Jordan in the morning!

I went to Jordan on 12 hours’ notice, for which I am proud as I’m not someone who has the luxury of living spontaneously very often. The best laid plans fell apart around 8pm yesterday. I had planned to join my brother on his flight from Dubai to Sri Lanka, and stay for a few days while he shuttled back and forth between Dubai and Sri Lanka a few times over four days for work. We bounced around the idea of me going along weeks beforehand when he got his schedule.  But in a moment of double-checking details, my brother discovered that just 10 days prior, Sri Lanka changed their visa rules to require Americans to attain a visa in advance instead of upon entry.  Lest I be relegated to five days of trying to avoid the heat of Dubai without it involving shopping malls – a nearly impossible task -- my brother and I looked at flights with open seats and no longer than three to four hours, and with the likelihood of some English speaking; with only five days, I wouldn't have a lot of time to allocate to long misunderstandings about where the toilet is or making it clear that I’m not interested in a prostitute. Though on my first off-the-beaten track adventure in 1995 in English-speaking Belize, I somehow inadvertently arranged for a prostitute to show up to my room, which proved momentarily handy when I needed help re-hanging the shower rod that had collapsed earlier in the day, but then got awkward when I then realized that we were both now standing in the shower.

My brother’s friend and fellow airline employee Omar was visiting when we discovered the Sri Lanka visa issue, and to my good fortune, he had been playing around with the idea of going to Jordan during an upcoming 4-5 day stretch of days off, and unloaded all of his intellectual Jordan trip-planning property on me.  Within about an hour I had a rental car reserved and my first night’s stay figured out.  I’d figure out the rest on a day by day basis.

My flight put me in Jordan’s capital, Amman, by mid-morning and I was in my rental car shortly thereafter. The rental car agent, an older and jolly man, remarked that on the day of my return, it would be his birthday and he would working because he always works, even on his birthday, which was Monday, the day that I would be sure to see him because I was returning the car that day. He wanted to be really sure I knew.

In anticipation of some squirrely driving norms I read about on the internet, I had reserved a mid-sized car under the urban legend that a slightly bigger car with slightly more metal will protect me in a slightly large collision. The car I received was no where near the size of the mid-sized car in the photo that I reserved on the internet, and I’m pretty sure that no matter what I reserved or what I paid for, I would have been given the same crappy car that was delivered to me.  It had the comfort, handling and size of a Radio Flyer wagon, and at a speed of around 100 km/hour (roughly 60 mph) it felt like parts of the car – inside and out – were falling off. Indeed, I think I returned the car with one less hubcap than what I started with but the apathetic guy working the check-in either failed to notice or didn’t care.

I drove south for about 150 miles, wondering often if I had just missed the turn to my initial destination, Petra. I was told at the airport that the road signs in Jordan were abundant.  Indeed, the road signs were abundant. Abundantly written in Arabic. Or, a destination would be written in English but followed by words in Arabic. When you see your intended destination written on a sign it often means some upcoming course of action is needed. My only resources were Bedouin people who somehow live in this barren, hot and desolate landscape, and on my one attempt in asking a Bedouin for clarification about the way to Petra, he pointed to one of his sheep. He could see the confusion in my eyes, and to clarify his initial response, he pointed to another sheep.

My further complication was the signs depicting upcoming roads and turns reminded me of Chutes and Ladders. They resembled shapes consistent with what a 2 year old comes up with when given a crayon.  I’ve never seen such options to drive in shapes that resembled question marks and EKG results. And there’s massive roundabouts  fed by an insensible number of roads. No reasonable  person designs a round-about that is fed by 11 roads, the maximum I counted in one instance which took me three laps to count and one additional lap to confirm, which was how I passed the time while acknowledging my complete uncertainty about where to go, and after completing an oral cursing of the Jordanian department of transportation.

I have a mixed history with roundabouts. In Mexico City about six or seven years ago, I went on an early morning run, and made a mental note of the roundabout near my hotel that included a statue of Jesus in the middle of it. It would be my landmark to insure a successful return to my hotel.  And then I promptly got lost for two to three hours and gained a greater appreciation for the devotion of Mexico’s 85% Catholic population to Him as the overseer of traffic, as He presided over many roundabouts in the vicinity of my hotel.  By the time I returned – in a taxi – my colleague had called the police, we missed our departing flight, and later that morning I dropped a 20 litre glass water container at the feet of Mexico's national park service administrative leadership team. 

