Lemmur of Arabia
please, just let me sit next to someone young on the plane, they don't need to be interesting, I'll settle for just someone my age. We can chat, learn, and maybe they know somewhere I could sleep for the next four days.
I can't remember the last time I've sat next to someone who was my age on a damn plane.
Sooo, I was smashed between a large surly Austrian, and a large surly Arab, who was really irritated with the news he was reading in the paper, gesturing angrily and smacking the page in contempt. I stared at the Arabic on the pages for a while, then tried to watch the movie. Something was wrong with his headphones, and I fixed it, and then he became the chattiest guy in the world, and we talked the entire rest of the flight. We talked politics, international relations, foreign opinions about our respective lands, and he knew EVERYTHING on these topics, I even got clarification on the little Canada-Denmark scuffle a couple years back that I'd been curious about, and though his opinions were slightly to the right of mine, it was absolutely fascinating discussion, and for sure, a warm welcome to Dubai.
We flew in over the coast at 2am, and the first thing I noticed was that the lights weren't flickering, there was none of that sense of "rolling Uzbeki brown-outs", the infrastructure was obviously rock-solid. I curled up on a chair in the airport next to the Pakistani and Indian laborers who were also curled up there by the hundreds, and half-slept til a decent human hour.
There is no way to walk in Dubai. You can't "stroll down to the city center", because there is no city center, and there is no strolling. It's highways, and you either take a taxi, or you drive your Lexus. My Lexus being in the shop at the moment, I took taxis. I took one to the Intercontinental, dropped off the film equipment, talked with Adam, our new Australian friend/concierge for a bit, he said, "you're going out there for 5 days? It's not really a "hostel" type city.... are you sure you'll be okay?" No! No, I'm not sure. I'm already exhausted and a wreck mentally, and it's only 9am, day one.
My plan was, get an umbrella, put it on the beach, lie on a towel, get a full night's sleep there during the day, then stroll around at night and explore. Then repeat. It lasted for about an hour. I took a woooonderful swim in the bathwater of the Persian gulf, then laid out as planned under the umbrella, but exhausted as I was, I was all nerved-up, and couldn't sleep, and just cracked. I had the address of the only hostel in the city, expensively far away from the beach, and I took another cab there, checked in with the psycho at the desk (oh you are American! You know, your president, he wants to kill Arab...), and got a sound sound sleep.
The other folks in my room were all about my age, a Slovene named Anže who was there to make connections to the grand hotels that might want to buy furniture from his family's high-end furniture business in bulk, a Dutch guy named Ali, on vacation there from studying Arabic in Yemen, a German guy named Wolfram who was there until he found permanent housing for his six month civil engineering internship, and a Yemeni guy named Abud, who was mysterious, rich, not there often, and only spoke Arabic.
I had a good ol time with the first three, going around the city, hitting the beach, and just talking about stuff, but Ali and Anže went out to hit the fuuuucking expensive clubs, and that's where our hangouts stopped, I just had to hear about it vicariously afterwards. And, me and the guy from Yemen got a hangout in as well. I motioned to him that I was going to go get dinner, and he gestured back "no no, I'll take you!" And we went. It was the weirdest Halloween ever, I rode around all night with the Yemeni guy in his SUV, chatting in sign language and having a good old time. He had a DVD player in the passenger seat sunvisor playing the Bollywood version of "The Fast and the Furious", which meant that the heroes were charmingly clumsy, the women were unrealistically beautiful, and everyone would break into unexpected song at times. The dialogue was 90% Hindi (I assume), and about 10% English, which was strange, that the characters would be talking and would say, "aslkje boiw aohgoahew ashoasd. Yes, I totally agree with your plan, but ashda gh ahsfgola sd?" Anyhow, Abud and I don't speak Hindi, or each other's languages, but we understood the movie, and each other, talked and laughed and drove around all night, eating good food, hanging in ridiculously expensive hotel complexes, taking boat rides, and seeming strange to anyone we talked to, since he was dressed in the full Arabic Dishdasha, and I looked American as hell, and we obviously didn't speak English/Arabic respectively. I learned how to say "God willing", "Hello", "photo", and "turtle" in Arabic from the evening.
After that I got really sick with the flu, and the rest of my first week was spent in bed, with a severe fever, wasting perfectly good beach days, and my tan suffered as a result. The time came to say goodbye to my hostel friends, and I headed over to the Intercontinental. Have you seen the movie Big Fish? Everything had this sense to it. One door being opened for you by an eight-foot tall Pakistani man named Abdul with a perfectly fitting little beard, the other door by a small, sun-shiny girl named Happy Doo. The bathtub filled by waterfall. Everything was luxury and yet nothing worked. They wore hats on their feet, and hamburgers ate people.
Shortly thereafter, Michael arrived, and we just sat up beaming about the idea of the city til all hours. How does a place with no natural resources and no tax revenue experience such constant and explosive growth for so many consecutive years? How can they build such grand things at a whim and have them be successful, when they simply wouldn't be supported financially anywhere else, even in other highly developed countries? It's a dreamworld of investment giants, and cheap labor by the thousands living in almost slavelike conditions.
