I can‘t quite believe its been just over three weeks since I moved to Dubai. Dubai has well and truly stolen my heart and I’m going to find it very difficult to live anywhere else ever again. This place is unreal and I constantly find myself entranced with the views I get to see day in day out. One thing that really wowed me was that a few days ago, I was at Aviation College, when I looked out of the window from my desk, and I could see the Burj Khalifa. I for one have never experienced studying with such an incredible skyline to look at, its just incredible.

It’s been an incredibly hectic five or so days since my last post. I completely understand the phrase “there aren’t enough hours in the day” now, as before I know it, its time for me to head to bed again. The past week at college has been such a fun one, for starters we had our evacuation onto land practical and our ditching (evacuation onto water) practical! So we first began by getting put into white overalls for the evacuation onto land. Of course this gave us the perfect opportunity to get more batch pictures and here we all are below…

I love my batch, they say your batch is your family and I completely get it. They’re so fun and they make my day every time I walk into college. We’re a crazy little bunch! So after our short but sweet photoshoot, we went over to the A380 simulator and proceeded with the standard evacuation process. One by one, we then went down the slides adopting the correct position so that if we ever did need to evacuate from an aircraft we could do this safely.

When we had all experienced this, we then went and got changed out of the overalls and into our “swimming attire” and went back into the A380 simulator. Before we went down we put on the life jackets and I can’t get over how quickly the life jackets inflate, it actually made me jump! This time we evacuated from the upper deck and into the swimming pool and congregated at the end of the raft so we could disconnect from the aircraft.

We then went through the post evacuation commands and began by sorting our canopy out for the raft. Its amazing the amount of people you can fit onto a raft, and all the features incorporated to ensure safety and well being in the catastrophic situation.

Following on from this, in groups of five we were then to jump out of the raft and adopt the huddle position – it keeps you warm and keeps you together if you’re out at sea. After this, we got out of the pool and we had passed our ditching practical assessment – yay!

That evening I went home and it was a long night of studying in preparation for my big A380 exam the next day! I had to make sure I knew everything that I had learnt over the past two weeks, so as you can imagine there was a lot of nerves. Anyway, I passed the exam which me and Grace were so happy and relieved about, and after that it was straight onto the Boeing 777 side of SEP!!

After the end of long but exciting week it was finally the weekend and I spent Thursday night running over my notes and finally catching up on my TV shows – Scream Queens is my absolute favourite at the moment, has anyone else become hooked on it? On Friday, a group of us had decided it was time to relax a little after passing our exams and decided on the traditional weekend activity of Friday Brunch. First of all I’ll explain what Friday Brunch is to those who don’t know, as I only found out about it a couple of weeks before moving to Dubai. So, every Friday at different venues across Dubai you can go for brunch – the place you’re brunching at depends on the price as they can vary from 200AED to 500AED. You basically pay a set fee and it is unlimited food and drinks. We decided on Candy Pants brunch at the Habtoor Grand Hotel. I hadn’t realised this beforehand, but this is the hotel which my parents stayed at when they came here for their silver wedding anniversary, and wow what a hotel!! Still can’t believe they didn’t take me and my sister along with them for the trip, especially after seeing where they stayed!

Brunch was so much fun and it was so nice to spend some time with fellow crew and eat some fabulous food. The beef stir fry was so good, I could have literally eaten the whole thing to myself haha. Toward the end of brunch, huge signs came out and different props which you could have your picture taken with. A “Chicken or Beef” sign came out for us cabin crew members which we absolutely loved – it made us laugh so much.

It has been such a well needed relaxing weekend, and I’m ready for the final few days of SEP and learning all about the B777. I also received my passport back this week which contains my UAE visa – I am now officially a resident here, so exciting!!

A video surfaced on my Facebook this week which is a brief overview of the training we do at the Aviation College which is what my daily life is now, so I’ve inserted this here below for anyone who is interested.

For more daily updates or to ask any questions feel free to follow me on Twitter or Instagram or leave a comment in the section below:

http://www.twitter.com/Jessicaaahhh
http://www.instagram.com/Jessicaaahhh