The flight to Abu Dhabi was fun – there was WIFI on the plane and I actually bought a pass to be online for a while. And instead of displaying my location somewhere flying towards the UAE, google showed my location as Dulles International Airport – Dulles, VA, US
When I had first looked for flights towards Myanmar, I read that Qatar Airways offers a free hotel night if you choose the fastest connection available and it still takes a certain number of hours of that night. Arriving at Abu Dhabi, I remembered that, and thought I’d try if Etihad offers that option, too. I talked to a guy who told me unfortunately this would need to be pre-booked, so he couldn’t organise anything for me, but he gave me a food voucher for dinner, instead. And he promised to give me another one, for breakfast, if I came back the next morning. Yea! 🙂
After a sandwich and juice, and after finding an ATM that accepted my postfinance card (3rd ATM out of 3!) I took the bus towards the city center. I assumed it would go to the center – which it didn’t 🙂
Instead I got off at the final station, in “nowhere” and was told by my new CS friend to take a taxi to “Special” – taxi drivers know it. Mine didn’t – and let me get off somewhere near the sea which seemed nicer, but also much emptier than the bus station. I didn’t really have any idea where I was, but finally Moses came to pick me up and we went for a shisha. To whichever of the 3 Special-places. Afterwards, he drove me back to the airport and I went in and looked for a nice place to sleep. I found a quiet (round!) couch, set my alarm to “much too early” and slept. Luckily there were some etihad blankets lying around as it was really cold with AC.
After getting up, I went to pick up my breakfast voucher. However, there was nobody from the airline at the counter, but some other guy gave me some juice and water and told me that soon someone should come. They did, I got my voucher and had breakfast. Boarding started on time, and the plane was quite empty – I had the whole row of three seats for myself. Yea!