First encounter with new cultures

I was flying Emirates. Since 22:00 yesterday night, stopover in Dubai, biggest airbus in the world, the flagship A380. It has a staircase inside. It has showers upstairs. It has freaking internet flying above the world in thin air.

And now after 12 hours of flying in this big box of magic I really needed to stretch my legs. Of course, it turns out they wouldn't let me go upstairs, keep the levels separated, so i took a stroll on the third class deck, wandered into the Irish drinking hall and danced till dawn and had sex with Leonardo di Caprio in a car... but alas, no. 

I found a little window next to the male toilet I was fancying it to look out of for a view. Oh, the toilets are separate according to gender (well, two of them at least) which the Europeans kindly ignore, and being European, I would say rightly so. I have never seen the female toilet being vacant more often than the male, here it was the case, but I'm detouring. 

I walked up to the window, almost past a gentleman who was intensely focusing on a receipt on the floor that somehow has ended up there on the carpet, and he was somewhat serious about it because he held out an arm to keep me from crossing in front of him. I didn't quite get it, I wasn't planning to step on his receipt, I just wanted to look out the little window, so I looked at him, but he was still more interested in the receipt on the floor. Quite fixated on it in fact. He was aware of me, he was even murmuring something, but I couldn't quite make out what. I looked at the receipts for some clarification, but I remained puzzled. My brain wasn't working properly because of the jet lag, and only when his full body moved forward did I realize that he wasn't bending down for a closer look. 

I apologized as best as I could and made a mental note that prayer is also an activity many people do and that has many forms. 

Then I realized that he was facing west. We are now on the other side of Mecca, north from it. Hmmm, how does that work? Maybe I should go back to my seat and get some sleep...