Back to today, though. Eventually I made it to Petra, home of the ancient civilization that was carved out of rock more than 2,000 years ago by an industrious and extinct Arabic group called the Nabataean. It reminded me of cultural resources protected in places such as Mesa Verde in Colorado or Tikal in Guatemala.  At Petra there are massive mausoleums, facades, a theater, all carved meticulously from the surrounding stone with impressive size and flare.  There’s a few miles’ worth of walking to see it all.

It’s easy to feel impressed with Petra the civilization, but difficult to feel impressed by Petra the tourist destination. I have mixed feelings about my time there.  Approximately every hundred meters along the trail there is a vendor selling tea, soda, water, magnets, figurines and a variety of trinkets that are labeled to be “real Bedouin” including the snow globes. Sadly, nearly all of these vendors are Bedouins who don’t just sell the wares at these stands but also live and sleep in their canvas-covered shops overnight.  Bedouins are a historically nomadic and herding population that comprise about a third of Jordan’s population, but the herding tradition has waned over the years and left many Bedouins without a clear livelihood, and many have taken up tourism as an alternative.  I struggle between empathy for their situation, respect for their need to make a living like the rest of us, and quite honestly, the impact on my experience as I’m offered and sometimes demanded to buy a cup of Bedouin tea or buy a bracelet. When I declined, it was sometimes followed by a guilt-laden comment in broken English. The only way to avoid this situation, as I saw it, would be to purchase a cup of tea at every request and I didn’t have the appetite for 800 cups of tea.

I got an early start at Petra so I could see sunrise from its highest point, which overlooks the same Rift Valley in Kenya that I have visited so many times 2500 miles to the south.  At the final saddle of the trail there’s a number of options to ascend a higher point for a view of the valley, and I absolutely loved that two signs, side by side, made identical claims of “best view of the valley” with arrows pointed in exactly opposite directions.  I wondered if they were also designed by the Jordan department of transportation. I wanted to determine for myself which had the best view, but in both cases was denied because access to the best view required a purchases from the vendor along that respective summit trail.

I reached the furthest point at Petra by mid morning, and then returned upstream against a wanderlust and frighteningly large current of tourists. The crowds became larger as I approached the trailhead, and just beyond the trailhead was a cluster of buses jockeying for parking spots and struggling to turn around in confined spaces. I marveled that such insanity existed at a World Heritage Site. I stood and watched this circus act for a few minutes while lamenting that my camera battery had died, preventing me from taking a video. 

Most tourists walked with their heads facing upwards to look at Petra’s various structures which means the tourist scene in Petra is more like a cacophony of stumbling tourists on Petra’s uneven trails. Many had some kind of branding on their person required by their tour company to insure no one accidentally gets mixed up with the wrong group.  Individuals in one group were given bandanas in a hunter orange color and obviously told to wear them around their arms; a World Heritage Site gang, if you will. Another group wore large, bright yellow visors, and I wondered how adult-aged paying clients were willing to go along with this. And some people just don't have the right hair for visors.

I left Petra with some uncertainty about what to make of my experience and headed for the Red Sea, about 80 miles south, with Aqaba as my intended destination. Aqaba is Jordan’s only port city, and it sits a few miles north of the border with Saudi Arabia and directly adjacent to the border with Israel.  Overall Jordan shares a border with these two countries as well as Egypt, Syria and Iraq, and if you’re keeping tally, most of those countries are engaged in or on the precipice of or recent recovery from high levels of civil unrest. Saudi Arabia is the exception though it is a country that beheads people in public for non-violent crimes, cuts of hands of shoplifters, and whose most recent breakthrough in women’s rights is allowing girls to play sports within their girls-only schools. 

