‘Open your Seat Belts, Come this way, Jump and Slide’

I sit at my dining table in Al Mansoura and gratefully have time to read the messages visitors are sending me through this blog. Outside of my apartment, the night looks stale and humid whilst the night prayers on the mosque next to our building retreat for the night after washing their feet in the water fountain placed by the footpath.
The next day, we are taken to the crew terminal to have a look at the briefing rooms, where every flight we operate will originate and we are taught on how to use the roster bidding system. After giving it a lot of thought, I place my bets on beach destinations. Perhaps a Male or a Bali will grace my next month.
Safety & Emergency Procedures training is hectic but I can already notice that once procedures are thought logically, the long hours in the classroom fly by. 
I go through my first exam, which I proudly walk out of with the highest score (100%). Commands I hope I never get to use still ringing in my head:
– Open your seat belts, come this way, jump and slide.
-Evacuate, Evacuate.
-Check yourself, check for debris, open seat belt, open the door, start evacuation.
Most time we forget that cabin crew are on the plane mostly as a security measure. Each crew having their own ‘zone’ to control and check and most times, also their own door.
Twenty miles out of Doha will take you to the middle of the desert, a place in which no human life can possible survive for more than a few hours in a day in which the temperature is almost reaching the mid-forties Celsius, the black lines of the motorway vanishing in the hazy mirage of humidity that the human eye crave for.

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This is where a warehouse has been placed and where our fire drill takes place. One by one and wearing heavy jumpsuits, we brave the elements and fight two types of fires in an airplane galley mockup. Despite the safety measures taken, the heat is intimidating and penetrates through the suit whilst the tastebuds impregnate with the smell of black smoke. It is not a big deal but it is incredibly fun.

Once I reach my one-month anniversary in Doha, the experience is almost complete and the integration is awkwardly successful for within the first thirty days in the ‘Heart of the Arabian Sea’ I have been food poisoned by a bad shawarma, I have gotten two haircuts at the Bengali barbers (and consequentially two hair massages) and I have bid for my first ever roster.

The dust, omnipresent in every corner of the city is somehow assimilated as easily as new costumes, such as seeing men holding hands despite not being a couple, an indication of best befriending in the Muslim world.

I score another 100% on my second Safety & Emergency Procedures exam and the module is finally over, opening ways for the next and hardest part of the whole training: Grooming (sic).

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