This list started as a lunchtime conversation at work, and of course I had to polish it up and post it here. Note that everything here is true-to-life and unexaggerated - for better or for worse!
-You have a system of reference for mutual friends which includes designations such as "Basel 1, Basel 2, and Basel 3" and "my Rami, your Rami, and Egyptian Rami" (even though 2/3 of said Ramis are, in fact, Egyptian).
-Your vocabulary expands to include Arabicisms (yallah, khallas, haram alayk), random and slightly outdated British expressions ("I was gobsmacked," "I was gutted"), Hinglish ("what to do"), and South Africanisms (saying "hey?" instead of "what?" when you don't understand someone), all used within 5 minutes of each other and with an audience that includes none of the aforementioned ethnicities/nationalities.
-When you want to buy yogurt at the grocery store, you instinctively head to the Pork Room (For Non-Muslims Only) rather than the dairy section, because all your favorite brands from back home have gelatin in them (pig hooves = haram!) and you've come to accept the logic of Berries 'n' Creme on the shelf next to ham and prosciutto.
-Your average driving speed on your morning commute out to the desert is 160 kmph (punctuated by the occasional slowdown to 120 when passing speed cameras); you feel a little sick when you finally realize that kilometers are real units and this velocity translates to 100 mph.
-You have at least once suffered the "I'm going to Boudoir at Dubai Marine"/"I'm going to Buddha Bar at Dubai Marina" misunderstanding with non-English-speaking cabbies and have ended up at the opposite end of town from the friends you were trying to meet at either place; after sitting in traffic for an hour trying to get back across town, cursing the cruel tides of the global economy and the waves of exclusively Malayalam-speaking cab drivers they bring crashing down upon the Gulf, you give up and go home.
-You have no problem spending AED 800 (USD $215) for a pair of sunglasses, but you staunchly refuse to pay more than AED 3 (USD $0.80) for a shawarma. Trading up/trading down, baby.
-You have an elaborate wusta contingency plan worked out in your head in case you ever get caught doing something illegal/immoral/un-Islamic, and you actually make a mental note when well-connected friends/colleagues brag about how they have a "get out of jail free" card with x ministry or y department.
-You've forgotten that there are places in the world where people think Israel is a real country, and when you read the New York Times online you find it jarring that articles about Palestinians don't start with the byline "Occupied Jerusalem."
-You know to check all your favorite celebrity gossip blogs before you leave your office (which is in a freezone) since you know they'll all come up as "counter to the political, moral, or religious values of the United Arab Emirates" at your house (which is not in a freezone).
-When someone drives up behind you in the fast lane and flashes their brights, your check their license plate number in your rear-view mirror before deciding whether or not to move over.
-You start regularly using phrases like "please do the needful" (do what's required), "thanks God" (thank God), and "I'm thinking loudly" (I'm thinking out loud), forgetting that they're not actually expressions used by native English speakers.
Sad but true!
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
I Run for the Money
I just got back from a big company breakfast event aaaaaaaaaand (drumroll please)... guess who has an AED 2000 (USD $544) gift certificate to Mall of the Emirates burning a hole in her pocket for being my company's fastest marathon finisher? And by "fastest" I clearly mean "only," since you all know my time.
(I also - LOL - got a huge, elaborate, engraved glass trophy. At least we have plenty of space in our apartment...)
So anyhow, I've decided that since it is a windfall and I did suffer for it (both during the race and at this breakfast, where I had to endure lecherous male colleagues telling me [insert Indian accent] "with a body like that, you look like you could run 100Ks!"), I should use it to buy a bag rather than something responsible - like, oh, say several months' worth of groceries from Carrefour, which would be the most practical MoE option.
At any rate, I have long admired the LV Speedy 35 (okay I know it is hackneyed, but it's also a classic) but early responses (Jojo: "Hmmm I don't know, I Googled it and pics of Jessica Simpson came up with hers"; Mar: "I might lose respect for you if you get that. It's so ghetto! Every ghetto fab woman has one!") have led me to reconsider.
Plus, with Dubai Shopping Festival sales coming up, I might be able to stretch my 2K dirhams and afford a proper status bag - Bottega? Balenciaga? Bulgari?
Ah, the uncommon perks of being a marathoner in the Middle East...
(Ed. note: I love how running a marathon - something I did in an effort to return to my earnest, hard-working, look-I-still-have-my-priorities-straight roots - has, by virtue of its occurrence in Dubai, morphed into yet another episode of rampant, crazed, soulless consumerism. I'm telling you, this place could turn Mother Theresa into Rachel Zoe.)
But whatever. I'm still excited for my bag.
(I also - LOL - got a huge, elaborate, engraved glass trophy. At least we have plenty of space in our apartment...)
