Laziest London Layover

In some jobs, employees brag to one another about promotions. In others, they brag about great sales and big commissions. So what do cabin crew brag about??

Sleep.

If you hang around the lobby of a hotel while crew are checking out, you may hear conversation along the likes of, "I slept 10 hours last night!".... "Yeah, well I slept 14!"

On some particular layovers, our crew hotel is far from any of the action of the city, leaving us with 2 options: We can either fight our fatigue and make the long journey on trains and buses, or we can stay in, be lazy, and sleep. On my latest London flight, I chose the latter.

Generally, staying in the hotel goes against my beliefs, as one of the huge reasons that my job is so awesome is because of the travel perks. I'll typically tough it out no matter how tired I am for the sake of exploration.

This time, however, it was just not going to happen. Fresh back from an amazing vacation I was physically and emotionally drained, jet lagged and homesick with the festive season upon us. Upon arrival at the hotel, the only place I wanted to be was dreaming. I changed out of my uniform and crawled up into the plushy soft bed and knew that there was no hope of getting out until some time the next day. It was around 8:30 pm when I called it a night, waking up again some time around 5 am. Despite having had a decent sleep, I looked at the clock and wondered what the heck I was supposed to do at 5 in the morning and decided to go back to sleep. I awoke to the phone ringing at 7 am... it was Ryan! Thanks to a lack of internet to feed my addiction, I go a bit crazy when I'm in London, so it was nice to be able to talk to him. We chatted for awhile before he had to go to sleep, and once again I did the same. I woke up briefly from time to time, but until 12 pm I was curled up in bed, redefining lazy.

I finally decided that I needed to drag my lazy butt out of bed, so I bundled up in my warm clothing and ventured outdoors.... all the way to Starbucks at the hotel next door. Did I need coffee after over 16 hours of sleep? No, probably not... but nothing spreads Christmas cheer like a Gingerbread Latte! I picked up a few snacks to feed my starving body, and returned to the isolation of my hotel room. Flipping through the TV channels, I wondered how some crew managed to do this nearly every layover. Sure, it was nice being extremely lazy, but if I did this more than a few times I'd start to go stir crazy. I watched a few episodes of a wedding show and vowed to never become a crazy Bridezilla like the woman who insisted on holding her reception on a boat despite her future husband's severe seasickness. As I prepared for the flight back to Dubai, I watched a countdown of the best Christmas music videos of all time. I was festive and cheerful, and boy would I need it for the flight back and it's bundle of medical cases. Fortunately the pregnant woman who was experiencing contraction like pains did NOT deliver her baby on board. I want to have children one day, and assisting in delivery probably would have changed my mind in a matter of minutes. We landed in Dubai... and guess what I did? You bet! Back to bed for me. It's not surprising that time passes so quickly in this job given the fact that I sleep through entire days!

In other news... I've got a new roommate! Her name is Kim, she's from Australia and she is pretty awesome. I think I've talked to her more in the past few days than I talked to my old roomie in 10 months of living together.