8,000 channels and nuthin' on

Forgive me the paraphrase, Mr. Springsteen.

So I'm finally getting a chance to update the blog just about a week into our trip. I thought I might write a post on the plane, but we didn't have WiFi on any of the three flights we've taken so far. (With another couple weeks now before we take another.) So instead, I'm writing this on a train with free WiFi, between Manchester and London.

But because the only movies I've watched while we've been gone have come on those flights --  yes, we've been busy, and also very tired -- I'm writing about something from the very beginning of the trip.

The thing I always heard about Emirates Airlines was that they somehow had 8,000 entertainment channels. It sounded like a number a child would make up, like "eleventy million," so divorced from reality did it sound. But, I think it may have actually been reality.

The list of possible movies was so deep that I never even made my way anywhere near the end of it. Even the "new releases" section almost defeated me, and it seemed to go back in chronological all the way to movies released in 2023. 

For me, this was mind-blowing, although certainly more than I needed. My wife said that she could still not find anything worth watching, but I think it was more that she was actually defeated by it, not that there were no options. (Though I'm glad to see that she took my recommendation of The Ballad of Wallis Island on our second flight, from Dubai to London, and loved it.)

Me? I watched Inheritance, Love Hurts, In the Lost Lands and The Friend on the first flight, and William Tell and Oh, Canada on the second, with lots of regrets and honorable mentions. 

How do I know it was actually 8,000?

Well I guess I don't. But the movies I watched all had a four-digit channel associated with them, in the 6,000 range. There may have been unused numbers, but the capacity for, well, I guess at least 7,000 seems to exist. 

Anyway, on the flight back in early October there should be plenty of fresh new options, which I am looking forward to. As well as the 7,800 others I didn't already scroll through. 

While I have you, I wanted to whinge (the Australian word for "complain/whine") a bit about the difficulty of blogging from my tablet.

I've just annoyed the rest of my family to no end with a lot of heavy sighs and the like. For some reason I can't seem to figure out how to download an image from the web to my tablet where I can actually access it through the Blogger uploading mechanism. So yes indeed, I've just taken a picture of the Emirates logo and uploaded that to this post. Apologies for the poor quality.

I'll get my routines down as we progress further onward -- or I assume I will, anyway.