So anyhow, I've decided that since it is a windfall and I did suffer for it (both during the race and at this breakfast, where I had to endure lecherous male colleagues telling me [insert Indian accent] "with a body like that, you look like you could run 100Ks!"), I should use it to buy a bag rather than something responsible - like, oh, say several months' worth of groceries from Carrefour, which would be the most practical MoE option.
At any rate, I have long admired the LV Speedy 35 (okay I know it is hackneyed, but it's also a classic) but early responses (Jojo: "Hmmm I don't know, I Googled it and pics of Jessica Simpson came up with hers"; Mar: "I might lose respect for you if you get that. It's so ghetto! Every ghetto fab woman has one!") have led me to reconsider.
Plus, with Dubai Shopping Festival sales coming up, I might be able to stretch my 2K dirhams and afford a proper status bag - Bottega? Balenciaga? Bulgari?
Ah, the uncommon perks of being a marathoner in the Middle East...
(Ed. note: I love how running a marathon - something I did in an effort to return to my earnest, hard-working, look-I-still-have-my-priorities-straight roots - has, by virtue of its occurrence in Dubai, morphed into yet another episode of rampant, crazed, soulless consumerism. I'm telling you, this place could turn Mother Theresa into Rachel Zoe.)
But whatever. I'm still excited for my bag.
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
"While The Palm was sinking, we just kept on drinking"
Okay, this is hilarious and so apt and I'm really kind of gutted that I didn't come up with it myself, but kudos Secret Dubai for their creativity.
(Hyperlinks added for the benefit/education of those who want background on the references...)
We Didn't Start the Fire
(A Dubai-inspired homage to Billy Joel)
Cheap villas falling down, prostitutes all over town
Roadworks, no perks, endless building cranes
Drivers, housemaids, everybody's getting aides
Asian labour, expat slavers, blonde Jumeirah Janes
Kids crashing sports cars, Saudis filling all the bars
Underage camel jockeys, getting 'round the proxy
Flickr blocked, Skype snipped, black texta censorship
Soaring oil, sinking dollars, rent hike apocalypse
We didn't start the fire
Though they burned Oasis, and they tried to blame us
We didn't start the fire
While The Palm was sinking, we just kept on drinking
Sheikh Zayed gridlock, all the way to Hard Rock
Burqas, workers, no one will pay 'em
Three Palms, camel farms, Sharjah banning naked arms
Emaar, Alabbar, Sultan bin Sulayem
Muntafiq, Al Gergawi, carpets from Mostafawi
Burj Dubai, Sheikh Mo, how high can you go?
Hummous, shawarma, knock offs from Karama
Zayed, the sheikh and I, Bridge on the Creek Dubai
We didn't start the fire
Though the sun was boiling, and the boys were toiling
We didn't start the fire
While you built your icons, we were all in Cyclones
Love it!
(Hyperlinks added for the benefit/education of those who want background on the references...)
We Didn't Start the Fire
(A Dubai-inspired homage to Billy Joel)
Cheap villas falling down, prostitutes all over town
Roadworks, no perks, endless building cranes
Drivers, housemaids, everybody's getting aides
Asian labour, expat slavers, blonde Jumeirah Janes
Kids crashing sports cars, Saudis filling all the bars
Underage camel jockeys, getting 'round the proxy
Flickr blocked, Skype snipped, black texta censorship
Soaring oil, sinking dollars, rent hike apocalypse
We didn't start the fire
Though they burned Oasis, and they tried to blame us
We didn't start the fire
While The Palm was sinking, we just kept on drinking
Sheikh Zayed gridlock, all the way to Hard Rock
Burqas, workers, no one will pay 'em
Three Palms, camel farms, Sharjah banning naked arms
Emaar, Alabbar, Sultan bin Sulayem
Muntafiq, Al Gergawi, carpets from Mostafawi
Burj Dubai, Sheikh Mo, how high can you go?
Hummous, shawarma, knock offs from Karama
Zayed, the sheikh and I, Bridge on the Creek Dubai
We didn't start the fire
Though the sun was boiling, and the boys were toiling
We didn't start the fire
While you built your icons, we were all in Cyclones
Love it!
Saturday, January 19, 2008
26.2 Miles Equals 42 Kilometers (& Other Lessons from Marathoning Abroad)
All I have to say is, khallas ("it's finished").
It wasn't pretty, but I finished 26.2 in in 4:38 - 59 minutes slower than my best time, but 82 minutes faster than the cutoff limit. In the end, I'm proud to be living, breathing, limping proof that you can run a marathon without "training" in the conventional sense - although I'd like to think that I get some residual fitness benefits through the intense workouts I give my liver and heart rate (recommended exercises: boozing, rage) by living in Dubai.
