Oh hai blogging! Yes, it has been quite a while. Let's get down to it, shall we?
So basically. After last we spoke, I went to America for 23 blissful beautiful wonderful days (minus the 2 that were spent in JFK waiting for my snowed-out pre-Christmas flight to Nashville... that really destroyed my illusions about "everything runs perfectly in America" right off the bat, let me tell you). Nashville and New York were both wonderful, and if I saw you in the US (or if we talked, or if we tried to talk... so basically everyone who's reading this) please know how much I love you and how thankful I am for you. That's my holiday message, a few weeks late. ;)
Then, I came back to Dubai. A very, very different Dubai from the city I left way back in 2008. The global economic crisis has finally hit here and hit hard, most notably in the form of layoffs for my 3 best friends in Dubai. Not to mention at least a dozen other friends and several dozen ex-colleagues (thank God I switched jobs when I did). Apparently 1,500 residence visas are being canceled every day as jobless expats pack up, give up, and head home, and the city feels palpably panicky - taxis with no business honk for you anytime you step outside, popular bars and restaurants are empty, 2,000+ cars have been left at the Dubai airport by people "pulling a runner" (as the Brits say) without paying their auto loans, and silent still cranes languish, awkwardly abandoned all over the city.
As much as what has happened in New York and London is scary (and I have plenty of similarly "up a creek without a paddle" friends in those places), it somehow feels worse here because there's no substance to back it up. From everything I understand, the Western markets, ultimately, will rebound - they have the infrastructure and the history and the global interconnectedness and the longevity to bounce back. But Dubai? A pseudo-city that was built on glitz and speculation and fairy dust and leveraged within an inch of its life?! I fear that I can already see tumbleweeds rolling between the half-finished skyscrapers of my beloved desert boomtown.
It will be an interesting ride, to be sure. I have no immediate indications (knock wood, knock wood, knock wood) that I should fear for my own job, but I harbor no illusions about the demand for strategy consultants in a world where companies are struggling just to stay afloat, especially given the effect of falling oil prices (the one place in the world where that's bad news, right?!) on our clients' appetites for frivolous consulting projects. So we shall see. The tentative backup plan is (a) find an "alternate income stream" in Dubai (interpret that as you see fit) or (b) bartend in Nashville until I ride out the crisis. But let's hope and pray it doesn't come to that.
Even if things stay steady with work, though, Dubai is going to be a much sadder place than it once was. Flatmate E, one of the layoff-ees, is leaving town next week and as much as I am trying to stay in denial, I'm forced to confront the fact that not only am I losing my best Dubai friend, I'm also losing the one person with whom I have a real "history" here. Ever since the very first day of my internship back in 2006 - in fact, since before the internship, when we traded emails as strangers in New York and London about wanting to travel to Pakistan and Sudan and Afghanistan during what was meant to be a temporary summer stint in Dubai - E has been my life here.
From our heady no-rules no-responsibilities days as interns, to negotiating job offers and goading each other into moving back, to flat-hunting and car-buying and bureaucracy-tackling, to crazy euphoric spur-of-the-moment financially irresponsible travel, to "real life" (or as close as you come to that in Dubai) and all its myriad ups and downs, E has been with me through this whole crazy adventure, and as many times as he's almost gotten me arrested and/or made me die of alcohol poisoning and/or made me want to kill him for clogging the sink with bacon grease (sometimes they all go together), I can honestly say that I don't regret a moment of the craziness we've shared together.
I think it's rare to meet a person - especially a platonic relationship - who carves out a niche in your life that you know no one else can ever fill, but that's E. Every time I wake up on a Saturday morning and feel a craving to drink secret vodka-tonics out of a water bottle by the pool all day, every time I sit down at the dining room table on a Wednesday night and start clicking through non-functioning websites of obscure African or Central Asian airlines to see where I can go for the weekend, every time I come home from work brimming with gossip about random internecine Dubai political or economic drama that's just begging to be dissected and discussed, I will miss him. And let's be honest, that's about 95% of my time in Dubai. But life moves on, I suppose, as does "life" in Dubai.
In other news, I ran the Dubai Marathon last weekend. Marathon #6 for those who are counting, and it is kind of exciting that I'm now at the point where I'm like "meh... I'm doing a marathon tomorrow, whatevs." I mean, I still have the elaborate and very real wishes for death from miles 20-26, but those can be managed. I ran 3:58, which remains 20 minutes slower than my PR but is 40 minutes (!!!) faster than Dubai last year, which I ran with no training, and 16 minutes faster than Beirut 6 weeks ago. Next stop is the Ras Al Khaimah half-marathon here in the UAE in February, then the Two Oceans ultra-marathon (35 miles, yahoo!) in Cape Town in April, perhaps with another full marathon sometime in between (budget and schedule permitting).
DXB was super-fun because I ran the first half with both New Blonde BFF L and Guy Friend M, and I hung tough with GFM until mile 20. GFM rowed varsity crew at Pr!ncet0n and is an amazing athlete who is very intense about self-discipline and pushing himself and being crazy, so we had a great time sharing dramatic glycogen-deprived musings about influential coaches and sports as a metaphor for life and Why We Run and The Things We Have Learned. (Heady stuff, right?!) At 20 miles he peaced out to finish in 3:48, and I popped in my headphones (for the first time ever in a race) and powered through the last 6 to the tune of "Eye of the Tiger" and "Right Now" on repeat. It was fab. Then we limped home and E made brunch back at the flat for us and a dozen of our mutual friends (see aforementioned lamenting).
And that's that. The inauguration last night was amazing, and I feel a real euphoria about this new path we're embarking upon as a nation - in fact, we were all like "Wait, why don't we live in America right now? Why can't we go help?!" What was less amazing was that someone brought Hennessy (to toast the first African-American president, obvs) and I drank some and became very tipsy and was quite inauguration-hungover despite my hope to the contrary. As I've always said... it springs eternal. And it is, as President Obama so keenly tells us, audacious.
Anyhow, this weekend will be crazy as per usual: I have a family friend from TN in town as of tonight, and E's going-away party is tomorrow night, and we're all going snorkeling in Oman on Friday, and then I fly to Syria on Sunday, and then I think I am going straight from there to a ski trip in Lebanon next weekend.
Distractions = yay. Hope = audacious. Post = long. Sleep = good.