My hotel was just south of Aqaba, or so I thought.  The hotel I booked, as it turned out, was located in Egypt. Both countries have a “Tala Bay” and I booked a hotel with the word “Tala Bay” in the name and located on the Red Sea without reading all of the important details, such as whether or not the hotel was located in the same country where I was visiting.   On my way to the incorrect Tala Bay hotel, just outside of the town, I missed the turn and ended up at Saudi border, and wondered which part of my body would be dismembered for a U-turn.

The hotel was understanding about my mistake and gave me a room at the same rate as I had booked at their sister hotel in Egypt. In the period of confusion about my reservation in which four additional employees were enlisted, no one came up with the suggestion that I was booked at the hotel with the exact same name in two different countries and situated on opposite shores of the Red Sea.  Whether it was true or not, I felt like I was the first person in their history to make the mistake, and it seems like this would happen more often.  But maybe it doesn't and so instead I just felt stupid.

I swam and snorkeled in the Red Sea but in hindsight would have stayed closer to town where I would have had easier access to walk around to get a feel for the vibe of the place and its people. There was a pleasant boardwalk in town with families, fishermen, couples and other walks of life enjoying it, vendors selling apricots, pistachios and oranges from the backs of trucks, and groups of teenagers on break from school and engaging in the universal teenage behavior of "hanging out", the only verb I know of that doesn't actually imply doing anything.

The next day I ventured north to the Dead Sea which was about 150 miles north on a highway that paralleled the border with Israel, of which I was reminded approximately every mile by either a lookout tower with multiple soldiers or signs announcing that any stopping of vehicles or photography was strictly prohibited and that soldiers had the right to “act accordingly” to any suspicious behavior.  It was a clear reminder that this part of the world is extremely tenuous, so much so that getting a flat tire along this highway could be interpreted as grounds for suspicion.  It’s a stressful part of the planet.

I arrived at the Dead Sea, which sits 1400 feet below sea level, got out of the car and was assaulted by a heat that I would not normally associate with something that can be experienced on Earth.  There’s a lot written in the Bible about this part of the world of course. For example, Moses and his entourage are said to have walked around this desert for 40 years. I barely tolerated the walk from my car to the hotel lobby.  If the story is true, Moses is the biggest bad ass to have ever existed.

I did the requisite Dead Sea activities of smothering my body in its muddy soil which is said to have therapeutic age-defying properties. I did this twice and awaiting the amazing results as I type. I also did the standard lying on my back in the sea with a newspaper, which required no effort to maintain because of the added buoyancy provided by so much salt.  It was strange. I couldn't physically touch the bottom of the sea because of it, until I dove down really hard and then learned what water with super high levels of salt content feels like in your eyes.

The next day I experienced the highlight of my Jordanian adventure, a canyon hike in which trekkers walked upstream literally in the river. I have done similar treks  in the Narrows of Zion National Park in Utah, but this one felt more adventurous. We should have known something was peculiar when we were offered life jackets -- for a hike, remember -- at the trailhead and told to leave our cameras in the car because they would get ruined.  The canyon was narrow in places, and it was fed by dozens and dozens of waterfalls that entered from dozens and dozens of entry points far above us, often carrying a very high volume of water. We hiked in the warm air and the torrential waterfall downpour of warm rain.

In a few spots along the river, there were large boulders with cables or ropes to assist in climbing up and over them. Imagine climbing up a rock using only a cable and with no footholds while torrents of water spilled over the rock and directly into your face. It was simultaneously terrifying and hilarious. This scenario repeated itself multiple times.  I made the remark at one juncture that “there’s no way this is the route up this section” but indeed it was the route up that section and every part of my body was given a good flushing while I proceeded through, up and over it. I hiked with a few Germans I had met in the parking lot, and we took turns with who went first when confronted with these obstacles, perhaps to spread around the risk of dying by being the first one up a section, though no one explicitly stated it. At one point, while climbing up a series of rocks in what was essentially a class 3-4 rapid, one of them turned to me and said “Das ist not intelligent.”

