White tailed plane
A nice white tailed plane brought Jan, me and a lot of other tourists last week to Hurghada. I guess the Tui group in Belgium keeps on having trouble with their planes after a lot of tourists got stuck in the beginning of this year. With the help of Jan's wide interest in planes and his always online phone, I got informed that we were flying with an Airbus formally used in Spain (hence all the signs still in Spanish inside) but recently sold to Sweden. So we flew with a blond Swedish crew, much to the exitment of some matcho passengers, so it seemed. Too white blond for Jan if I asked him if he was glad to be on board :p.
The meal distribution sure was a bit more chaotic with only 2 crew members talking Dutch or French and a lot of older people onboard not understanding English.
I really liked the fact that the bathrooms were downstairs! Apparenlty they had used part of the cargo space to build a line of toilets with some waiting seats which could be reached by some turning stairs downstairs. It almost gave a homy feeling, but the toilets itself were still the stereotypical claustrophobic little rooms.
The flight was long and boring, but I needed the time to study my diving course. I started reviewing the first chapters that I had taken already the previous year but I soon realised that I'd never be able to read all of the 350 pages again. So tired already after a while, I skipped to the new material to make sure I could finish at least those chapters. PADI has quite strict rules to be followed by their padi diving centers and last year in India they didn't even let me start any exercises before I had finished the book and the review questions of the chapters. I didn't want to risk not getting on the boat the next morning so I was dutifully reading my new chapters while fighting sleep.
The ecologic hype isn't very strong yet in Egypt, at least not stronger than the economics of tourism. As a result we landed first in Sharm El Sheik,Egypt, only to then fly 30 min more , 100 km across the Red Sea to land in our destination Hurghada. I suppose we all don't want to know how much kerosine this convenience has costed. At least now the passengers could clap their hands twice for a successfull landing. What is that with charter flights anyway? Should we start clapping in the bakery as well for receiving a well baked fresh bread? The pilots of scheduled flights must be so jealous that they never receive applause when they land :p.
Anyway, after a long afternoon flying and a smooth and very transfer in our hotel, we finally could crash in our hotel room and our vacation could start (since I did fill in my Padi review questions first :p).
The meal distribution sure was a bit more chaotic with only 2 crew members talking Dutch or French and a lot of older people onboard not understanding English.
I really liked the fact that the bathrooms were downstairs! Apparenlty they had used part of the cargo space to build a line of toilets with some waiting seats which could be reached by some turning stairs downstairs. It almost gave a homy feeling, but the toilets itself were still the stereotypical claustrophobic little rooms.
The flight was long and boring, but I needed the time to study my diving course. I started reviewing the first chapters that I had taken already the previous year but I soon realised that I'd never be able to read all of the 350 pages again. So tired already after a while, I skipped to the new material to make sure I could finish at least those chapters. PADI has quite strict rules to be followed by their padi diving centers and last year in India they didn't even let me start any exercises before I had finished the book and the review questions of the chapters. I didn't want to risk not getting on the boat the next morning so I was dutifully reading my new chapters while fighting sleep.
The ecologic hype isn't very strong yet in Egypt, at least not stronger than the economics of tourism. As a result we landed first in Sharm El Sheik,Egypt, only to then fly 30 min more , 100 km across the Red Sea to land in our destination Hurghada. I suppose we all don't want to know how much kerosine this convenience has costed. At least now the passengers could clap their hands twice for a successfull landing. What is that with charter flights anyway? Should we start clapping in the bakery as well for receiving a well baked fresh bread? The pilots of scheduled flights must be so jealous that they never receive applause when they land :p.
Anyway, after a long afternoon flying and a smooth and very transfer in our hotel, we finally could crash in our hotel room and our vacation could start (since I did fill in my Padi review questions first :p).
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