What could be the worst in-flight movie? I haven’t spent a great deal of time pondering this question, but initial thoughts spring to mind as being any of the 1970’s Airport movies or their derivatives. Even the funny ones.

I have to put a plea out to Air Astana, and tell them officially that the film ‘Amelia’ is NOT a good choice for in-flight entertainment.

We settled into our seats on the Air Astana flight to Astana in Kazakhstan, grabbed the magazine from the seat pocket and eagerly devoured the English half of the entertainment schedule. We would have close to 6 hours to kill on a flight scheduled to arrive in Astana at 0545 which would really be 2345 in our bodyclock time, and therefore it was very likely that sleep would evade us. What did we have to keep us amused? The 2009 film – largely regarded as a boxoffice flop – about Amelia Earhart in which she dies in a plane crash.

You see, any other crappy film would have been preferable, because whilst I did not know it was going to be as rubbish as the reviews had said, I DID know the ending – as would anyone who had ever heard of Amelia Earheart. Great choice!

The flight was mercifully empty; meaning that just about everyone apart from us had three seats to themselves. As soon as the fasten seatbelts sign went off, everyone else scrambled for the empty rows, while I cuddled up to my husband. This was a mistake. I should have bolted for an empty row and at least I could then have attempted to get comfortable. As it was, N had the ‘wall’ as he was in the window seat, and proceeded to curl his legs up on the middle chair and promptly fell asleep; while I sat in the aisle seat with nowhere to lean. I spent the flight fully awake and trying not to watch the flight disaster movie playing out just above my head.

In no time at all (and I swear I did not sleep), we were touching down onto Kazakh tarmac. Little butterflies whirled around in my tummy as we made our way towards immigration, where I tried not to think about my passport photo looking nothing like me, the fact that our immigration cards had nothing in the ‘invited by organisation’ section or the lack of any kind of ink stamp on the visas.

I stepped up to the booth, handed over my passport, and took a deep breath. What was the worst they could do? They would have to pay to deport me, so I was thinking it would be much easier on them to just let me in. And they did. A swift look at me, two stamps on the card to show I was registered with the police, one on the visa, and that was it – in you go. So in I went.

The next dilemma was the luggage. At Frankfurt, the Air Astana check in lady assured us that we were booked through to Almaty, but there’s just something about Central Asia that makes you a teeny bit suspicious that things may not go entirely to plan. We therefore hung about by the carousel just in case the luggage appeared. After a few minutes however, we shook ourselves by the shoulders realising that this was a little silly – we really had no reason to suspect that the luggage needed collecting and checking in again, so we turned our back on the circling bags, went through the point of no return and wondered out into the airport.

Astana airport is modern and busy; all the signs are in English, Russian and Kazakh so there was no need to be concerned with not being able to find our way to the right gate for the next flight. We were here! We were in Kazakhstan and Central Asia! I was an excited thing, soaking up just being here; somewhere different with different people, sights and smells. N promptly announced that he was tired and would stretch out on the chairs and catch a few ‘zeds’ to kill the couple of hours before we met our friends.

Not for me! How could I sleep? Even though my body-clock was now saying it was 2am? While N dozed, I wondered around the airport and her two gift shops. It didn’t take me long. When I poked N awake, telling him I needed coffee, we tracked down an ATM. At this point, we should really have got out The Book which would give us an indication of the exchange rate at the time of publishing. We had arrived with US dollars, but no local currency, as we would not need Kazakh Tenge until the second week, and you could only buy Kyrgyz Som in Kyrgyzstan, so our friends were going to sort this for us.

Having spotted the ATM, we tried various cards, and eventually it accepted the German Bank card (but not the UK debit cards strangely enough), and then came the dilemma of how many Tenge to ask for. We literally only wanted breakfast, so we went for the second lowest amount which was T1000. Sounds a lot doesn’t it? I think it’s because when we think of thousands in relation to our own currency it’s a lot, and the days of the Italian Lire are long ago forgotten.

We hunted out the café and ordered a couple of coffees. As we leaned on the counter, it suddenly struck me that maybe T1000 wouldn’t be enough, and what were we thinking picking a random amount?! We had no idea of the value of what we had withdrawn, other than it wouldn’t be THAT much, being the second lowest figure possible to get from the ATM. My concern mounted, and as I was trying to work out quite how we would explain in our non-existent Russian to the lady that we didn’t have enough money and would just be doing a dash back to the ATM, when she produced two coffees and wrote 1000 on the pad of paper next to the till. Relief! We had managed to withdraw precisely £4.00 from the ATM, and spookily this was the price of two cups of coffee.