V-Flyer

Here's the second leg of our trip

Our stop over in Abu Dhabi was only 1h30m but it seemed to drag, my I pad was showing uk time and my iPhone had died so I was very very confused. I think the flight was due to depart at 9:30am.
We made our way to the gate and sat for what seemed an eternity, when they opened the gate we remained seated waiting for the queue to go down.
We boarded quickly and were seated in 18AB, the flight wasn't full and there were a good few seats left. All the front row seats were empty! When the doors closed there was a stampede for these! The crew let them move into theses seat but I was waiting for "to sit here you need to pay for the extra leg room" that didn't come so they bagged extra leg room for free!
We were very unfortunate to be one of the only rows with 3 people in, every other row had 2 or 1 person. This made for a very uncomfortable flight!
Being in the middle I was very conscious of the guy next to me, not only that he smelled of red wine and cigarettes!
At this point I started kicking myself because I had missed out on some very good pearl business prices in December! Booking through expedia meant we couldn't change our booking online with ethiad and being lazy I didn't try and call to upgrade! My fault!
With a flight time of 5h25m I thought it's not that bad, I can survive!
We were on a 777 and it had a little bit more wear and tear than the previous one. It had touch screen but no power point. The big downside was that the inflight map wasn't working!
We took off and drink service commenced, after the excesses of the previous flight we both opted for water.
The crew on this flight were all very pleasant, nothing seemed to much trouble. I can't fault them apart from being a bit robotic.
I decided to sleep but was woken by the crew asking if I wanted to eat!
The options were chicken, fish or veggie. I thought the curse of the fruit platter had ended! I wasn't sure if I wanted to eat so declined but quickly changed my mind and asked for chicken.
The starter was a bean (fart) salad!
Main was a Thai green curry! No no no! I'll never eat curry on a plane after currygate returning from Mexico! All those poor grown men (me included) looking sorry for themselves queuing for the toilet as soon as we landed. We all knew each other's plight...the damn chicken curry!
Dessert was a beige mousse with no flavour!
So I ate the bread roll with butter and had a glass of water.
Senhor smell next to me had the fish curry and another glass of red!
Simon, sat by the window is fast asleep through all this!
Then a fruit platter appeared! I tried to explain the mistake, she took it away and said it was there if I wanted it.
This is where it got tough, I couldn't get to sleep or get comfortable and the map wasn't working so I had no idea where we were! I'd lost track of time so this flight was never ending!
The crew came around with a selection of rolls and more fruit for me! Yay!
Simon had woke by this point and was wondering how many hours he had slept...more than me was the answer!
I remembered I'd downloaded iplayer stuff on my iPad so watched a few things.
We finally started our descent and even this lasted forever.
I was glad when we landed and off the plane!
No queues at immigration we were straight through.
We were waiting for our bags at 17:30 bkk time so 45m earlier than planned! The bags took forever to come out but once collected we made our way to exit B door 5.
We had booked the hotel limo to pick us up so there was a man from the banyan tree waiting for us. He took us straight to the car and we were given cold towels to freshen up and water. We were checked into the hotel within an hour!

Overall I think ethiad are a great airline and would use them again. The connection and second flight for us was hard so in future we would look to fly direct and if that doesn't happen we would try to fly business. The economy product they offer is great and if you have decent seats it might not be an issue.

I just hope the return leg will be forgiving!

Darren

Thank you for Part Two .
I am so used to knowing where we are in the air that I too would really miss the flight map now. Despite not having such a good seat it is pleasing to read that you would recommend ethihad economy. Always good to read positive comments about the back end of the plane .

Thank you for a very informative and balanced TR. Hopefully you will get good seats on the way back

Thanks both for this and the first leg TR (which seemed to get very Pedro Almodovar quite early on). Always interesting to hear experiences of the middle eastern based carriers and interesting in the compare and contrasts where more than one journey leg / aircraft / crew with the same carrier is involved.