Kelli’s African Odyssey, Book 3: Here’s Lookin’ At You

[This post was written on the second leg of the trip, from Casablanca to Dubai.]

I spent 4 hours at the Casablanca airport and found no potential candidate with whom I could embark upon the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Kind of disappointing. Oh well.

The Casablanca airport is a step up from the one in Nouakchott, but still nothing to write home about, so I won’t. I’m holding out hope for Dubai, though – Mom googled it and reports it looks swanky, so I’m prepared to be impressed!

Other than waiting forever to board and being pulled aside to have my passport rechecked with the other people who were transferring from Mauritania (could it be that the fine folks at Emirates Airlines don’t trust the airport workers in Nouakchott? Surely not), my time in Casa was uneventful. And the Emirates Airlines people made up for boarding super late by pulling away from the gate while flight attendants were still frantically slamming overhead bins closed. Despite not boarding until we were supposed to take off, we only left 15 minutes late – now that is speedy!

Also, the Emirates Airlines food is awesome. Chicken, cous cous, greek salad (complete with feta, but sadly no kalamata olives), mystery dessert (but creamy and good-I think it involved mango), topped off with wine. Pas mal. And the seats go back really far and the seatback TVs are bigger than my iPad screen and there are a ton of movie options. The cherry on the sundae, though, was the empty middle seat next to me! So, overall, a huge upgrade from RAM, which seemed to be stuck in the 1990s. Hopefully the good people at the Casa airport are also awesome and put my bags on this flight. On verra.

So on to those movies. After watching the first 15 minutes of that new Oz movie with James Franco, I threw in the towel due to bad acting, boredom, and the overuse of elements clearly designed to only be seen in 3D (although I am still totally in love with Zach Braff). So I moved on to “Parental Guidance” (Billy Crystal/Bette Midler movie that came out at Christmas time – not nearly as bad as the previews made it seem, but I’m still glad I didn’t pay $13 to see it. It was actually the perfect airplane movie.) Now I’m on to “Guilt Trip“, a decision based solely on my childhood love affair with Barbra Streisand. This is another one where the previews looked very questionable.

98 minutes later…

Verdict: another great airplane movie! Cute and fast-paced enough to hold my attention, but not quality enough to spend $13 on…

The last movie I watched was “Hitchcock“, about the making of Psycho – I saw that one in the theaters and it was completely worth the $13, so it was fun to watch again.

I hope I never get tired of long airplane flights. I have a lot of them ahead of me if all goes well, and if I can maintain my enthusiasm for kicking back and watching dumb movies, all the better!