First impressions 7/4/10
First point of note, I look like a tourist. It's some manner of genetic imperative that states you must look like a moron on holiday. But that's a common musing and mostly irrelevant.
I only fully appreciate how distended Glasgow is when I see other cities, from above Amsterdam is a combination of well ordered, pristine streets lined with neat, perfectly spaced buildings and rolling fields of corn and grass. Aside from their tendency to horribly overcharge for food, it almost seems like an idyllic society, peaceful and possessed entirely by the over cheerful, smoked up populace who prove with every breath that life can be better. Of course, human nature dictates that every city has flaws, they just hide theirs better.
Six and a half hours on a cramped airbus takes me to the desert, the first thing I notice is that I'm mildly disappointed it's not a thing like Baghdad, no small stone houses and 20 year old Fiats driven by goats and men in the back asking directions. It's neat, ordered, beautiful. The architecture distinctly middle eastern but modern and rich, the area I'm in is definitely for the prosperous. A lot of it is still under construction, an ever expanding metropolis, pushing into the desert wastes like a new age wild west.
For all it's life, the air here is dead. Arid, dry and stale, I tasted the change as soon as we hit dirt. Even the breeze is warm, it tastes like I imagined it would, like the earth here resents someone taking up it's challenge to survive.
The shade provides little solace, even as I sit here, by the cold pool and sipping a warm Arab coke it's drying the ink in my pen.
Everyone else has gone off to sleep the afternoon away, leaving me here with the words no one but I can read for now. Here with my words and my thoughts.
For all it's life, for the smell of the dead in it's air and the oven of it's days. It's beautiful.
"And I will take you far away, with my mind, with my mind"
Anton
I only fully appreciate how distended Glasgow is when I see other cities, from above Amsterdam is a combination of well ordered, pristine streets lined with neat, perfectly spaced buildings and rolling fields of corn and grass. Aside from their tendency to horribly overcharge for food, it almost seems like an idyllic society, peaceful and possessed entirely by the over cheerful, smoked up populace who prove with every breath that life can be better. Of course, human nature dictates that every city has flaws, they just hide theirs better.
Six and a half hours on a cramped airbus takes me to the desert, the first thing I notice is that I'm mildly disappointed it's not a thing like Baghdad, no small stone houses and 20 year old Fiats driven by goats and men in the back asking directions. It's neat, ordered, beautiful. The architecture distinctly middle eastern but modern and rich, the area I'm in is definitely for the prosperous. A lot of it is still under construction, an ever expanding metropolis, pushing into the desert wastes like a new age wild west.
For all it's life, the air here is dead. Arid, dry and stale, I tasted the change as soon as we hit dirt. Even the breeze is warm, it tastes like I imagined it would, like the earth here resents someone taking up it's challenge to survive.
The shade provides little solace, even as I sit here, by the cold pool and sipping a warm Arab coke it's drying the ink in my pen.
Everyone else has gone off to sleep the afternoon away, leaving me here with the words no one but I can read for now. Here with my words and my thoughts.
For all it's life, for the smell of the dead in it's air and the oven of it's days. It's beautiful.
"And I will take you far away, with my mind, with my mind"
Anton