I have traveled to Jordan three times in the last four months. Each trip has been riddled with problems. I thought the problem was that I was flying Jazeera Airways. The first time I flew, I missed my flight. The second time I flew, I was given a boarding pass for a Dareen Al Shankseer. That is not anywhere close to my name. I thought the problem with all of this was that I was flying Jazeera. The link, however, turned out not to be Jazeera. The link is Jordan.
My third trip to the Hashemite Kingdom started off smoothly enough. I made it to the airport on time and checked in. I had a seat. Our plane wasn’t brand spanking new, but it had definitely been made in the last 7 years. Nothing disastrous happened in Amman, so when I woke up on the last day there, I considered the trip a success.
Our return flight to Kuwait was scheduled for 2 p.m. We all went to breakfast with our Jordanian friends, as a sort of final farewell. Around 10:30, I got a message from a friend in Kuwait who was supposed to pick all of us up:
“Hola! Is your flight delayed? Just checked the web.”
I was confused and wrote back, “Not that I know of – is it saying it’s delayed? We are flying Royal Jordanian”
The response was immediate: “It’s delayed five hours!!”
I made the announcement to the table, and all of us sighed in relief. We may be delayed, but all of us love Amman and none of us were in any hurry to get back home. That notion, coupled with the fact that we thankfully weren’t AT the airport put us all in a cheerful mood. The rest of the day was spent doing lunch, checking in at the Royal Jordanian office in Amman and saying goodbye.
Once we got to the airport at 6 p.m., we went through security and then checked our flight. In bold letters, it read like this:
RJ800 KUWAIT 13:55 (original time) 20:45 (estimated time) DELAYED
We were delayed another 3 hours on top of the earlier 5 hours. We all groaned, and realized that it could be worse. We could have been there since 11, like we were supposed to be. We needed to entertain ourselves, and fast.
“Let’s play cards,” said Nisreen. Leaving Shamlan to watch the bags, Samer, Ziad, Nisreen and I all trotted over to the duty free section to buy cards. But Nisreen got distracted by the Jordanian souvenir section.
“Guys!!” she said, calling Samer and Ziad over to her. “Let’s dress up!” The three donned Palestinian scarves picked up tambourines, drums and fezzes and posed for my camera. We managed to take about five photos, in various poses, before a very unhappy looking Duty Free clerk came over and started telling me, in Arabic, that this was a “high secure zone” (really?) and that pictures weren’t allowed.
“Guys!” said Nisreen, taking my camera from me. “What we should do is go to the alcohol section, grab TONS of it, and take photos!”
In our defense, we live in a dry country.
Samer and Ziad went about collecting alcohol in a blue plastic cart while I struck a pose with a bottle of Johnny Walker. Ziad, meanwhile, stopped in front of a display of Belleintine’s alcohol, and pointed. “Will you be my ballentines?” he asked us, with a mournful look on his face.
Cracking up, because we are all about five years old, we made our way back to our bags, where Shamlan had been patiently waiting for about half an hour as we conducted our photoshoot. On our way back, we spotted a Royal Jordanian representative, and made a beeline for him. Nisreen did the talking.
”Amoo,” she said in Arabic. “Can you tell us why the flight is delayed? We’re on our way back to Kuwait.”
He turned to us and spoke in Arabic. I listened, trying to understand what was going on, in an effort to improve my own Arabic. I couldn’t. Samer understood, though, and turned to me, laughing.
The reason our flight was delayed eight hours? It’s simple, really.
“The flight,” said Samer, in between laughter, “is delayed because it is stuck in Baghdad.”
Yes, Baghdad. As in Iraq. As in the war zone. As in, why the hell is our plane stuck there?
I began to laugh and just walked away before I could ruin Nisreen’s two truths and half a lie about how we had been at the airport since noon (lie) and we were tired (truth), hungry (truth) and how we just wanted to go home (half lie, half truth – we just wanted to get out of the airport).
After making it back to Shamlan, we shifted over to the Starbucks to get comfortable, when there was announcement made over the airport intercom that all people waiting to get to Kuwait on RJ800 were entitled to a free meal. Nisreen, Samer and Ziad jumped up and ran off.