We saw all the sites, rode the hot air balloon (not as terrifying as expected! I was picturing windy, swaying, blowing, none of that, it was just like a sky elevator, gentle up, gentle down), rode a camel (much less gentle), crashed over sand dunes in an SUV, got in a bunch of boat rides (!!!!!), and, in the end, at the last minute after it looked like it was going to fall through, we got a seaplane ride over the coastline, and, from above, I saw The Palms. I saw The World. I saw Dubai, not on the Discovery Channel, but for real. It closed some undefined chapter for me, one that opened with my struggle to start living in Písek, where I spent 8 intense, isolating months, that now seem like some strange dream. We filmed it all, Adam was a natural, he was good fun to work with, and even took us to a place or two that he shouldn'tve. You don't know sadness until the most beautiful girl in the world, who happens to be a prostitute from Ghana, whispers in your ear that she wants to be all yours tonight, even proposes marriage, and you have to tell her no.
For Dubai, we insisted on finding out about the nightlife, and made room for it in the budget. It is posh, pretentious, expensive as fuck and not terribly diverse on the music selection, and alcohol is fucking expensive, so in this sense, Prague wins, hands down. But, the pretentious club world, while not a nice place to live, is a nice place to visit. We went to Zinc one night, which was fun, uneventful, way too air-conditioned (like everywhere in Dubai), I danced, chatted with one Irish girl, got rejected by another, and around 2ish we went back to the hotel. Then, on our last night, we went to Trilogy (the one Ali always called "Thrillogy" for some reason). It was insanely expensive (nearly $50 to get in), but was beautiful, the terrace lounge on the roof particularly, looking out over the city. I had some dumb panic attack that I couldn't shake until it was almost closing time which was awful, I think the coffee I'd had earlier was too strong, by the time I shook it, it was all I could do just to stand in the crowd, barely dancing, and wishing I had the energy to talk to this beautiful little girl I kept seeing around. Afterwards, we sat outside for a while, and saw Asians speaking Russian. Kazakhs! We talked to them, told them we'd been to their country, they were excited about that, and they were friends with the beautiful little girl! She turned out to be a very friendly little Russian girl, and the hour outside the club was the highlight of the night. Then, homeward, to the hotel, to the airport, to Prague.
I've been home for just a week now, but it feels like it's been months. It's cold and snowy here, the 85 degree beach is long behind me. The beauty of the Old World here is familiar, but in my heart I'm still pining for the beauty of the New World. In a month exactly, I go home, my first time home since last Christmas. How different things are now than the were then, how much has occured since then. I'm looking forward to it terribly, it will be a beautiful close to a beautiful, difficult year.
oh and PS, of course, I took a few pictures.
I can't remember the last time I've sat next to someone who was my age on a damn plane.
Sooo, I was smashed between a large surly Austrian, and a large surly Arab, who was really irritated with the news he was reading in the paper, gesturing angrily and smacking the page in contempt. I stared at the Arabic on the pages for a while, then tried to watch the movie. Something was wrong with his headphones, and I fixed it, and then he became the chattiest guy in the world, and we talked the entire rest of the flight. We talked politics, international relations, foreign opinions about our respective lands, and he knew EVERYTHING on these topics, I even got clarification on the little Canada-Denmark scuffle a couple years back that I'd been curious about, and though his opinions were slightly to the right of mine, it was absolutely fascinating discussion, and for sure, a warm welcome to Dubai.
We flew in over the coast at 2am, and the first thing I noticed was that the lights weren't flickering, there was none of that sense of "rolling Uzbeki brown-outs", the infrastructure was obviously rock-solid. I curled up on a chair in the airport next to the Pakistani and Indian laborers who were also curled up there by the hundreds, and half-slept til a decent human hour.
There is no way to walk in Dubai. You can't "stroll down to the city center", because there is no city center, and there is no strolling. It's highways, and you either take a taxi, or you drive your Lexus. My Lexus being in the shop at the moment, I took taxis. I took one to the Intercontinental, dropped off the film equipment, talked with Adam, our new Australian friend/concierge for a bit, he said, "you're going out there for 5 days? It's not really a "hostel" type city.... are you sure you'll be okay?" No! No, I'm not sure. I'm already exhausted and a wreck mentally, and it's only 9am, day one.
My plan was, get an umbrella, put it on the beach, lie on a towel, get a full night's sleep there during the day, then stroll around at night and explore. Then repeat. It lasted for about an hour. I took a woooonderful swim in the bathwater of the Persian gulf, then laid out as planned under the umbrella, but exhausted as I was, I was all nerved-up, and couldn't sleep, and just cracked. I had the address of the only hostel in the city, expensively far away from the beach, and I took another cab there, checked in with the psycho at the desk (oh you are American! You know, your president, he wants to kill Arab...), and got a sound sound sleep.
The other folks in my room were all about my age, a Slovene named Anže who was there to make connections to the grand hotels that might want to buy furniture from his family's high-end furniture business in bulk, a Dutch guy named Ali, on vacation there from studying Arabic in Yemen, a German guy named Wolfram who was there until he found permanent housing for his six month civil engineering internship, and a Yemeni guy named Abud, who was mysterious, rich, not there often, and only spoke Arabic.