At 6 AM I walked to the starting line alone, save a few laborers and prostitutes along the way, and much to my great awe and amazement was able to see Haile Gebrselassie and the #2, 3, and 4 men's seeds doing their warm-up strides only a few feet away from me. One of the benefits of doing a race with a very small field but a very rich prize purse? You get to be within tripping distance of the best marathoner in history! After a 15-minute delay, the starting gun went off at 7:15 (that's AST - Arab Standard Time) and, choking back tears (as is my custom), I set out on my merry way.
I burned through the first 13.1 miles in 1:58 thanks to the pacesetting of Wolfi and Marcus, a pair of gregarious Austrians I packed in with upon learning they were planning to run sub-4. Our fleeting race-friendship ended soon after the halfway mark, when I realized that OH MY GOD I HAD BEEN SMOKING CRACK IF I HAD THOUGHT I WAS GOING TO RUN AN UNTRAINED-FOR MARATHON IN UNDER 4 HOURS and proceeded to die (no but really - die die die die die), running the second half in 2:40... for those of you who are not runners, a 42-minute difference in the amount of time it takes you to run your first and second halves is a very good example of How Not To Run A Race.
So yeah. First half = good times with jovial Austrians. Second half = Dante's 9th Circle of Hell.
When they left me at the half, Wolfi and Marcus gave me a Tropical Fruit PowerGel as a parting gift, and from the 20K mark to the 3oK mark I fantasized about how, at 30K (18 miles), I would allow myself to eat the gel and it would be the most delicious, restorative, succulent food on earth. Which it was, actually, but not even that was enough to dull the pain of 20+ miles on legs that hadn't undertaken more than 6 in almost a year.
30K to 40K was really just unbearably and inconceivably painful. I think the only things that allowed me to survive were Paul, a oldish Lebanese man who would come up from behind and give me a gentle shove when I started to run sideways instead of straight, and the series of weird mantras I kept repeating over and over in my head that seemed very profound at the time but now just sound crazy (the only one I can remember is "there is a place inside me which knows no tears" - LOL!).
Somewhere right after 40K, I almost killed an Indian woman who was walking along the course, disinterestedly shouting "Faster, faster, faster!" But then a group of nice South African girls gave me a handful of Gummi Bears - a welcome blood sugar spike for the last stretch - and I decided there were better uses for my remaining energy than murder. Right before the 41K mark, Old Lebanese Paul and I found each other again and - in one of those moments of intense camaraderie between strangers that I truly believe are unique to marathons and crashing planes - we looked at each other and said "yallah, we will sprint the last kilometer together."
And so we did, and I finished, and R and Jojo&M were there to collect me, and I got my medal, and a few hours later I was at brunch eating 4 meals and all was right with the world.
So voila, after a 5-year hiatus my marathoning career has resumed. There were a lot of things that were different about running a marathon abroad - like the fact that the whole course was delineated in kilometers (I mean, why not furlongs? or hectares?), and the conspicuous absence of both obnoxious Team in Training groupies and runners wearing Hebrews 11-2 ("Let us run with perseverance the race set out before us...") t-shirts. It was also weird to run a race without hearing the national anthem at the start (although that usually just exacerbates my pre-marathon weepiness, haha), and to see 2 girls in hijab, long-sleeved tunic shirts, and leggings queuing up with the rest of us... no word on whether they finished, but it was a hot day to be a female Muslim runner.
And with that, dear readers, I will leave you to try and stand up, and perhaps even straighten my legs. Wish me luck!
It wasn't pretty, but I finished 26.2 in in 4:38 - 59 minutes slower than my best time, but 82 minutes faster than the cutoff limit. In the end, I'm proud to be living, breathing, limping proof that you can run a marathon without "training" in the conventional sense - although I'd like to think that I get some residual fitness benefits through the intense workouts I give my liver and heart rate (recommended exercises: boozing, rage) by living in Dubai.
At 6 AM I walked to the starting line alone, save a few laborers and prostitutes along the way, and much to my great awe and amazement was able to see Haile Gebrselassie and the #2, 3, and 4 men's seeds doing their warm-up strides only a few feet away from me. One of the benefits of doing a race with a very small field but a very rich prize purse? You get to be within tripping distance of the best marathoner in history! After a 15-minute delay, the starting gun went off at 7:15 (that's AST - Arab Standard Time) and, choking back tears (as is my custom), I set out on my merry way.
