The Arab airlines are notorious for having really attractive flight attendants. Waiting for our flight from Prague today, watching the darn snow that I am utterly thankful to be leaving, I noticed this gorgeous woman. (That is saying a lot as Czech people were drop dead gorgeous in general, and I am mad at whichever one of my grandparents left that particular gene pool.) Turns out the gods of seat assignments put me and her next to teach other. We started talking and turns out she was an off duty Emirates flight attendant, from Slovakia. I had a great flight.
I occasionally glanced up at the in-flight map. It shortly occurred to me that our route would put us over Iraq. First came Mosul, then Kirkuk, Baghdad etc as we pushed south towards Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and on to Dubai. I felt very odd knowing many lives were changed and lost on the sands 35,000 feet below. While waiting in the airport in Prague I was reading One Bullet Away By Capt. Fick, a Marine who was one of the first people to head opposite my direction in 2003. Knowing what happened below us to two generations of Americans and countless years of struggle for the Iraqis made it all a little uneasy and I was happy to get out of Iraqi airspace. I thought of if and when I will ever land in Baghdad in a professional capacity. The recent political strife in Egypt and other countries guarantees positions for Arabic speakers.
The newspapers here are still covered with Egypt news. We skyped one of our friends in Alex last night and he mentioned things had calmed down. We watched tv reports from Cairo at the same time and saw something very different.
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