The night on the plane was long. Not uncomfortable but long. I mean, the flight time between Bangkok and Muscat where we had to switch planes was just 5 1/2 hours. Given that we both watched a movie, were fed snacks, our real vegetarian dinner, water and coffee, it did not make for a lot of uninterrupted sleep. At all.

Muscat was just more waiting at the gate for us. Transfer passengers don’t even get to see much of the airport itself. So we waited, hoped on the next plane and I fell asleep immediately. The woman sitting behind us woke us up when she asked Flo if we know why we are delayed. Until then, blissfully asleep, we hadn’t realized that we were off to a late start. The pilot explained at some point that we were still waiting on some passengers (probably a connecting flight) but I couldn’t care less as I got to sleep in a comfy airplane.

The flight from Muscat to Dubai is incredibly short with a flight time of 37 minutes. During that time, we received water and snacks. A lot of snacks. So many in fact that we saved the sandwiches for lunch time because we had already feasted on bread sticks and hummus, a chocolate brownie and chocolate chip cookies.

Arriving at Dubai at the local time of 3am, we stood in line for “foreign passports” for a bit before a staff person got us out and told us to stand a much shorter line. Germans get 30 days visa exempt so we got stamped in and that was that. Picking up our one checked in luggage bag and we arrived in the UAE.

Cute car, was even reasonably affordable for us

It was still 4.30am though. And I was really really tired. There was nowhere we had to be yet so we slept for another hour or so in the arrival hall at the airport. At 6am, we decided to have breakfast in an airport cafe. My inner clock told me that it is time for breakfast as in Bangkok it would have been 9am. Checking with the help desk, we found out that the general consulate of Iran opens at 8am and thus, we had more time to spend. At 7.30am Flo rented a car so that we could get around in the city (mathematically that will be cheaper than taxis) and off we went.

Snood as an improvised headscarf to get into the embassy.

The consulate of Iran was straight forward with the process of obtaining a visa. Since we already had a confirmation code, we just had to fill out the visa forms, leave passport pictures with the forms, pay and leave our fingerprints. Everyone was nice and seemed generally excited that we would visit Iran for the first time. I only had a tiny problem…I haven’t bought a headscarf yet so we had to improvise one. In the end, I used Flo’s black cotton motorbike snood as a make-shift hijab which worked surprisingly well but was way too hot.

Everything is … big.

Once we had the application out of the way, we went to Dubai Mall at the foot of Burj Dubai. It’s a mall. Gigantic. Full of things and people and…we didn’t have the money for any of it. Taking pictures was still fun and we saw a lot but mall fatigue set in rather quickly. After three hours, ready for another nap, we left. This time towards our hotel, we hoped to be able to check in around lunch time. Our hotel was on the cheap side (for Dubai) and turned out to be in a quarter where many of the migrant workers live.

I had to take a nap first, then we explored the surroundings. So many flavours of the world. Tiny stalls selling flat breads which just came out of the oven. Falafel and hummus for dinner. So yummy!

Surprised by the fact that the ratio of men to women that we saw walking on the streets changed so drastically, I’d guess that the crowds we saw consisted of 80% men and only 20% women.