I burned through the first 13.1 miles in 1:58 thanks to the pacesetting of Wolfi and Marcus, a pair of gregarious Austrians I packed in with upon learning they were planning to run sub-4. Our fleeting race-friendship ended soon after the halfway mark, when I realized that OH MY GOD I HAD BEEN SMOKING CRACK IF I HAD THOUGHT I WAS GOING TO RUN AN UNTRAINED-FOR MARATHON IN UNDER 4 HOURS and proceeded to die (no but really - die die die die die), running the second half in 2:40... for those of you who are not runners, a 42-minute difference in the amount of time it takes you to run your first and second halves is a very good example of How Not To Run A Race.
So yeah. First half = good times with jovial Austrians. Second half = Dante's 9th Circle of Hell.
When they left me at the half, Wolfi and Marcus gave me a Tropical Fruit PowerGel as a parting gift, and from the 20K mark to the 3oK mark I fantasized about how, at 30K (18 miles), I would allow myself to eat the gel and it would be the most delicious, restorative, succulent food on earth. Which it was, actually, but not even that was enough to dull the pain of 20+ miles on legs that hadn't undertaken more than 6 in almost a year.
30K to 40K was really just unbearably and inconceivably painful. I think the only things that allowed me to survive were Paul, a oldish Lebanese man who would come up from behind and give me a gentle shove when I started to run sideways instead of straight, and the series of weird mantras I kept repeating over and over in my head that seemed very profound at the time but now just sound crazy (the only one I can remember is "there is a place inside me which knows no tears" - LOL!).
Somewhere right after 40K, I almost killed an Indian woman who was walking along the course, disinterestedly shouting "Faster, faster, faster!" But then a group of nice South African girls gave me a handful of Gummi Bears - a welcome blood sugar spike for the last stretch - and I decided there were better uses for my remaining energy than murder. Right before the 41K mark, Old Lebanese Paul and I found each other again and - in one of those moments of intense camaraderie between strangers that I truly believe are unique to marathons and crashing planes - we looked at each other and said "yallah, we will sprint the last kilometer together."
And so we did, and I finished, and R and Jojo&M were there to collect me, and I got my medal, and a few hours later I was at brunch eating 4 meals and all was right with the world.
So voila, after a 5-year hiatus my marathoning career has resumed. There were a lot of things that were different about running a marathon abroad - like the fact that the whole course was delineated in kilometers (I mean, why not furlongs? or hectares?), and the conspicuous absence of both obnoxious Team in Training groupies and runners wearing Hebrews 11-2 ("Let us run with perseverance the race set out before us...") t-shirts. It was also weird to run a race without hearing the national anthem at the start (although that usually just exacerbates my pre-marathon weepiness, haha), and to see 2 girls in hijab, long-sleeved tunic shirts, and leggings queuing up with the rest of us... no word on whether they finished, but it was a hot day to be a female Muslim runner.
And with that, dear readers, I will leave you to try and stand up, and perhaps even straighten my legs. Wish me luck!
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Yallah! (Let's Go)
This time tomorrow, I will inshallah be about 12 miles into the Dubai Marathon.
Some of you may be surprised that I haven't talked about training for a marathon on this blog. That is because I haven't, in fact, "trained." I mean I've been running, of course, just not in the typical "back in college when I ran 80 miles a week" sense. In fact the longest run I've done recently was the half-marathon I did in Tennessee back in... April?
But I'm going for it anyhow, because I feel like I have something to prove to myself (that I'm still a runner, no matter where I live or what I'm doing) and something to prove to this city/region/culture (that no matter how little you respect pedestrians/Americans/women, we will still prevail! in very short running shorts, nonetheless!).
And so tomorrow I will wake up before dawn, and I will play "Eye of the Tiger," and I will eat my frozen bagel, and I will run. It won't be fast - I'm just aiming to finish under the 6-hour limit, a far cry from the days of 3:39 - and it probably won't be pretty, but if all goes according to plan it will be finished, and that's what counts.
Bring it, Dubai.
Some of you may be surprised that I haven't talked about training for a marathon on this blog. That is because I haven't, in fact, "trained." I mean I've been running, of course, just not in the typical "back in college when I ran 80 miles a week" sense. In fact the longest run I've done recently was the half-marathon I did in Tennessee back in... April?
But I'm going for it anyhow, because I feel like I have something to prove to myself (that I'm still a runner, no matter where I live or what I'm doing) and something to prove to this city/region/culture (that no matter how little you respect pedestrians/Americans/women, we will still prevail! in very short running shorts, nonetheless!).
And so tomorrow I will wake up before dawn, and I will play "Eye of the Tiger," and I will eat my frozen bagel, and I will run. It won't be fast - I'm just aiming to finish under the 6-hour limit, a far cry from the days of 3:39 - and it probably won't be pretty, but if all goes according to plan it will be finished, and that's what counts.
