From Dallas0609

Children's park in Allen, TX

From Dallas0609

A car on display at Grapevine Mills Mall, Tx

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The journey

Jub 4th.

We had to leave for the Trivandrum airport at 1 a.m. So couldn't catch up with much sleep. The Emirates flight to Dubai was comfortable. 

Reached Dubai at 7 a.m local time. 

Emirates had made so much noise about the new terminal being open and the ease of transfer for connecting flights, but I was disappointed as the TVM flight parked far away and we were ferried to Terminal 3 in buses. 

Terminal 3 was of course, state-of-the-art. The airport officials could have been little more traveller freindly, accoding to Vanaja.

We had only two hours to connect to our Houston flight. We did that in easy time navigating through the unfriendly security and the tempting duty free shops.

EK 211 to IAH was by a Boeing 777. The aircraft was only about 40% full. We had opted for the aisle and second seat in the middle row . As the other two seats were unoccupied, we had 4 seats for two of us. 

The 16 hours journey was comfortable. The service was adequate and freindly. The only complaint Vanaja and I had was about the meal timings. though breakfast was served in good time, there was a long gap (almost 10 hours) before lunch was served. The choice of vegetarian snacks between meals was limited to cookies and spicy biscuits. 

The advanced entertainment system had a wide choice of movies, musics and games, but the audio was so poor (at least in our row) that listening to music was ruled out. I tried watching some old Hollywood movies (Bridges of Madison County)  but had to give up because of the poor audio. I could watch movies with Close Captioning:  Pink Panther 2, (an enjoyable movie, but expected better role for Aishwarya Rai) , the International, Bed Time stories. Also saw part of Chandni Chowk to China