Overall, the hike was ridiculous amounts of fun.  Absolutely ridiculous amounts of fun. The Germans were staying at a super swanky Dead Sea resort and in yet another moment of good karma, earlier that day two people in their larger party had to leave the trip early on a moment’s notice, and they offered me their room which was paid for and for which they could not receive a refund due to the last minute cancellation.  It wasn’t a place where I would spend that kind of money in a million years for a night in a hotel because I would choose to pay my mortgage instead,  but they insisted that I take the room and maybe buy the group a round of drinks. Done.  And so I again had my soiree with the luxurious high life for a limited but entirely enjoyable gluttonous period of time. I’ve been riding this Good Karma Train for awhile now, and I can only figure the that journey must be coming to an end sometime soon, so start asking favors and requests because I need to replenish the tank.

How to describe Dubai....

How to describe Dubai to anyone who hasn’t been there is a challenge. Most of us have built parts of Dubai when we played around with piles of legos as a kid – tall towers erected one after the other, laid out in such a way that the functionality of our lego city would be challenging but not impossible.  Dubai is one part Vegas, one part Disneyland, and one part Gotham City, but without the trashy people, ungracious kids or Wonder Woman in a jet that was pointlessly invisible since she herself was not invisible so it would just look like a buxom woman moving in the air while in the sitting position, respectively.  Dubai’s urban planning was possibly completed on Sim City by a classroom of second graders who ate a box of Twinkies each beforehand.  It’s home to the world’s tallest building, world’s largest water fountain, world’s only indoor ski slope, world’s only housing development in the shape of the planet, and other “world’s only”-laden landmarks.  At some point, the “world’s only” designation is overkill.

Everything  in Dubai is so clean and often so luxurious. I went for a run and the sidewalk was adorned with tiles that reminded me of ones I recently ruled out for a flooring project because they were too expensive.  The government recently announced that they were purchasing police cars with a pricetag of more than $500,000 each. That wasn’t a typo. One Dubai police car is more than the value of everything I own, or more accurately stated, that my bank mostly owns but is willing to let me buy from them over the course of 30 years.

Actual photograph of one of many Dubai skylines, this one from 124 floors up

And it’s hot.  Hellish hot.  I went on my tile sidewalk runs around 5am because much later and the temperature becomes unbearable, and at that hour I also didn’t have to run by anyone else and wonder if running is what anyone else does in Dubai or if they figured I was an ex-pat just up to some insensible ex-pat activity in the heat because we need to retain our routine. As it was, I returned from these at-dawn runs as a sweaty mess, looking like at some point I fell into the nearby 30-acre manmade Lake Dubai that was constructed in front of the 5.4 million square foot Dubai Mall and in the shadows of the 163-story high Burj Karifa building. Unfortunately I couldn't cool down by swimming in Lake Dubai because it’s prohibited, I assume because of the danger of swimming in a lake with hundreds of underwater fixtures for the elaborate 275 meter fountain located in the lake. Further, the fountain is choreographed to a combination of more than 25 songs that includes Lionel Richie, Beyonce, Celine Deon, Andrea Bocelli and the national anthem of United Arab Emirates (UAE).  Something for everyone, except the Lionel Richie stuff because certainly no one has liked the music of Lionel Richie since 1991.

UAE is the country in which Dubai, one of seven emirates (think of an emirate as a state), is located. The country itself isn’t large; the entire north-south length can be driven within a few hours. Two of the emirates --  Dubai and Abu Dhabi --  – have the concentration of wealth in this country, and their respective leaders (called “sheikhs”) have essentially been engaged in an intra-country duel for at least a decade to out-build, out-glitz and generally out-do the other, which is why both Dubai and Abu Dhabi have their over-the-top images.

Dubai baffles me that it even exists.While its roots are in fishing and pearl harvesting, those industries were not so abundant that a country of nearly 8 million people and the 13^th highest per capita GDP in the world could emerge from a desert with essentially no nearby source of fresh water.  I associate most large cities in the world as having to pass through a blue-collar, industrial phase or be home to a massive seaport, on its way to significant post-industrial economic wealth. The U.S. and many European cities had their industrial revolutions.  Australia had its coal-driven heyday.  Dubai seems to have skipped that phase; it went straight to post-industrial.  

