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We were going back to Singapore from our holiday. Departing from Rome, we would take a very interesting and long way back, flying with Emirates all the way. The first leg of our trip was on Emirates A380 from Rome FCO to Dubai International. This flight departed Rome at 1440hrs local time. The flight was full. It was interesting to note that Rome FCO's traffic was very light, perhaps this was the wrong time (winter) of the year for Rome. Most of the planes landing and taking off were narrow bodied aircraft. The Emirates A380 was the biggest plane at the gates, and there was only 1 A380. Economy class passengers were all lining up at the Boarding Gates even before they allowed boarding. Emirates allows passengers travelling with young children to board. But we had to make our way to the front of the line and politely ask the ground crew to board us. They did. The flight itself was smooth and departed on time. Since the air traffic at Rome was so light, there was no issue of congestion on the ground. My seat for this flight was 46H, in the front most section of the Economy Class cabin. The aircraft interiors looked and felt very new. Leg room was good. In the air, as this was a day flight, most passengers did not sleep. The inflight entertainment system was superb, as usual. Many movies to watch. I also like the cameras on the IFE system very much. This is a feature that is not available on SQ. My kids got no sleep during this flight. They either played games or watched movies for the entire time. The main meal served not too long after take-off was dinner. I guess that is because Dubai was 3 hours ahead of Rome and by the time we got into the air, Dubai local time was around dinner time. The food was good. The dessert, which was a wild berry crumble, was excellent! As the flight was quite short (6 hours), there was only one meal. However, before we landed, they handed our Vanilla ice cream as a sweet treat. After we landed, we were met at our gates by the Meet and Greet service from Dubai International Airport hotel. We had booked a couple of rooms in the hotel to get some sleep before the flight tomorrow. We landed past 11pm local time. Our flight to Singapore (via Colombo) on Emirates departed at 0745hrs the next day. You may be wondering, why is the connection timing so poor? Aren't there better connections on Emirates to Singapore? After all Emirates flies to Singapore many times a day. Indeed, there are better connections, however, the combination with the return flight via Colombo gave us the cheapest fares by far. To share the numbers, we saved about SGD $500 per passenger by choosing to fly back to Singapore with the Colombo stopover. For my family of 4, this worked out to be about $2,000. What to do for the 8 hour layover at Dubai Airport? If you were really hardcore, just spend the 8 hours at the airport itself. They do have some loungers at various parts of the terminal. If you can get one of those, you can actually sleep, in public of course. However, we decided against spending all the time in the airport public areas. So we decided to book a hotel room and squeeze the four of us on 2 rather narrow beds. At least you get to lie flat and get a good sleep for 5-6 hours. Just make sure you get the hotel to do a wake-up call and set your own alarms, in order to avoid missing the flight! For the next leg of the flight back to Singapore via Colombo, check out this video: http://youtu.be/1pqUFgKtMtQ