Bring it, Dubai.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Things Fall Apart, The Centre Cannot Hold
... mere anarchy is loosed upon the Gulf.
Gridlock on Sheikh Zayed. Check out the sign - "Watch for water ponds"!
Oh no the rain DID NOT flood his S-class.
All is lost. Forsake your SUV. Run for cover.
Hokay, so. Between yesterday's Bush-induced lockdown and today's flash flooding, I think we can safely say that Dubai's veneer of being a functional city has worn off... or should I say, been washed away in the torrential rain. People have been straggling into my office all day citing insane commute times - it took one woman four hours, from 8 AM to 12 PM, to get here from the neighboring emirate of Sharjah, a drive which sans traffic/flooding/acts of God should take about 30 minutes. Holy crap. As for me, I made it to work in only an hour and a half (normal drive time: 20 minutes), but only after following the lead of a couple brave 4x4s in front of me and off-roading my way past traffic on the shoulder of the highway. That was until the highway itself disappeared, all 5 lanes on my side submerged by a foot of water.
Also, a note to Arab drivers: I know you are a desert-dwelling people. I respect that you are the proverbial fishes out of water in this environment. But for the love of God, you don't need to drive with your hazard lights on just because it's raining. It doesn't make me less likely to hit you. It just makes me completely unable to know when and if you're going to switch lanes. (Not that you were very likely to have signaled anyhow. But at least there would have been a possibility.)
At any rate, I'm optimistic that we may get a "rain day" tomorrow, which would be our second unplanned day off this week. Luckily I have my groceries bought and my "Gossip Girl" downloaded thanks to my day of Bush-prompted house arrest yesterday, so I'm prepared for further hibernation should it come to that.
Honestly!
Gridlock on Sheikh Zayed. Check out the sign - "Watch for water ponds"!
Oh no the rain DID NOT flood his S-class.
All is lost. Forsake your SUV. Run for cover.
Hokay, so. Between yesterday's Bush-induced lockdown and today's flash flooding, I think we can safely say that Dubai's veneer of being a functional city has worn off... or should I say, been washed away in the torrential rain. People have been straggling into my office all day citing insane commute times - it took one woman four hours, from 8 AM to 12 PM, to get here from the neighboring emirate of Sharjah, a drive which sans traffic/flooding/acts of God should take about 30 minutes. Holy crap. As for me, I made it to work in only an hour and a half (normal drive time: 20 minutes), but only after following the lead of a couple brave 4x4s in front of me and off-roading my way past traffic on the shoulder of the highway. That was until the highway itself disappeared, all 5 lanes on my side submerged by a foot of water.
Also, a note to Arab drivers: I know you are a desert-dwelling people. I respect that you are the proverbial fishes out of water in this environment. But for the love of God, you don't need to drive with your hazard lights on just because it's raining. It doesn't make me less likely to hit you. It just makes me completely unable to know when and if you're going to switch lanes. (Not that you were very likely to have signaled anyhow. But at least there would have been a possibility.)
At any rate, I'm optimistic that we may get a "rain day" tomorrow, which would be our second unplanned day off this week. Luckily I have my groceries bought and my "Gossip Girl" downloaded thanks to my day of Bush-prompted house arrest yesterday, so I'm prepared for further hibernation should it come to that.
Honestly!
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Oh Say Does That Star-Spangled Banner Yet Wave...
Tomorrow has just been declared a public- and private-sector holiday for all of Dubai thanks to the presidential visit and the road closures, traffic jams, and security concerns that my compatriots have so generously brought with them.
I never thought I'd say it, but G-d d@mn it, I love George W. Bush.
I'm off to go stock up on groceries and get mimosa/Bloody Mary fixins' before all the roads close... I love it, today has such a festive, pre-blizzard, calm-before-the-storm feel!
(If you don't think about the fact that this is basically a citywide curfew and the roads will be patrolled by tanks.)
I never thought I'd say it, but G-d d@mn it, I love George W. Bush.
I'm off to go stock up on groceries and get mimosa/Bloody Mary fixins' before all the roads close... I love it, today has such a festive, pre-blizzard, calm-before-the-storm feel!
(If you don't think about the fact that this is basically a citywide curfew and the roads will be patrolled by tanks.)
Lockdown
So Bush touched down in Abu Dhabi this morning and - as if the rain wasn't enough! - Dubai is now a complete, total, clusterf!cked mess in anticipation of his trip here tomorrow.
In typical Emirati fashion, nothing was announced or publicized or made official, but the situation has been unfolding all day, pieced together through emails and phone calls and SMS messages. It seems that all of the service roads along the entire stretch of Sheikh Zayed Road - the 16-lane thoroughfare that links Dubai from end to end - are closed now; if this is the case, it means I'll have to forsake my car at least a half-mile away from my apartment and scramble home across 16 lanes of traffic on foot.
