Back to the Real World

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I have a texting conversation with Emma, and as usual I manage to annoy her. She swears at me. I remember reading somewhere about someone getting arrested in Dubai for swearing on Facebook. I wonder how the Emirati Police will know it's Emma that swore and not me? I think it might be just as well we're leaving today.

Today we'll be flying to Barcelona. It's lunchtime as we drive to the airport and it is again ridiculously hot. We pass hundreds of labourers in heavy blue overalls spending their lunchtime sleeping under the massive overpass they're building. It's hard to see how any amount of sleep could be enough to allow you to keep doing heavy manual labour in this heat.

The Dubai airport hasn't got any smaller since we arrived here. I read somewhere that it is now the busiest airport in the world, having overtaken Heathrow a couple of years back. They don't seem to put up with being second at anything here in Dubai. I'm sure if anyone looked like taking over their "world's busiest airport" status they'd quickly manage to chuck a few more planes in the air and put the upstarts back in their place.

The desert we fly over looks vast and completely empty; all we can see is sand, sand and more sand in every direction, and there's no sign of any roads, villages or any sort of human habitation anywhere. The flight map shows us taking a sharp detour, seemingly to avoid flying over Israel. Emirates is owned by an Arab country, so maybe they're not allowed to fly over Israel and vice versa? Israel's surrounded by Arab countries, which leaves me wondering what Israeli planes do when they want to fly anywhere. They must have to take lots of detours, which presumably means it must take them a long time to get anywhere.

We land in Barcelona. Issy's not happy; she was watching a thriller movie on her TV and they turned off the entertainment system just before it finished so she doesn't know how it ended. There's no shortage of machine gun toting soldiers patrolling the airport; I hope that they don't know something that we don't. We feel like we've returned to the real world. Issy points out some graffiti and rubbish on the side of the road, and we both notice that unlike Dubai everything here isn't pristine and perfectly maintained. Our apartment is on the top floor and has a large terrace with great views of the famous Sagrada Familia, which looks to be only about three blocks away.

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