Happy 2005!

I'll write more about New Year's eve soon, but today let me just throw out there one thought: A small glass of beer costs seven dollars here, whereas a decent lunch costs about three bucks. But the two Heinekens I drank last night were more than worth it, because they gave me the courage to go up to the guy wearing the kilt and ask him if that was really a kilt, really, for real, an actual kilt, and are you really Scottish, for real, from Scotland. It was, and he was. Such a happy, happy night.

Also, I took the picture that defines, once and for all, Dubai. It is absolutely the final word on this city. I can't wait to post it!

The music of the Empire

Americans, be proud: Our music is swashbuckling its way through the far corners of the earth. I thought one side benefit to moving near the heart of Islam would be a break from constant elevator Christmas music, but in the airport, the Indian markets, everywhere, it's "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." At this moment, in the tiny Internet cafe where I'm working, it's that Whitney Houston song from "The Bodyguard" -- I will always love youuuuuuuuuuuu...

Rain and snow

The day after I arrived, it rained here for the first time in over a year. Then it kept on raining for three days. The locals seem only slightly less astonished than if the sky had opened up and rained frogs for three days. Personally, I would be grateful to see a storm if my town had gone a year without rain, but these folks shake their heads in wonder, then seem annoyed.

You’ve got to give them credit, though: Even in this freak rainstorm, people seem calmer than the hysterical Washingtonians who run around flapping their hands and wailing every time in snows. And it snows in Washington every winter. Ras al-Khaimah, one of the northern Emirates in the mountains, got snow yesterday for the first time in at least 40 years. Keep in mind: That doesn’t mean it snowed 40 years ago – it means that nobody can remember back any further than that. This may be the first snow in Emirati history, for all anyone knows. And you didn’t see them getting their knickers all in a twist.

On the topic of weather: Thunder sounds different here. You would think that thunder is one of those things which is exactly the same no matter where you go in the world, like the moon, or Burger King. But thunder here – or at least last night’s thunder – lacks the percussive thump of good American thunder. A feisty storm of American thunder is like a Hell’s Angel yelling and pounding his meaty fist on a table. It thuds. It can be scary. The china rattles. Middle Eastern thunder is like a nervous guy clearing his throat. I saw strokes of lightning that flashed brightly even underneath my bed covers with my eyes closed, and even these monster strokes produced thunder that seemed oddly tentative and polite, like it didn’t want to bother anybody.

I was awfully pleased with myself when, after puzzling for a couple days over the question of how to dry my washed clothes, I realized that my little window has hooks underneath it on the outside, and that everybody here just hangs their clothes out the window to dry. It was very satisfying to hang my first load of clothes out the window; I felt like a part of the scene. Then, after the intermittent drizzle of the last two days turned into a real downpour overnight, I woke up this morning to shirts that were even wetter than the washing machine managed to get them.

Everybody else in my little courtyard evidently was able to anticipate that clothes hanging in a downpour will not dry, and had removed their clothes in the night. I’m obviously not ready to be part of the scene yet.

Update: Snow in the Middle East

My friend Tara tells me that she lived in Dubai as a girl and learned to ice-skate here. To me that sounds like learning to surf while growing up in Overland Park, Kansas. Hopefully Tara will enlighten us more on this amazing fact. Maybe I can get a picture up here of a middle-eastern ice skating rink.

Important things still happening in the U.S.

Oh, man, if these guys thought I wasn't going to post this picture, they were sorely mistaken. Left to right: Scott K., Jim K. and Rummell, three of the finest card players ever to draw an ace on the river. Scott won the evening going away, I'm told. Jim looks deep in thought -- did you win that hand? And Rummell, how did you do at Casino Night? Come on, the people want to know.

Also, please note that the beers these gentlemen are drinking are a solid step up in quality from the swill we proudly drink at Rummell's Horseshoe.

It's a long way

I tracked my progress to the Middle East by the cities that drifted by far beneath the plane, cities whose names were beamed up to us via the plane's onboard tracking map. I started feeling far from home when the balance of vowels to consonants in the city names began to fall out of whack. Munich and Berlin I recognized. But then the cute flight attendants passed out a snack and when I looked at the map again, we were passing over places called Brno and Plzen and Iasi.



