This is one of my favourite anecdotes. I’ve shared this with many of my friends, and seeing as I’ve now got an ‘AF’ series going on, this would be the perfect addition to it. When I’d gone to India back in December 2014 – January 2015, we’d decided to go to Dubai as well for a short few days just to get away. We flew with IndiGo airlines. This particular airline offers cheap fares. If I remember right they offer either seat only or seat plus checked-in baggage fares and food must be purchased in-flight, unless you plan on picking up something from the restaurants situated by the gates prior to boarding.

The trip to Dubai was after our trip to Jaipur, which was in the first week of the New Year. We’d had a rather hectic trip to India thus far as this trip was organised primarily to take care of some family matters and we’d planned small trips to other cities and in this case country just to get a proper break. We also have some really close friends who live in Dubai and we were excited to be meeting them.

We made our way to the airport and checked-in, waited at the gate and then finally boarded the flight. We made our way to our seats. Of course the window seat had my name on it. Soon the passengers seated behind us boarded the plane and thus began a 4-hour misery. They were talking VERY loudly. I mean each passenger could hear what they were talking about.

Each time they got up to either stretch their muscles or use the loo, they pulled our seats back to assist themselves in getting up. Do you know how annoying it is, when someone keeps pulling your seat back every two minutes? Continuing on, these aircrafts don’t have TVs on each seat. Needless to say you need to provide entertainment for yourself to while away the time. These passengers had the older ‘smart’ phones which weren’t necessarily designed for music, to be played using the phone’s speakers. But they didn’t have headphones I don’t think and even if they did, they. Did. Not. Use. Them. They started playing their music. Really loudly. Oh the horrible sound that comes out of ‘monotone’ speakers that are playing ‘polyphonic’ music. The cabin crew did not say anything to them. They could see that everyone was distressed at that horrific sound but they did not say anything to them. Having the unfortunate misery of being seated in front of them I was starting to lose it pretty quickly. Within 5-10 minutes I turned around to give them the death stare and to my surprise they were all asleep with their mouths open and the music blasting. Yup.

One of the passengers from their group was enquiring about their Dolphin watch activity that they had planned to do when they were visiting Atlantis. They weren’t quite sure what a Dolphin was. The reason I say that is because the lady seated by the window provided an intelligent answer. It went as follows, “A dolphin is a big and smart fish and it will do jumps and acts for us”. A rather unique answer in my opinion, however I didn’t do the Dolphin watch activity. I did however go to Atlantis.

In other news, the music did not turn off till the pilot announced that we’d begun our descent into Dubai. That is when they woke up feeling fresh, whilst the rest of us were well let’s not go there. Thus began their commentary about ‘landing’. “Oh my god, look so many planes have lined up”. “Oh look I can see something like a world map down there”. “I’m pretty sure that’s Palm Jumeirah”. There were just 4 words that I wanted to say to them, I’ll leave that up to your imagination. Soon, the lady seated by the window got her phone out and started filming the landing. I’m not going to lie that is where I got the idea of filming some of our take off and landings depending on the time of the flight. But what was annoying was that the entire time she was holding on to my seat pulling it back and she got her hand on my hair too. I was in pain. Want to know a secret? She didn’t have her seat belt on even though the sign was on and it had been announced.

The plane finally touches the ground and is being directed towards the gate where we will disembark. As a result we were being trolleyed past a set of hangars with the airplanes parked in them. This lady had an amazing discovery and made the statement, “Look at all these planes parked here, just like a bus stand”. Yup. The filming continued. The plane came to a halt and I couldn’t actually get up until they stood up. But regardless it seemed like forever before we could get off the plane.

Dubai airport at the time was going through construction and so there was a bit of a walk from the gate to Customs. She was filming the entire time. As much as we tried getting ahead of them, they always caught up because Dubai airport is a busy airport and at that given time multiple flights had landed creating traffic enroute to Customs. She continued filming in a zone that had signs up saying “Any photography or videography is strictly prohibited”. I do think that she finally turned off her camera once they got in line.

That is the ordeal of the annoying passengers who were seated behind us on our flight to Dubai. It was a very long and painful 4-hour flight. I hoped and prayed that they would not be on our flight back. Thankfully they weren’t. It’s amazing, the stories that you get from just one travel. I think this may have been their first flight and my oh my as annoying as it was for us, they surely had a blast. That is what travelling is all about, to have fun (not to annoy others).

I’d love to hear some of your unique experiences with fellow passengers!

Until next time,

MiliG