Day 0 - Toronto and Planes

Day 0 - Toronto and Planes #Jordan2021

Back to a travel blogger thing, I did do a mini-trip to Houston around a month ago but it wasn't worth blogging

Travelling with all the covid screenings and masks and tests is a bit less fun but I'm still excited for the trip even if in many ways there's external stressors involved but from within and without

For starters the last 2 weeks were incredibly stressful due to being behind on a deliverable at work and having to leave before we finished it as I could have done much better at team management to not leave a mess behind but that's what compartmentalizing during the trip is for

I'll get to the other factors later but for now i want to complain about how slow the line to check COVID-19 entry requirements is, we've been here like 25 mins already

I swear there's people at the counter filling out required forms that are required because they've been there forever while other counters keep rotating people out

Finally done, at least the bottleneck for covid checking meant that security was really fast

We ate extremely over priced burgers, decompressed a bit and boarding is about to start, now some may be wondering why Jordan, well...

The original reason was to go meet my ex-gf's family etc since she's from there but things got really crazy and hectic and anxiety inducing and well, since we're about to take off I can now say that it's also a trip to celebrate our engagement woo!

Sorry if I haven't told you, didn't really tell pretty much anyone cause I'm not a good sharer for these kinds of things (plus it only happened officially a couple of days ago) anywho, see you all in like 12 hours!

Landed in Doha and have a 3 hour layover before heading off to Amman. I appreciated the "do not go through Syria" swerve our plane did. Mostly uneventful flight (though she did steal my house cancelling headset!) with unremarkable food

Went to the complimentary lounge I get with my @Chase credit card (please give me free things for influencerizing to my VAST network of followers) and chilling here a bit before we walk through the shopping mall, er, airport

Just got a notification boarding is open for groups 1 and 2 but it's 2 hours before the flight, do the elite get to chill in the airplane castles they have for that long

Burritos are wild here

Now about to board the Amman flight, got to meet her cousin + husband + 3 kids as they're on the same final leg and they were super chill, the true test will be once I'm there and meet the non-expat family

WiFi is terrible though and no roaming yet so probably will resume the live blog after i arrive there, planning on getting a SIM card there. One scary thing is her cousin's husband mentioned sometimes they don't let you pick up your checked bag and send it to you the next day...

Got 1 hour of free wifi which is pretty cool, plane was delayed an hour due to some problem with the bathrooms but it seems to be on track to only be 20 mins late, love plan scheduling. I also saw this plane has dashcams which is neat, a bit blurry at night but a cool concept!

Oh another really nice thing about this flight is Qatar Air is not filling the middle seat in their flights meaning there's tons of space, one silver lining of having to wear this mask for like.... Close to 24 hours, kn-95 ones are pretty comfy though

Their food game is much cleaner looking than the Air Canada flight we took first, chicken hummus

Now made it to Amman, pretty smooth customs, just waiting on checked bags now then getting a ride to the Airbnb, woo

Finally got the bags! Now customs (before was immigration) then SIM then a drive back with her dad

Finally at the Airbnb, looks pretty nice and modern (which is a pretty rare state for places here I'm told). Didn't end up getting the SIM card today since they were closed so I'm getting it tomorrow when we pick up my dad

Oh yeah, did I mention my parents are coming to this engagement party that's being thrown for us, the couple, neither of whom really wants an engagement party? My mom is here already and once dad gets with his wife here I'll switch to the other bed in mom's room

Plan is to take a chill day tomorrow, eat some tasty food, get SIM+dad etc, then next day go to some brunch place while fiancee (feels weird to type that) does some errands including renewing her Jordanian passport and ID card and have a nice dinner with her family in the evening

After that will be some of the actual fun periods that we planned out but what we're doing will remain a mystery for tomorrow's posts, my guess is I'll be a bit more sporadic until I get my SIM and become unleashed again while on the go

Right now i should be trying to sleep but my internal clock is messed up so 2am feels much earlier even though I tried not to sleep too much on the plane to make it easier to crash, but gotta be out be 10:30 tomorrow so tick tock...