#57 May 14, 2024

By complete chance, I encountered a huge flood in Dubai. I was on my way back from a business trip to Milan because I had some things that I needed to do in Tokyo, and Emirates Airlines enabled me to fit in this tight schedule by going through Dubai.

However, the Milan – Dubai flight did not arrive in Dubai on schedule due to a major storm, and I got stuck in Dubai for two days because of the massive flood that it caused. I first left the airport in a car heading to the hotel, and saw that this was a very serious situation since the roads had been transformed into rivers. We managed to get to the hotel, but even after going to my room, the driving rain did not stop, the sky was dark and greenish even though it was daytime, and the continuing sound of the thunder was very intense. It did not feel like I was in Dubai which appears in the desert like a mirage. The glass and aluminum façades of the skyscrapers made them look spooky in the darkness, and the white LED lights were sparse, making the city look like a ghost town.

After spending a night in my room with the incessant rain and thunder, I went down to the lobby at five in the morning. I decided to believe the message on my smartphone that the 7:40am flight to Haneda would take off as scheduled. I looked for a taxi, but the space for taxis was under water, and there was not a single car. When I asked the front desk, all they shout was “no taxis”, and it appeared that the staff had lost the ability to think. This city and the people living in it were unable to anticipate the possibility of a huge flood. Since it had rained an amount of rainfall equal to two years in a single day, the drainage system for the city could not cope with this amount of water, and the entire city had become a big lake. Noah’s Ark was not a myth. It was real.

Just when I was about to give up on getting to the airport and catching my flight to Tokyo, a black van appeared. This van had been reserved by a group of people from India who were in the lobby, and when I asked the driver who had an unusually good-natured face if he could take me to the airport, he smiled at me, and said was not sure if he could take us there at all but would do his hardest. I gave him a large tip, and said “Take me to the airport”. He grinned at me, and I got into the front passenger seat.
　
The van looked like it was Noah’s ark. It was the only vehicle on the road in a city that had the appearance of a lake. There were many high-end cars that had been stranded and abandoned. We wove through a graveyard of luxury cars, and somehow Noah’s ark managed to get to the airport. It felt like this driver was an incarnation of an angle.
However, the flight to Haneda on that day ended up being cancelled. The airport was inundated. They kept me waiting nine hours, and finally announced that the flight was cancelled. Naturally, since almost all flights were cancelled, the connecting desk was crowded with people, and there was a long line. I really don’t like to get in line, but since that was the only way to get home safely, I got in the end of that long line. Everyone was irritated, and many people were shouting. It turned out that I stood in line for 12 hours, and managed to get a ticket to Haneda leaving at 7:00 the next day.
　
It definitely was a miserable situation, but from the perspective of being provided with the real-world experience of Noah’s great flood, I felt like god gave me a truly precious experience.
　
It really felt like the global environment had come this far. The chance of being faced with a huge crisis and having to stand in line for 12 hours in the near future is probably nothing. God probably sent me to Dubai on this special day to teach me this.