Close your eyes and imagine a world in which requests are filled before you think of them. A car at the curb with this morning’s paper in the pocket of the passenger seat. Your name, rehearsed, and uttered with a smile at check-in. Arab Emirates functions like that – they aim to bring the concierge mindset to almost everything they do, and they kindly invited someone from the She Does The City team to play at a level of wealth for an afternoon, disguised as an aircraft tour.
My most potent fantasies revolve around an apparatus separate from myself that I can outsource all of my worrying to. Flying has always hit at the root of my rumination (will the plane crash? will my fellow passengers notice me counting to sixty three times under my breath? can they see the marks from my nails as I dig into the soft flesh above my elbow?)
The tour is made up of a strange crew: an assortment of reporters and travel writers, those of us who replied yes to the invitation. We trade stories back and forth: which airports always drop connections, which have the best corners to doze off in and charge your phone, which will let you stand in a room with your fellow travellers and smoke indoors (the ultimate novelty in 2016).
We go through the same security procedure that pilots, flight attendants, and perfume salespeople do and get spit out between Burberry and Bvlgari. There are no patterned neck pillows, only a ten-foot tall poster of Chloe Grace Moretz smiling impishly with a handbag nestled in her lap. The international departure terminal of Pearson terminal bears little resemblance to what we usually encounter in spaces of anonymous transit. The grey sameness has been replaced by the feeling of assurance that comes with price available on request. You can even shit comfortably here and wash dirt from your body, as the Emirates lounge contains a full, private bathroom larger than most studio apartments. We take selfies in it, posing as if it were our own.
I don’t know why I was surprised to see this replicated on the plane, but it shocked me to see the Bvlgari products lined up next to the full size hair dryer in one of the two first-class washrooms. There is a fasten seatbelt sign inside of the shower, because not even the ability to use one can protect you from chaotic pressure changes in the air around your plane.
The plane is divided into three sections, with the first set of stairs I’ve ever climbed inside of a jet. Economy is on the bottom level, and it pains me to share that it’s exactly like every other jet line’s seats for normals. The seatback entertainment system is a little more bloated, the mid-Atlantic meals a bit more carefully spiced – but the seats are the same butt prisons enforced by the type of rigorous efficiency that fuel prices enforce.
The upper deck is the shining jewel of the company and has been meticulously designed to make each passenger feel like an individual. Encountering other human beings is inevitable when you stuff a couple hundred of them into an aluminum tube for up to eighteen hours, but Emirates tries its hardest to turn privacy into a product. The press literature is full of photos that make it seem as if each seat in first class functions as a sealed room, but the partitions between them don’t reach the ceiling – straddling of the Venn diagram of privacy and safety. Never fear though – the joy that comes from opening and closing the partitions with the press of a button makes up for it; and if that isn’t enough, there’s a cashmere eye mask tucked into the armrest.
Re-entering my life was difficult. Three short hours of luxury was enough to have me Googling “How to get rich with an arts degree” and “Is it true that people sometimes throw hundred dollar bills into public fountains” and “Single professional darts players.”
Seeing the way that discomfort and inconvenience are erased from the wealthy person’s life was sometimes at odds with the unpredictability of air travel – but the most educational part about the whole experience was seeing how many hours of human effort go into creating a seamless experience.
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