day period in the UAE, we had to arrange accommodation in advance, which we had already booked in Abu Dhabi, of course.

We set off to the airport in the early morning hours in a rented large car. Bažo helped us with the journey, getting up early for us and taking a trip to and from Budapest during his workday. We are very grateful to him for that. On the way to the airport, we were lucky because there were roadworks on the highway and the lanes were being separated in various ways, with one lane always being congested while we always caught the free one (thanks to Johnny’s sixth sense).

At the airport, Johnny was getting frustrated with the Wizzair staff, who were slow and just standing there, even though there was already a queue of “priority” passengers as well as regular ones in front of them. They just stood there and nothing happened for a long time. Then they finally started letting the “priority” passengers through, and when they let them into the waiting section, they physically blocked passengers from sitting down in the seats, so standing in line just turned into standing in line a few meters further. We “regular” passengers could watch this while standing and waiting in our queue for when they would serve us. When we finally got on the plane, we just sat there looking out the windows, and what was supposed to be a flight 10 minutes earlier than on our tickets turned into about a twenty-minute delay compared to the ticket time.

The flight lasted 6 hours. We assumed that food is normally served on such longer flights. However, we were proven wrong and they didn’t give us anything to eat the entire time. We could, however, purchase tempting-looking instant noodles for 5 euros each. We passed on this and the kids somehow survived on the snacks I packed for them. We adults treated ourselves to a few hours of fasting.

We landed in Dubai. We went through the checkpoint, fortunately the priority one thanks to having a baby. (The older siblings and Johnny appreciate these benefits). Four of us went through the checkpoint with a gentleman, and I went with Simeonko behind a partition with a lady. They checked passports, scanned faces, gave three adults a SIM card with 10 GB for 24 hours, and off we went.

Johnny had pre-ordered transportation to our accommodation Dubai-Abu Dhabi (some distant outskirts area, close to Abu Dhabi airport, where we were originally supposed to land during the night hours). We sat for over an hour after sitting for 6 hours. I won’t lie, electronics and downloaded cartoons from Netflix and YouTube saved us the entire journey.

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