Flying 1st Class in Economy Class

Being from Nepal and a student is self explanatory why I bought a cheap ticket to Kathmandu from NYC. Although Qatar Airways is not obvious as an economy flight, I bought them cheap through STA, a special discount travel site for students. And thanks to this cheap ticket, I would have had to wait a total of 18 hours at the Doha airport for a 5 hour flight from there to Kathmandu! At first I thought that I could get by the wait time by obtaining a visa and taking a lonely tour of Doha. But after constantly calling Qatar Airways, Qatar Embassy, the consuls, I found out that there are only two ways to get a visa into Qatar, one of which is if you belong to one of the 33 rich nations listed under their airport website and the other one is through Qatar Airways itself. As one might guess, Nepal was clearly not among their exclusive 33 nations and Qatar Airways denied to sponsor my visa since they said that my ticket was not issued through their airline. Later I found out that arranging a hotel by myself would cost me about $125 but then that would make my cheap ticket cheap no longer so I decided against it. My 12 hour flight from the JFK international airport to Doha Intl seemed shorter as I thought of the 18 hours layover at a small airport like Doha.

I deliberately took longer than usual at each shop at Doha and memorized almost all the products and their prices. I became a true window shopper! Then after, I found an Internet Point, which to my relief again, took longer than usual to connect. These actions killed time better. Despite being on my own, the sign family lounge attracted me and thankfully it was not mandatory to have a family in order to enter that section. I slept for a couple hours there and woke up with a strong urge to get home earlier than planned. I went looking for the transfer section counter, where the officer told me that I could not be put onto the next flight since there was not enough empty space and I had too many luggages. At that point, I almost promised myself that I would travel without any luggage from then on.

After the unfruitful meeting with the Qatar Airways transfer officer, I went back to explore the airport with a slight thought of wanting to rent business lounge, which was supposed to be very comfy and cozy. Then my eyes came across a signboard pointing towards something called quiet rooms. Though this reminded me of torturous quiet study hours during my middle school in Nepal, I was willing to explore that one out of boredom. So with hesitance and unsure of what I might find behind the double glass doors, I dared to open them. To my surprise, I found nice long comfy chairs filled with tired asleep passengers. Just when I was about to turn back, an empty chair from the corner of the room attracted me, where I slept for another couple hours.

Then I went back to the transfer counter, where I was told that there were empty seats on the 9 AM flight but the company wanted to wait until the last minute to see if they could be sold. So they gave me a later time to come back, which gave me some time to check out the restroom where I found a woman from Nepal that was the cleaning lady. I had known all along that male went to oil reach countries in search of physical labor intensive jobs but had never known that even women went out in search of similar jobs. Her name was Sumita Rimal and she shared her family story with me. She had lost her husband in the Maoists movement and was left with two daughters and an old father in law to look after. After the emotional story, I went back to the counter only to find that the earlier officer was replaced by another kinder looking one. I pleaded my case again and to my surprise, he gave me a boarding pass to the 9 AM flight, making my stay at Doha shorter by 6 hours. I was so happy that I thanked him with an unusually big grin on my face but he did not even bother to smile back.

I was excited to finish second halves of two movies on the flight to Kathmandu that I had seen on the movie list of my earlier flight. However, my excitement came to an end as soon as I became aware that there were no video screens there. But my disappointment did not last long as I saw two rows of three empty seats at the back of the flight. As soon as the flight took off and I was allowed to move, I took all my belongings to the last row. I made a comfy bed with the use of one blanket and three pillows from the three seats. Then I used the rest of the two blankets to cover myself and slept peacefully for the first time in the last 48 hours. Even though I had never flown first class, I could tell this was even better than first class. This made my journey quicker and I was happy to be home again.