Then, I just got sent an email about roads that will be closed tomorrow, and the gist is basically, "Here's a list of every road in the city. They will all be closed. Good luck."
If my company was sensible, it would declare tomorrow to be National Work From Home Day, but because it's not, I'll probably spend all of tomorrow in insane, panic-inducing, gridlocked traffic, moving about 10 feet in 8 hours.
THIS JUST IN: All schools will now be closed tomorrow. This is great. It's like waiting for a snowstorm to roll in. What will close next, what will close next?!
You've gotta hand it to the Americans. When we roll in, we do it in style.
In typical Emirati fashion, nothing was announced or publicized or made official, but the situation has been unfolding all day, pieced together through emails and phone calls and SMS messages. It seems that all of the service roads along the entire stretch of Sheikh Zayed Road - the 16-lane thoroughfare that links Dubai from end to end - are closed now; if this is the case, it means I'll have to forsake my car at least a half-mile away from my apartment and scramble home across 16 lanes of traffic on foot.
Then, I just got sent an email about roads that will be closed tomorrow, and the gist is basically, "Here's a list of every road in the city. They will all be closed. Good luck."
If my company was sensible, it would declare tomorrow to be National Work From Home Day, but because it's not, I'll probably spend all of tomorrow in insane, panic-inducing, gridlocked traffic, moving about 10 feet in 8 hours.
THIS JUST IN: All schools will now be closed tomorrow. This is great. It's like waiting for a snowstorm to roll in. What will close next, what will close next?!
You've gotta hand it to the Americans. When we roll in, we do it in style.
Don't Go Chasin' Water Ponds
This. Is not. What I signed up for. When I moved to Dubai.
It is raining. In fact, it has been raining for the better part of the past week, and is forecast to continue raining until this Thursday. Rain is such a foreign thing here - like snow in Tennessee - that it's prompted a whole slew funny responses, including the electronic traffic monitors on Sheikh Zayed Road that now tell you "Drive Carefully - Avoid Water Ponds." Dude, I know we live in the desert, but you could at least try to get the terminology right.
It's also freezing, by which I mean highs of 70F and lows of 55F. Which is apparently the coldest winter in 7 years - wallahi I'm not kidding. People's reaction to this, too, is hilarious - local men wearing puffy down coats over their dishdash, and radio shows encouraging people to call in and share what they'd rather be doing instead of being stuck in "this freezing [sic] weather" ("I'd like to be curled up by a fire reading Harry Potter" ... "I'd like to be in a warm bathtub with a mug of hot chocolate" ... etc).
In the northern emirate of Ras Al Khaimah, it even hailed the other day - although no one knows there's a word for hail, so the story generally goes something like, "You know, my cousins in RAK, yesterday morning they were seeing these very small balls of ice, yanni, like the rain but frozen, coming down and making very loud noises when it was falling." This also elicited a whole round of email forwards from all the Emiratis I work with, complete with photo attachments of random uncles/nephews/brother-in-laws/cousins who live up north posing (still in sandals, of course) with tiny, sad, snowballs, or with their Land Cruisers out in the desert, pointing proudly at a small patch of ice on the ground.
But I must say that all this, combined with the sun not rising until 7:06 AM, has given even me a little bout of seasonal affective disorder... what do you mean, I can't lay out by my pool in late January?! If this keeps up much longer, I might have to pack up and move somewhere that's really tropical... Singapore, anyone?!
It is raining. In fact, it has been raining for the better part of the past week, and is forecast to continue raining until this Thursday. Rain is such a foreign thing here - like snow in Tennessee - that it's prompted a whole slew funny responses, including the electronic traffic monitors on Sheikh Zayed Road that now tell you "Drive Carefully - Avoid Water Ponds." Dude, I know we live in the desert, but you could at least try to get the terminology right.
It's also freezing, by which I mean highs of 70F and lows of 55F. Which is apparently the coldest winter in 7 years - wallahi I'm not kidding. People's reaction to this, too, is hilarious - local men wearing puffy down coats over their dishdash, and radio shows encouraging people to call in and share what they'd rather be doing instead of being stuck in "this freezing [sic] weather" ("I'd like to be curled up by a fire reading Harry Potter" ... "I'd like to be in a warm bathtub with a mug of hot chocolate" ... etc).
In the northern emirate of Ras Al Khaimah, it even hailed the other day - although no one knows there's a word for hail, so the story generally goes something like, "You know, my cousins in RAK, yesterday morning they were seeing these very small balls of ice, yanni, like the rain but frozen, coming down and making very loud noises when it was falling." This also elicited a whole round of email forwards from all the Emiratis I work with, complete with photo attachments of random uncles/nephews/brother-in-laws/cousins who live up north posing (still in sandals, of course) with tiny, sad, snowballs, or with their Land Cruisers out in the desert, pointing proudly at a small patch of ice on the ground.