They came back about 20 minutes later, holding five boxes of “food” (one for each of us) and handed them out.
“Oh man,” said Samer, opening up the box. Inside the box was a turkey sandwich (aka two slices of bread slapped together with some butter and a turkey slice), an airplane meal that was probably meant for a flight yesterday, banana bread and a juice box.
“This isn’t food,” Shamlan said, pulling apart the sandwich.
“You have to hear what we did,” said Nisreen, helping herself to a bite of the “sandwich”. “We barged into the kitchen.
Samer continued. “I was talking to the guy giving us the food and I told him, in Arabic, “Make sure we get better food than the American.” And then I realized that she probably heard me say “Amrikia” and figured out that I was talking about her, so I turned back to her and was like 'How many do you want? I just asked the guy to make sure you get enough.'"
We all were crying with laughter at this point.
“And then,” continued Nisreen, “the guy working at the kitchen was just NOT happy about the fact that we had barged in. So I was like, ‘why are you so mad?’ and he said he wasn’t. And then I said that I’d call him sanfoor ghadban [translation: angry smurf] since he was so upset with us.”
Ziad chimed in: “Everyone there was yelling about how they’d been there since 11 a.m., and we all stood up and were like US TOO, GET US OUT OF HERE.”
I wasn’t sure how we had evaded being arrested, but somehow we had managed to be overly obnoxious in an airport and still hold boarding passes.
Just then, we heard an announcement that all passengers to Kuwait should head to Gate 7, since the plane had apparently made it out of Baghdad and into civilization.
We handed over our boarding passes at the gate and started walking towards the tarmac. “Oh, guys,” I said. “I think we have to take the bus to the plane.” Sure enough, we crossed through the gate and were greeted by an escalator, taking us down and out of the airport.
Not just any escalator. A non-moving escalator.
“This,” said Samer, “is VIP treatment. The plane is delayed for hours, we are forced to wait here since 11, we get terrible food and now the escalator doesn’t even work!”
As we walked out of the airport, there were two buses waiting for us. About 500 yards away was the plane. We could walk the distance.
“Amoo,” said Nisreen, sweetly to the elderly Royal Jordanian employee guiding people onto the buses. “Can we just, I don’t know, walk to the plane?”
He looked at us, unamused. “No.”
”But it’s so close.”
“It’s a security threat,” he said, and turned his back to us. Case closed.
When we finally made it on the plane, we were faced with another dilemma. Nisreen and I were not sitting with the others. In my case, it was purely my fault – when I checked in, I was given seat 6A, and wasn’t fond of giving up such a prime seat. The boys were in the second to last row. We all waited as a group to try and switch seats. Nisreen took care of this effort and did it seamlessly. However, in the process, she made an enemy of Diana S., the flight attendant assigned to our section of the plane. The woman constantly threw us dirty looks as we attempted to finagle our way into Row 27. At one point, I was blocked into the row because she and two other people were standing right in front of me and there were people behind me.
She shot me a dirty look. “Where are you sitting?”
“Um, up front.”
“Please go to your seat.”
I smiled sweetly at her. “I would love to, but I can’t get out of the area I’m in.”
She sniffed, and walked away.
“We are so going to get her,” hissed Nisreen, joyfully.
After finally settling into our seats, having successfully switched, I noticed that the armrests had ashtrays built into them. How old, exactly, was this plane?
I got my answer soon enough, when the safety video came on. While Royal Jordanian didn’t have video screens built into the back of the chairs, they generally had, at the very lease, normal television screens ejecting from the roof of the plane.
Our flight, however, had a projector.
“How old is this plane?” asked Samer, in a hushed tone, as the projector screen slowly descended in front of us.
We all stared. I was trying to calculate the last time I had been on a plane that had ashtrays and a projector screen and figured it was probably in 1993. I didn’t know planes like this were still in existence.
While the rest of the flight was uneventful (except for when they handed out comment cards, to Ziad and Nisreen’s joy – they had lots to say about Diana S.), we were all fairly certain that we’d never fly Royal Jordanian again.
Baghdad. Honestly.
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