The flight from New York to London traced a lovely straight arc across the Atlantic, then wheeled south over Europe. People have been asking me for months whether I was nervous about my trip, and the truth is I never was. I kept waiting for my nerves to make themselves felt, but they stayed quiet all through November and December. It was the moment that the last recognizable city name -- it was Prague, actually -- finally disappeared off the little map screen in the back of the headrest. That was the moment I got nervous. I looked down and saw the lights far below in eastern Europe and realized I'd never been farther away from a single person I knew.

Watching "The Bourne Supremacy" instead of the scrolling map took the edge off somewhat. When the movie ended, I checked the map again and was relieved to once again see a city I recognized. The relief didn't last long. The city was Baghdad.

You can see on the map above that our flight path only deviated from its smooth curve one time, towards the end. That little zig was Iraq, and I think we can all agree that the pilot showed wisdom in that particular move. When we zagged back, we were over Saudi Arabia and the sun was coming up. I stretched my neck to see the sand but the desert was covered by clouds. When the clouds finally broke, we were over the Persian Gulf -- Emirati locals call it the Arabian Gulf, because Arabs despise Persians -- and the plane was low to the water. I saw oil derricks and one giant boat that seemed to be leaking a huge amount of green sludge into the water. When Dubai appeared on the coast, the one thing that struck me about the aerial view was the sand. It's a city built entirely into sand.

Airport

As I mentioned, my flight connected through London on Christmas Eve. Heathrow airport is fine, but given that it is Britain's largest air hub, I was stunned and disappointed that I did not see Santa as I expected. I was also put off a bit that so much wall space in the airport was simply empty, with only a half-hearted attempt to fill the blankness with advertisements. Not being assaulted by an unending stream of vulgar airport ads was my first bit of culture shock.

Here's a photo:



And here's another one. It was Christmas, after all:



Lovely pictures, aren't they? They really capture the essence of the London airport on Christmas, don't they?

Except that they weren't taken in London. Those are the third and fourth pictures I took from Dubai. This is a cafe under the arrivals gate in Dubai International Airport. That London Dairy was a little ice cream shop, just across from that giant Christmas tree. Any thought that I might be moving into some Islamic tent city in the desert was put to rest at that moment.

Well, that's a lie. That notion was put to rest the instant I stepped off the plane into the terminal. The first sight to greet me was a giant blinking spaceship hanging from the ceiling. Yeah, that's right. Feast your eyes:



The image is a little blurry because I was trying not to faint from the shock. I turned around and was greeted with this sight:



Again, the blurriness as I struggle to control my slack-jawed drooling. Also, I'm a shit photographer. But believe me when I say: Dubai airport is the most glitteringly modern thing I've ever seen. They were auctioning off a Rolls-Royce outside the duty-free shops where rich Arabs -- and everyone else -- buy their dirt-cheap liquor.

One of the themes of this website will be the odd and hilarious way the western world and the Middle East have collided here in Dubai. My first inkling of that came as I walked toward passport control. Unlike in London, the Dubai airport is littered with wall ads -- just like home sweet home. At the welcome port of this Muslim country, I saw a enormous ad for Chivas Regal, I saw the familiar little M&M characters saying "Experience the Fun!" and I saw a spot for some Dubai resort featuring a grinning Arab guy holding up a surfboard in one hand and a giant thumbs-up sign in the other. As the nervousness of the flight gave way, my first impression of Dubai was, "What in the HELL is this place?"

Arrived

I made it to Dubai. I meant to have done much more posting on this website by now, but I haven't yet achieved a reliable Internet connection. Soon, I hope.

So all is well with me, though I've been sorry to miss my favorite time of the year in the U.S. I'm jetlagged and I miss all my friends and family. But this place really is pretty fascinating, which I notice when I'm awake enough to look around. Check here again soon for some interesting photos and my own inane commentary.