But I must say that all this, combined with the sun not rising until 7:06 AM, has given even me a little bout of seasonal affective disorder... what do you mean, I can't lay out by my pool in late January?! If this keeps up much longer, I might have to pack up and move somewhere that's really tropical... Singapore, anyone?!
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
The Goa Report
I'm back, safe and sound, from India!
My holiday in Goa was... interesting. Let's put it this way: if the state of Goa has the lowest population density and the highest per capita GDP of any state in India (which it does), I cannot imagine the overcrowded chaos and the abject poverty that must characterize the rest of the country. Don't get me wrong, there are beautiful beaches, lush jungle, and a thriving tourist party scene; the locals are friendly, there's great food, and the mix of Portuguese colonial history juxtaposed on indigenous South Indian culture creates a really interesting vibe. But I also saw one of the saddest scenes in Goa that I've witnessed in all my travels, on an afternoon when we were having lunch at a beach shack in Anjuna, an area made famous by the "Goa freaks" - hippies from the US and Europe that arrived in the 1960s, set up a rollicking drug and music culture, and basically never left.
As we were eating, a little girl of about 5 or 6 kept coming up and begging for money. She was cute and decently well-dressed and seemed to enjoy the challenge of dodging the restaurant's security guard who tried to shoo her away, so we figured the begging was mostly a show - after all, that's the mantra of travel in the developing world, right? Give to local NGOs, give to international charities, but if you give directly to the kids, you don't know where it's going to go or what kind of a racket they've been forced into or whether you're actually contributing to something that will do more harm than good. And when you hear that line so many times, you start to almost believe that none of the kids you see begging on the street are really hungry - that they're all part of some massive touristploitation scheme, going back home to comfortable beds at night while their parents funnel their misbegotten earnings into drugs or the sex trade or whatever other social problem plagues their given country.
All of which is to say, you get desensitized, right? You stop believing that they're actually begging for money for food to put in their mouths. At least I do. But then the table of tourists next to us left, and the girl immediately materialized along with her brother and her mother, who was holding a very young baby. And before we even realized what was happening they were furiously diving into the leftover food on the table, the kids stuffing their faces with whatever was left and chugging from an open bottle of mineral water, the mom using her fingers to scoop a half-eaten plate of noodles into a silver tiffin, the omnipresent Indian lunch box.
The girl grabbed a glass with a straw and started feeding its contents to the baby, and just then the security guard reappeared, knocking the drink out of the girl's hand and away from the baby because it wasn't juice, it was a half-finished pina colada, flies buzzing around it, warm and melting, coconut milk and cheap rum oozing in the hot Indian sun, discarded by its sated British purchaser and being fed to an infant. As the guard shooed them away they started to retreat but then the mother stopped, noticing some stray noodles trailing out of her tiffin, and tucked them them neatly back inside, carefully tightening the lid on top.
It was sad. It was especially sad in light of the juxtaposition with the Indian friends we were staying with - an big old Goa family, longtime steel and ore magnates who now run a mobile phone software business out of Bangalore and Dubai just for fun, decorate their 4 beachside villas with the work of up-and-coming Indian artists purchased from Sotheby's and Christie's, own a herd of enormous Great Danes who are fed 3 square meals a day by a special servant dedicated just to dog care, and willingly pay the 100% import tax on top of the price of their several foreign cars because they don't want to drive Indian brands.
None of which is to judge at all because they're a great, friendly, warm family, hosted a whole group of us for a week with an amazing amount of hospitality, and probably do more than their fair share for the community around them - certainly more than most tourists do. It's just mind-boggling to be in a country that creates such haves and have-nots.
On lighter notes. The rest of the trip was fun and crazy and full of hijinx and late nights and market trips and sunburns and 6 AM bedtimes and beachside Kingfisher beer the next day. One of the highlights was going to a hilarious drug-fueled late-night rave in the middle of the jungle, where bratty European kids who live in Goa on their parents' bankroll under the dodgy auspices of "learning healing" and "starting a real estate business" gave me my first real insight into what, maybe, the 1960s might have been like. (Don't worry, I didn't partake - watching was funny enough.)
I also managed to be felled by the onset of a massive urinary tract infection AND really bad food poisoning (I know, I know, so cliche... the American who goes to India and gets food poisoning) within about 3 hours of each other. This rendered me pretty much useless for the last few days of our trip and allowed me to have my own krazy/trippy/groovy hallucinatory experience of throwing up so much in rapid succession that at one point, it seemed like the lights in the bathroom were flashing on and off in time with the beat of my racing heart. Drug free!
