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Yesterday was my first full day in دبي. (Dubai). I flew in Wednesday evening from Pune (via Mumbai), and met Nathan, who was flying from Cairo (via Bahrain) at Dubai International Airport. We spent most of the day wandering around بر دبي (Bur Dubai, or Old Dubai), and made our way to the Mall of the Emirates for the evening.

My travel was pleasant but uneventful. It was the first time I have flown by myself in India, and I was impressed with the renovations that have been done to the Pune Airport since the last time I departed from there in October, 2007. Since my colleagues told me that it was risky to wait until just an hour and half before my flight to head to the airport, I checked in far too early and had a couple hours to wait in the Jet Airways lounge before departure.

The flight to Mumbai was short, but as I had a window seat, I enjoyed my view of the terrain. (Some other ex-pats told me that it’s possible to hire a helicopter to fly from Pune to Mumbai for a fairly reasonable rate. That would indeed be a lot of fun—the views would be incredible.) I don’t think we actually flew higher than about 10,000′.

I was very impressed with the Mumbai airport, both the domestic and international terminals. They appear to be brand new and are very large. The international terminal had a fairly limited selection of restaurants, but a good-sized duty free shop—which I used to purchase the gin we’ve been drinking in our hotel room. I had dinner at the Pizza Hut (which was right next to the KFC) and then found the single bar in the departure area and ordered a Kingfisher while I waited for my flight.

I flew Emirates on the Mumbai–Dubai leg of my journey, and was quite pleased with their service. I secured an exit row seat next to friendly German man flying on to Munich, so we had a lovely chat before I put on The Dark Knight on my laptop. (He was very impressed with the HD quality.) The staff onboard seemed to all be from outside the Gulf area—the flight attendant who was handling our area was a cute British woman not much older than me.

As I was on an Emirates flight, my plane disembarked to Dubai International’s third terminal, which is for the exclusive use of Emirates. Unfortunately, Nathan was flying on Gulf Air, and didn’t realize that we would not be landing and clearing Customs and Immigration in the same location. Like almost everything I’ve seen in Dubai, Terminal Three was brand-new, very large and upscale. Everything about it was beautiful and impressive. (I saw most of it as I searched for Opie…)

Eventually I realized that his flight had not disembarked to Terminal Three, and asked where Gulf Air lands. I took the shuttle to Terminal One, which, while still nice, was much less impressive. I made a round of the terminal and was about to give up and head to the hotel (it was about 2 a.m. by this time—3:30 a.m. in India) when we randomly ran into one another. Nathan had been guarding the exit area of Terminal One, waiting for my flight to come through.

We caught a cab to the Hilton Dubai Creek, who had rudely not sent a driver to pick us up (This may have something to do with the fact that I neglected to ask them to do so, but let’s not let facts get in the way of rhetoric here.), where we had a room reserved for our stay. DHS 40 later, we were dropped at the back door at the Hilton, checked in, and went to bed.