Hamad International Airport.
As we began to disembark the plane, I was not prepared for what I would find. Not in the sense of anything wrong or inappropriate, just the orderliness of it all. I wasn’t in Kansas anymore! Every step of the way in Hamad, we were escorted by an airport employee. At times, it was almost as if I was in elementary school again. Expected to stay seated unless called upon with a raised hand.
Several times, as I stood to stretch in our third holding area, my handler would approach me quickly and say in a thick Middle Eastern accent, “Please, sir, have a seat. We will take you to the gate when it’s time to board”. One time, all I did was touch my baggage to move it out of someone’s way, and he came running up expressing in a tone of my God this guy, “Sir, it is not your turn.” I thought about explaining my movements to show him how much of a moron he was, but then I realized where I was and thought better of it. I was, after all, in one of the quietest, cleanest, most elegant airports in the world. Getting jumped by security in an environment where every passerby could hear the slightest knock against my noggin’ and not wanting to see the bill for cleaning my bodily fluids off the beautiful marble floor seemed like a bad idea. So I swallowed my pride until he passed us off to the next handler in the long line of handlers.
You see, at Hamad, you get off your plane and are escorted to an area where others are going to a similar area of the airport. You get mixed and matched with people going to the same continent, then region, and finally find yourself sitting with people on your actual flight. No lit-up boards telling you gate numbers or cancellations and delays. Seeing that we were never without escort, there was very little noise, not even announcements on the P.A.. We moved throughout the airport by oversized golf carts as if standing or walking was forbidden.
The most sound heard is the hourly prayer that comes over the intercom. Apart from the one attendant I think is just a worry wart, It is a stress-free, quiet, relaxing, clean, beautiful, calming, and comfortable place to be! Wait, I did say I was at an airport, right?
We reached what I thought was the final gate, but something was amiss. We were on the ground floor of the airport. And there wasn’t a tarmac or loading tunnel to be seen. Then it hit me: we would be loading the plane the old-fashioned way.
I looked at my watch and thought I heard a muffled voice say Qatar flight something or another boarding for Da Nang. I dismissed it, slumped back into my leather gate chair, and continued to write while I waited for someone to retrieve me. Given this airport’s attention to your whereabouts and details, I was confident I would be shown to my plane soon enough.
At about 7:30 p.m. local time, our handler came and retrieved Ngoại in her wheelchair, and we headed for a set of glass sliding doors. I wasn’t too surprised to see a shuttle bus waiting outside. I was, however, astonished at the significant drop in temperature. I shouldn’t have been. Everyone knows the desert gets cold at night. Unless you experience it for yourself, the dessert always has the thought of heat. For lack of a better word, we were transported to a concrete field with rows of mobile staircases in neat columns. There was, in roughly the center of the giant pad, a sole airplane. A Qatar Airways B787 Dreamliner. A single mobile staircase was driven against her open doorway.
All the passengers boarded up the stairs except for us. We were taken to the opposite side, where a lift truck lifted us to the door on the opposite side from standard boarding. We were given exemplary service in getting to our seats. This flight was very light, and I took advantage. I ended up with an entire row to myself, and as soon as the plane took off and the seatbelt light came off, I was stretching out and getting some needed sleep. I’ve only had about 6 hours since Atlanta, and we arrive at 7 a.m. in Da Nang in 6 hours. I’m sure I won’t be sleeping then. 
We taxied to the runway, the engines roared to life, and at the end of a classic clambering trot down the runway, we lifted off into the dark Persian sky, and Doha’s brilliant city lights became swallowed up by the endless pitch of the desert darkness set against the Persian Gulf.
