The heat outside my heavily air conditioned apartment has reached unbearable levels. A run to catch a taxi turning into some sort of a safari inside an open giant oven. The very few hours I will spend in Doha over the next months will perhaps mostly be spent resting and craving for more hospitable environments.

  ‘ I promised myself that I’d go to the swimming pool , but I didn’t. Especially because going out to the streets in the midday and afternoon hours is like asking to die slowly, but here’s an important detail: It does feel like home’.

Life in the Middle East can be demanding on both the body and the mind. It is indeed a place in which the normal is a mixture of several backgrounds from all over the world which have converged into the one city embedded in the hot desert. Driving can at times be hazardous, squat toilets can at times appear as a surprise in the most luxurious of the restaurants. The family are several hours behind time zones and the friendships grow distant with the new rosters.
Days of being homesick can go by in between lunches at Nando’s, sometimes enjoying the company of the batch mate which oddly happens to be in town, sometimes in a table with a setup for one, the Filipino waiter engaging into an equally alienated conversation for we are all in the same boat.

Nonetheless, words of encouraging come from across the world and make me feel thankful. Appraisal for what it looks like a life well-lived, a craving to know more about it from my closest friends and the oh-so-powerful ‘I miss you’ from my family are the coal that fuel this powerhouse making its way through the dusty streets of Al Mansoura.

A day of mellow rest in Doha takes a dramatic turn that teaches me how fast the cabin crew turmoils happen.
Whilst waiting on the briefing room for my flight to frown-upon Dhaka, we are notified by crewing that the aircraft has changed and the most junior cabin crew member must be offloaded and placed on Airport Stand-by. My number is then called by the Cabin Senior and, heart still fast-racing, I sit on one of the sofas at the crew lounge and await for instructions.

My roster changes immediately from a five-day plan featuring the routing Doha-Dhaka-Doha-Tripoli-Casablanca-Doha-Dubai to almost a week of blank lines to be filled.
Entertained by the come-and-go of crew setting off for interesting layovers or red-eye turnarounds, I walk to the canteen for a cup of coffee, when the half-Syrian rostering manager enters the room and in between a cheeky smile, places his hand on my shoulder and exhales:

– Did you bring a coat? 
– No. Why?
– Because you are operating a flight to Beijing now. Take a bus to your accommodation and pick up your coat. You have time. 

I run through the terminal and glancing at the crew bus, I asked to be dropped at Al Mansoura for two minutes, sweating through the fly of stairs, into my bedroom and back to the crew terminal in time for the briefing.

The purser announces: ‘Welcome all. Tonight we will be operating flight QR 892 to Beijing Capital Airport’. The most junior crew member now dreams about the Great Wall once the flight is over.