Ten Thousand Miles Through Space And Time
How long does it take to make the 24-hour journey from Prague to Melbourne? It is a flight more through time than space.
I flew from Prague, changed planes in Dubai, made a one-hour technical stopover in Kuala Lumpur and finally arrived in Melbourne with my sense of time completely messed up.
I flew with Emirates Airlines for the first time and I was quite satisfied. I’ve never had so much good airline food and the entertainment system was loaded with movies, TV shows and games. (But their Sudoku at the so-called “Medium” difficulty is in fact a pre-school level :-).)
Midnight Dubai from above looks fantastic. The air is full of aircraft lights, the Gulf is crisscrossed by ships and the city itself is an endless sea of lights. I spent just a few hours on the airport but I’m already looking forward to staying in Dubai for several days on my way back from Australia.
Flying so far for so long was a bewildering experience. I normally live in the CET time zone and some of my activities depend on the American ET, CT and MT zones, so I am used to subtracting hours all the time. However, crossing ten time zones in a day was a bit too fast. World Clock quickly became my most favorite iPhone app :-)
This confusion of time combined with intermittent sleep and the mind- and body-numbing experience of flights 6–8 hours long creates a strange sense of time-lessness. You suddenly don’t know what’s the time. It looks almost the same on the plane, day and night. Well, day and night somewhere above the Indian Ocean is irrelevant anyway. It takes World Clock and intensive calculation even to find out how long you’ve been traveling.
It is actually liberating. No destination in sight, food is served every few hours, time does not seem to flow, you have a 1,200-page book, tons of movies and a laptop…
Speak your mind
Allowed HTML tags are a, blockquote, em, code, li, ol, p, pre, strong, ul. Links to other comments in the form “[IV]” or “[4]” are detected automatically.