I had a good ol time with the first three, going around the city, hitting the beach, and just talking about stuff, but Ali and Anže went out to hit the fuuuucking expensive clubs, and that's where our hangouts stopped, I just had to hear about it vicariously afterwards. And, me and the guy from Yemen got a hangout in as well. I motioned to him that I was going to go get dinner, and he gestured back "no no, I'll take you!" And we went. It was the weirdest Halloween ever, I rode around all night with the Yemeni guy in his SUV, chatting in sign language and having a good old time. He had a DVD player in the passenger seat sunvisor playing the Bollywood version of "The Fast and the Furious", which meant that the heroes were charmingly clumsy, the women were unrealistically beautiful, and everyone would break into unexpected song at times. The dialogue was 90% Hindi (I assume), and about 10% English, which was strange, that the characters would be talking and would say, "aslkje boiw aohgoahew ashoasd. Yes, I totally agree with your plan, but ashda gh ahsfgola sd?" Anyhow, Abud and I don't speak Hindi, or each other's languages, but we understood the movie, and each other, talked and laughed and drove around all night, eating good food, hanging in ridiculously expensive hotel complexes, taking boat rides, and seeming strange to anyone we talked to, since he was dressed in the full Arabic Dishdasha, and I looked American as hell, and we obviously didn't speak English/Arabic respectively. I learned how to say "God willing", "Hello", "photo", and "turtle" in Arabic from the evening.
After that I got really sick with the flu, and the rest of my first week was spent in bed, with a severe fever, wasting perfectly good beach days, and my tan suffered as a result. The time came to say goodbye to my hostel friends, and I headed over to the Intercontinental. Have you seen the movie Big Fish? Everything had this sense to it. One door being opened for you by an eight-foot tall Pakistani man named Abdul with a perfectly fitting little beard, the other door by a small, sun-shiny girl named Happy Doo. The bathtub filled by waterfall. Everything was luxury and yet nothing worked. They wore hats on their feet, and hamburgers ate people.
Shortly thereafter, Michael arrived, and we just sat up beaming about the idea of the city til all hours. How does a place with no natural resources and no tax revenue experience such constant and explosive growth for so many consecutive years? How can they build such grand things at a whim and have them be successful, when they simply wouldn't be supported financially anywhere else, even in other highly developed countries? It's a dreamworld of investment giants, and cheap labor by the thousands living in almost slavelike conditions.
We saw all the sites, rode the hot air balloon (not as terrifying as expected! I was picturing windy, swaying, blowing, none of that, it was just like a sky elevator, gentle up, gentle down), rode a camel (much less gentle), crashed over sand dunes in an SUV, got in a bunch of boat rides (!!!!!), and, in the end, at the last minute after it looked like it was going to fall through, we got a seaplane ride over the coastline, and, from above, I saw The Palms. I saw The World. I saw Dubai, not on the Discovery Channel, but for real. It closed some undefined chapter for me, one that opened with my struggle to start living in Písek, where I spent 8 intense, isolating months, that now seem like some strange dream. We filmed it all, Adam was a natural, he was good fun to work with, and even took us to a place or two that he shouldn'tve. You don't know sadness until the most beautiful girl in the world, who happens to be a prostitute from Ghana, whispers in your ear that she wants to be all yours tonight, even proposes marriage, and you have to tell her no.
For Dubai, we insisted on finding out about the nightlife, and made room for it in the budget. It is posh, pretentious, expensive as fuck and not terribly diverse on the music selection, and alcohol is fucking expensive, so in this sense, Prague wins, hands down. But, the pretentious club world, while not a nice place to live, is a nice place to visit. We went to Zinc one night, which was fun, uneventful, way too air-conditioned (like everywhere in Dubai), I danced, chatted with one Irish girl, got rejected by another, and around 2ish we went back to the hotel. Then, on our last night, we went to Trilogy (the one Ali always called "Thrillogy" for some reason). It was insanely expensive (nearly $50 to get in), but was beautiful, the terrace lounge on the roof particularly, looking out over the city. I had some dumb panic attack that I couldn't shake until it was almost closing time which was awful, I think the coffee I'd had earlier was too strong, by the time I shook it, it was all I could do just to stand in the crowd, barely dancing, and wishing I had the energy to talk to this beautiful little girl I kept seeing around. Afterwards, we sat outside for a while, and saw Asians speaking Russian. Kazakhs! We talked to them, told them we'd been to their country, they were excited about that, and they were friends with the beautiful little girl! She turned out to be a very friendly little Russian girl, and the hour outside the club was the highlight of the night. Then, homeward, to the hotel, to the airport, to Prague.
I've been home for just a week now, but it feels like it's been months. It's cold and snowy here, the 85 degree beach is long behind me. The beauty of the Old World here is familiar, but in my heart I'm still pining for the beauty of the New World. In a month exactly, I go home, my first time home since last Christmas. How different things are now than the were then, how much has occured since then. I'm looking forward to it terribly, it will be a beautiful close to a beautiful, difficult year.
oh and PS, of course, I took a few pictures.