This is getting weird. This ash cloud/flight ban thing.

Here in Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, nearly all flights go in one of two directions.

East to India, China, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia.

Or north and west to Europe. The direction most westerners in this country would prefer to go. But have not been able to for four full days now.

Which makes me wonder if air travel is more important than I had realized.

Well, in one word … hellyes.

One-third of the flights out of Abu Dhabi from the emirate’s carrier, Etihad, are bound for Europe. And none of them are flying. And neither are those coming back here from Euro-land.

We are beginning to feel a bit isolated here. We leave via those routes. Some of our stuff comes in on them. (If my McVities dark-chocolate digestible cookies from England stop turning up in the stores, someone has some answering to do.)

People from the paper who have gone on vacation … have not come back. Others who were scheduled to go to Europe are just hanging around.

A co-worker was going to see Manchester United and Manchester City play over the weekend. Uh, no. No flights.

Another co-worker is scheduled to return to work Tuesday after flying back from London tomorrow … but that isn’t going to happen either.

A former co-worker was returning to Canada on Saturday. I have no idea how she got there because a straight line from here to Toronto takes you right through the ash cloud over Scandinavia … London is closed … and I’m not sure they have invented the jumbo yet that can fly directly from here to Toronto — while detouring far enough south to miss the ash.

This is all coming from that volcano in Iceland that erupted. It blew up, blasting a zillion particles of hot grit into the air, all the way up to 50,000 feet … and then followed the prevailing winds south and east — covering England, Ireland, France, Germany, etc.

If this happened in the U.S., we would be in huge trouble, because we don’t have trains that cross the country (no; we don’t really; don’t even talk about Amtrak).

But things are getting hinky here, too. The UK estimates 150,000 of its citizens are stranded outside the country.

I would be seriously annoyed if I were sitting in an airport for a day or three, waiting for someone to decide it might just be feasible to get a plane through the cloud once it has gone, oh, 1,000 miles-plus from where it started.

As the story in the link indicates, people in the airlines industry — which is in a state of collapse across Europe — seem to think flying is do-able. But officials are holding them back.

Another story on bbc.com explains a plan by the UK (and this is real, not a joke), to get Britons to fly to Spanish airports not yet closed, and have the Royal Navy pick them up in Spain and sail them home.

Are you talking about this, back home? Or is it off-our-grid, out-of-mind?

Imagine the States without air travel. How quickly would we freak out?

A lot faster than the Euros are, I’d think.