Wednesday, November 4, 2009

The Dubai story -1

Alright, Rise and shine sir, I take a u-turn and come back to this little blog as I said earlier, I changed my mind. A warning: The next few posts have nothing to do with my bike (which is currently running nicely, amen). I just happened to hit on a jackpot and got lucky. I will cut the prologue of how I got lucky, you see I don't like to see my readers getting jealous. But the story goes like this - I was made to play games,then booze, then play some more game, then go around karting track in a Go-Kart and then land in Dubai one fine morning from Hyderabad. I am so lucky that my Emirates flight was sponsored, so was my hotel stay and food...
Anyways, I land there with my stomach full with nice lunch and beer. The first thing I saw from the door is a Ford Focus and I became happy. The smile glued on my face from that moment remained till I boarded (sponsored!)flight back to India after the tour. We go inside and I was astonished at the marvellously huge and beautiful airport. Everyone was needed to go through eye-scan before they stamped our Visas as valid. I still don't know what was the reason behind it. There were some 5 queues of people 1 especially for women. Each queue was ending at a counter with retina scan machine and an Arab operating it. Amazingly for women also a man was there with huge face and pouty lips and moon surface skin, looking terrible. The person for my queue was quite safe looking, thank you! Me along with my friends were standing when I noticed that it was almost India with 80 out of 100 people around me speaking Hindi. Finally we reach at the end and my friend Senthil goes for the scan.. He sits on the chair facing the Arab and closes one eye, positions other eye towards the machine. The Arab is not satisfied, he takes a look at visa and gestures with his hand to open the eye widely. Mr.Senthil 'opens' as much as possible but not enough. The person is frusrated and seeing an Indian slips to HINDI! He says "Aankh kholo!" in weird accent. Now, Mr.Senthil here comes from Chennai and knows as much Hindi as Paris Hilton knows about what is being smart. He sits there dumbly, without emotions. The Arab takes a pityfull look at him and barks "Aankh kholo, Badaa badaa!!" and opened his own eyes wide. As if finally on some clue Senthil shows some movement of eye, but just. Not enough. I certainly did not want the first casuality to occur within minutes of landing and looked on dreadly. The Arab must have gone crazy by now, he curled his lips downward, clenched his fist and opened it slowly, just like a flower. Senthil finally got it and I guess he opened his eye really REALLY wide as he got the stamp on visa. I was next. I don't exactly remember but I must have kept my eyes in a ohh-what-a-surprise-mode, because the Arab immediately stamped the document.
First hurdle cleared, with all of our limbs in tact!
P.S. - All the talks such as very freely given capital punishment, your limbs being cut for offences etc etc are crap. Me however, till today, have taken very good care of my body. So losing a limb trying to stretch UAE law, was out of contention and results would have been disastrous. Coding as they say is tough. With only one hand left, it will be impossible I guess.
And I suggest if you ever go to Dubai, you also do the same: do not try to verify. As we all know, that you never know.
To start, here is a picture of the awesome Dubai airport entrance. The colors keep changing every 2 seconds.


shukran!

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