Day 12 - The Return of the Return

Day 12 - The Return of the Return #Jordan2021

As we left off last day (unless you're reading real-time in which case I haven't backfilled...) we arrived at the airport after the brief moment of panic. The line for check in went very slowly but sped up at some point.

It went pretty well though we had forgotten to fill out ArriveCAN so she started doing that during their verification of other things like our vaccine status and negative tests, but the man said we could just fill out before we get on the flight to Doha.

We now also see our flight is delayed a bit more, leaving at 3:53 instead of 3:15am, so we go to wait at the lounge with her brother and his gf. Mostly quiet as we were tired but they had a bit of a tiff over some rent payment that was gonna be late that was a bit awk to watch...

Our flight was a bit confusing as the app said 3:50 but the board said 3:15 and boarding but no gate, my guess is the status automatically changes based on the time. We checked and the incoming flight hadn't even arrived, it ended up arriving at 3ish almost 5 hours later than ETA

For chronological reasons I'm real time typing from the flight to Toronto from Montreal that's about to take off. There's loud babies close to me but my noise cancelling headset + pixel buds mostly drones out everything but the shrillest yells. But posts will come after landing

Ok continuing on the day's events. With the almost 2 hour delay on the Amman flight our comfy 3 hour layover was indubitably going to be much less so. We basically said our goodbyes to the brother and gf there as we were primed to bolt on landing depending on how bad it was.

The flight itself was fine and involved some trying to sleep, some trying to read but nothing particularly remarkable. On landing though we did basically rush out as theoretically boarding started soon. We went through security again (though it was only a light check) and ran

Unnecessarily as it turned out as we had plenty of time once we got there because boarding started extremely late relative to when it was supposed to. The other problem(s) with boarding were a lack of real communication with the people waiting in terms of zones...

We were told zone 4 couldn't board yet but we saw people ignore that completely and free for all, also it seemed oddly full. The warning signs were there as even though during booking wee could not select middle seats (due to covid) there were so many people...

Eventually we start get tgh the boarding pass checks and on the way to the plane get intercepted and told they have to check our carry-ons, not too unusual when done organizedly but this was a bit annoying because while they grabbed us other people went through fine with theirs

That was not a feels good moment as I get rankled when people playing dumb get away with things like this when there just weren't enough agents to enforce people with carry-ons from proceeding. Anywho once in our fears were confirmed, bye bye socially distanced seats

That was actually really annoying because we literally were not given the option to choose seats next to each other when we bought the extra leg room seats but they opened up the seats after. We later theorized they fused in a second flight.

But @qrsupport, it was really shitty to have to then ask a stranger to sit together even after we did everything by the book because we weren't given the options. Not to mention that the guy in our row just didn't care about wearing a mask and was never asked to put it on

The other carry-on related thing that pissed me off was the amount of carry ons people near us hadn't loaded due to no space that they refused to check because they didn't want to and were allowed to keep them+space was found for them, just hate people like that getting rewarded

Really lost most of my good will @qatarairways that as they were just so disorganized during boarding they allowed this to happen, plus when we bought the tickets it was advertised as as socially distanced and then...it wasn't leading to all this

Really hated being next to the guy that just coughed sometimes with no mask on 80% of the flight

Rant over, flight was whatever, the food was fine, a bit too salty for the mains maybe. Similar to the first a mix of trying to sleep but also not sleep too much and no good movies to distract myself. I bought internet as it was only $10 for the whole flight

It was a bit hit or miss in terms of stability and speed but the real kicker was discord and reddit were both blocked which really sucked as that was most of what I'd planned to use it for.

I did manage to finish "Children of Ruin" by Adrian Tchaikovsky, sequel to "Children of Time" which I enjoyed the journey of a lot, my kind of sci-fi! the endings slightly missed the mark for me but not by enough to sour the experiences

Back to the flight, there was a moment where a woman's closish to us started choking and it seemed like she was in quite a bad shape but got help. It looked quite scary for a while as she looked very off.

Landing was normal and immigration in Canada went fast save a hiccup where it looks like in our rushed attempt to fill in ArriveCAN something caused her second shot date to be entered as today's date which would have made her ineligible for no quarantine, but the agent fixed it

All the notices and speaker announcements make it clear we have to pick up our bags in Montreal before heading to the Toronto flight (though in Amman we were told twice that they went straight through, neither of us believed that though)

Miraculously my large checked baggage was there by the time we got to the carousel, to make a long story short we waited like 30? 40 mins for the others including the carry-ons we'd checked

Real-time update, more than 24 hours after starting we're back in Toronto!