The Departures section of Dubai airport was the worst I ever saw, even worse than the one in Istanbul (which had improved)! It was like an ordinary shopping mall (selling duty free items) but with depature gates at the second storey as if they were also shops. There were only about 20 or 25 seats infront of the gate! I had to stand up for nearly two hours! What madness!
Well, some four weeks later, I was to go return to Australia. Duty called (school duty that is). This time, I was to go back with me dad (who had come to Turkey two weeks after us). After waving goodbye to our relatives, we left for the airport.
When we first went into the airport, we had to go through the X-ray baggage scanner. We went to one, but the security guard there said that it was full; go join another one. We did, and it was just as full!
We reached Dubai as about midnight after a comfortable flight from Istanbul. As I was putting my bag on the baggage scanner at Dubai (and after I had gone through the metal detector) the policeman at the computer next to the scanner was very anxious. He was pointing everywhere for some reason. It seemed as if he had detected something in MY bag. Maybe he was interested in the radio I had in there, I thought.
I was ordered to empty out my bag. I showed the female cop there that I had mainly books. But then to my amazement, she just said "Don't worry about the books" after she had seen them. Then I relised what had happened. One of these books (my school diary to be exact) had a metal spiral binding on it. The cop on the computer must have thought that it was wire for a bomb or something. Then the female cop muttered something in Arabic to me. Since he only Arabic I know involves obscenities, I was naturally stumped. I had to tell here twice in English that I couldn't speak Arabic. Then in a quiet and almost undecipherable voice, she said that I had to go put my bag on the scanner again. This time, I took out all the metal objects in the bag as well (radio, shaver, two Turkish Navy badges I got at Erdek, a naval base between Istanbul and Bursa, a Turkish Air Force keyring I got at Istanbul). Lucky for me, the queue was not so long, so I got through quickly. I wondered to myself, if I was really carrying a bomb, then wouldn't they have detected it at Istanbul?
Our plane for Melbourne left Dubai at 2:00 am. I was thankful that I had left the city behind.
We landed at Singaport in the afternoon (about......
