Doha to Roma

This post is just a story written by Pete with no photos.

It was an early morning flight out of Doha and our body clocks hadn't adjusted the night before so for both of us the sleep was a disturbed one. We were both still tired when we woke at 5 am to catch an 8 am flight. At the airport departure queue something really strange happened. The story follows.

On our arrival into Doha the previous evening we had to queue with many hundreds of people for two hours to get past immigration into Qatar. As most of you already know I like to talk to people, so I started chatting to the young woman in the line next to us.

Her name was Marcela and I asked her where she was going, knowing that 90% of passengers from Australia were only using Doha as a transition. She was travelling  back from Australia to see her family in the Czech republic. We started talking about languages as many of the countries in Eastern Europe speak similar languages and I understand some of the words but not all of them.

We started to compare various words for body parts, greetings, products, clothing and other items. Just like Croatian many word were similar yet with clothing and other products different.

We had started to form a bond and started to discuss what our occupational experiences were. Marcela was currently lecturing at Wollongong university on statistics and then I explained that I had worked at the Australian Bureau of Statistics for  32 years, This caused many other discussions to occur. Followed by my interest in the stock market and her previous experience working for an investment house during the GFC, The few hours passed quickly.

On the flight out of Doha we got out of our shuttle and as we entered the departure lounge there was Marcela. We went through the departure queues together.  AGAIN,  a very weird coincidence.

On our flight from Canberra to Doha we booked seats with a gap in between with Claire having the window seat and me having the aisle seat.  In the past this usually resulted in a vacant seat between us and again it worked perfectly on this flight, which on a 15 hour flight was a godsend.

 On the Doha to Rome  flight we had booked  our seats too late to do the same for our window to aisle seats so we settled on both aisles of the middle row of three seats hoping again for a gap in between.

On boarding, getting to our seats we found that someone was sitting in Claire's seat while I had already found my seat, Claire pointed out that he was sitting in the wrong seat. So he moved to the center seat. At this point we realised that the plane was full and that our little ploy had failed this time.

What made it worse was that the guy in the middle was a rather large man and it was going to be an uncomfortable journey. Meanwhile just behind us there was another seat dispute with the rightful passenger insisting on his correct seat, then the guy between us started talking to the woman who had been moved out of the wrong seat. Just before our flight was going to take off the guy between us moved into the middle seat behind us next to the woman he had been talking to. Their attempt to get better seats had failed.

Leaving us again, glory of all glories with a spare space between us. I looked though our section of maybe 12 rows and the other section behind us of 12 rows and there was no one else with a  free seat between them. May the Qatar gods be blessed.

The  moral of the story is if you try our ploy and it fails, always ask to see the intrusive party's ticket.