And that is absolutely all I have to update on. Happy Islamic New Year (this Thursday) and for those of us for whom it is a public holiday (aka... me), happy 3-day weekend!
My holiday in Goa was... interesting. Let's put it this way: if the state of Goa has the lowest population density and the highest per capita GDP of any state in India (which it does), I cannot imagine the overcrowded chaos and the abject poverty that must characterize the rest of the country. Don't get me wrong, there are beautiful beaches, lush jungle, and a thriving tourist party scene; the locals are friendly, there's great food, and the mix of Portuguese colonial history juxtaposed on indigenous South Indian culture creates a really interesting vibe. But I also saw one of the saddest scenes in Goa that I've witnessed in all my travels, on an afternoon when we were having lunch at a beach shack in Anjuna, an area made famous by the "Goa freaks" - hippies from the US and Europe that arrived in the 1960s, set up a rollicking drug and music culture, and basically never left.
As we were eating, a little girl of about 5 or 6 kept coming up and begging for money. She was cute and decently well-dressed and seemed to enjoy the challenge of dodging the restaurant's security guard who tried to shoo her away, so we figured the begging was mostly a show - after all, that's the mantra of travel in the developing world, right? Give to local NGOs, give to international charities, but if you give directly to the kids, you don't know where it's going to go or what kind of a racket they've been forced into or whether you're actually contributing to something that will do more harm than good. And when you hear that line so many times, you start to almost believe that none of the kids you see begging on the street are really hungry - that they're all part of some massive touristploitation scheme, going back home to comfortable beds at night while their parents funnel their misbegotten earnings into drugs or the sex trade or whatever other social problem plagues their given country.
All of which is to say, you get desensitized, right? You stop believing that they're actually begging for money for food to put in their mouths. At least I do. But then the table of tourists next to us left, and the girl immediately materialized along with her brother and her mother, who was holding a very young baby. And before we even realized what was happening they were furiously diving into the leftover food on the table, the kids stuffing their faces with whatever was left and chugging from an open bottle of mineral water, the mom using her fingers to scoop a half-eaten plate of noodles into a silver tiffin, the omnipresent Indian lunch box.
The girl grabbed a glass with a straw and started feeding its contents to the baby, and just then the security guard reappeared, knocking the drink out of the girl's hand and away from the baby because it wasn't juice, it was a half-finished pina colada, flies buzzing around it, warm and melting, coconut milk and cheap rum oozing in the hot Indian sun, discarded by its sated British purchaser and being fed to an infant. As the guard shooed them away they started to retreat but then the mother stopped, noticing some stray noodles trailing out of her tiffin, and tucked them them neatly back inside, carefully tightening the lid on top.
It was sad. It was especially sad in light of the juxtaposition with the Indian friends we were staying with - an big old Goa family, longtime steel and ore magnates who now run a mobile phone software business out of Bangalore and Dubai just for fun, decorate their 4 beachside villas with the work of up-and-coming Indian artists purchased from Sotheby's and Christie's, own a herd of enormous Great Danes who are fed 3 square meals a day by a special servant dedicated just to dog care, and willingly pay the 100% import tax on top of the price of their several foreign cars because they don't want to drive Indian brands.
None of which is to judge at all because they're a great, friendly, warm family, hosted a whole group of us for a week with an amazing amount of hospitality, and probably do more than their fair share for the community around them - certainly more than most tourists do. It's just mind-boggling to be in a country that creates such haves and have-nots.
On lighter notes. The rest of the trip was fun and crazy and full of hijinx and late nights and market trips and sunburns and 6 AM bedtimes and beachside Kingfisher beer the next day. One of the highlights was going to a hilarious drug-fueled late-night rave in the middle of the jungle, where bratty European kids who live in Goa on their parents' bankroll under the dodgy auspices of "learning healing" and "starting a real estate business" gave me my first real insight into what, maybe, the 1960s might have been like. (Don't worry, I didn't partake - watching was funny enough.)
I also managed to be felled by the onset of a massive urinary tract infection AND really bad food poisoning (I know, I know, so cliche... the American who goes to India and gets food poisoning) within about 3 hours of each other. This rendered me pretty much useless for the last few days of our trip and allowed me to have my own krazy/trippy/groovy hallucinatory experience of throwing up so much in rapid succession that at one point, it seemed like the lights in the bathroom were flashing on and off in time with the beat of my racing heart. Drug free!
And that is absolutely all I have to update on. Happy Islamic New Year (this Thursday) and for those of us for whom it is a public holiday (aka... me), happy 3-day weekend!
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