Dubai, my love, Dubai...

Dubai Airport. Looks nice, doesn't it? You could cheerfully spend a couple of hours wandering around, sniffing out stuff, don't you think?

This is where Furry just spent nearly 30 hours.

The gig with Emirates is, that if you have a long layover in Dubai, you get a hotel room.

Which Furry did. Where he had a shower and slept and Skyped me and shook off some jet lag. There was a small issue with his meds, the customs officials weren't keen on letting him out of the airport with 20kgs of cardiac/diabetes medications, so they held them over while he had his layover snooze.

Pretty simple, eh?

Well.. no.

Like EVERYTHING in my husband's life, NOTHING is simple.

He got the the airport 3 hours ahead of his scheduled departure. Was given a bum steer on directions to get his bag of meds,  spent nearly an hour finding and them finally retrieving said meds.

All good so far.

So, on his way from customs to the departure gate for his flight to Riyadh, he asked an airport security guard for directions. And said guard most politely gave those directions, swipe his access card, and let Furry out of the terminal, with the instructions: "Walk up here, around the corner, and through the door on the right"

Again, all good so far....

Until..

He attempted to re-enter the terminal at said "door on the right", to discover, he'd left the security of customs and immigration, and was now OUTSIDE with 20kgs of meds in a bag.

Not cool.

Customs officers took him to a "special" room where, thankfully, all the paperwork in triplicate was in order.

But.... there was still a language barrier that was not that easy to cross.

After repeatedly describing the contents of the case as "medicine" and pointing to his heart and saying "tablets".. tapping his wrist and saying "blood tablets" he uttered the OTHER word to describe the contents of said case:

"drugs"

And that, dear reader, is when things went South.

From here, he was taken to an even more "special" room, where he was strip-searched and drug swabbed.

And all he could think of was that he'd borrowed the suitcase from our darling friend Peakie, who had recently been to Bali.

Apparently his happy-place mantra while he was being "probed" was:

"Please don't have let her walk past some random person smoking a joint, whose smoke got on her t-shirt that was stored in the case"

So, needless to say, he missed his connecting flight to Riyadh, and after (most apologetically) being given drug-free clearance, was told NOT to leave the airport for any reason whatsoever.

Oh, and by the way, the next flight to Riyadh isn't for another 26 hours.

So, I can tell you, Dubai airport is a WONDERFUL place, unless you are a sleep deprived, recently-probed, unfairly accused drug mule who has to spend 24(ish) hours sitting in a plastic hair and eating airport food.

And, in closing, for all you international travelers who may suffer from diabetes,

Januvia, apparently, looks like Ecstasy.