Of course there’s oil around here – UAE is a top 10 world producer -- but UAE and Dubai’s wealth doesn’t stem only from petrol. The country’s leaders had more foresight than to put all of their chickens in one oily basket.  Dubai is geographically situated in close proximity – relatively speaking – to Europe, Africa and Asia.  As the shift began to the global economy, particularly as the earliest signs emerged that India, China and the African continent were ripe for impressive economic growth, Dubai postured itself as THE place for companies to locate a branch, a division, a department of their organization.  Solicit, market and advertise that over a few decades, throw in a lot of tax-free incentives and the novelty of taking your kids on a camel ride in the desert, and voila, you have an influx of wealth, ex-pats and today’s Dubai.  Dubai’s airport and its government-run airline, Emirates, is an example of this “global hub” vision. A look at the Emirates departure screen at the airport is staggering. Nonstop flights to all of the world’s major cities on the globe; their vision is for anyone in any major world city to be one-stop away – Dubai – from any other major world city. Impressive.

The city has a weird vibe, or maybe it’s better to say it lacks a clear vibe, or a defined soul unless it can be defined by mega-malls, and I hope we don’t ever elevate malls to some kind of cultural iconic status. Here’s my analysis of this “soulless-ness”.  Dubai’s population is 80% ex-pats. That’s mind-boggling to me.  Most of them are here with similar plans to work for 5-10 years to make a much higher and mostly tax free income than they could at home, then return home and coast for awhile with your savings, or send that savings home each month so your kids can go to a university or your family can be more comfortable. There’s A LOT of sacrifice in Dubai of people working, particularly in the service industry, who live thousands of miles away from everything that is comfortable and familiar in order to send  money home for the well-being of their families. Then there’s the ones who are here more simply to get rich. Tolerate the heat for a decade and be rich in the end.  Why not? It’s not for everyone.  One of three people I keep in touch with from high school moved to Dubai at his suggestion with his wife and young child a few years ago, and they were back home in the U.S. months later, begging his wife to please talk to him again someday.

There’s large communities of countries represented here.  Brits and Americans hold a lot of the skilled labor positions. Indians seem to have a significant portion of the small business market. Filipinos, Bangladeshis and people from many African countries appear to comprise much of the service sector. But since everyone is here temporarily, I didn’t get the feeling that many invest in establishing some kind of integrated celebrate-the-differences community. Sort of like middle school, people stick to their zones of familiarity and talk poorly about those outside of that group, until you’re forced to be on (warning: junior high memory coming up) a sacket ball team with Jennifer Freed and find out that actually, she’s not so bad.
    

Instead, people in Dubai seem to stay within the familiarity of their country groups and well, everyone just tolerates each other. They seem to stick to their own norms for how to drive, how to do business, how to communicate, how to behave at a Lionel Richie fountain show.  Those norms aren’t always compatible, as evidenced by the abundance of car honking and the number of times I hit shoulders with a passer-by on a crowded walkway or store and received a glare rather than anything that resembled “oops, sorry!”  

Within my brother’s social world, however, I didn’t meet another American or European among the lot, so there are exceptions to what I just wrote. It just has to happen with intention. My brother’s friend Khalid, a Moroccan, took over my brother’s kitchen for hours to make a traditional Moroccan meal, which is to say it used nearly every spice on the rack, and it was shared among the three of us, their Greek friend Anna, and their Emirati friend, Omar.  This is why I love food and cooking – it can be about so much more than caloric intake, and facilitate fellowship and camaraderie.

With my brother's friend Khalid, buying spices for a Moroccan meal.

My brother met Omar when Omar smashed into my brother’s vehicle. That's a surefire way to meet other people. Since my brother drives a vehicle that is roughly the size of a Burlington Northern locomotive, his vehicle didn’t sustain much damage but as it was told to me, Omar’s vehicle crumpled like an aluminum can. The process of accident reporting took hours, and feeling guilty for taking up so much of my brother’s time, Omar invited him to his family’s home for dinner.  I’m sure that seemed like an odd proposition by the person who just wrecked his car by smashing into yours, but Scott accepted, and they remain friends today. I'd have at least four more friends in my life if I took this approach.

My Dubai plans included some time and guiding by car-smashing Omar on a few occasions. With Omar, it was also an opportunity to talk to someone more poignantly about life in a predominantly Islamic country.  I have a few Muslim friends at home as well as in Kenya, though both are countries in which the Muslim faith is a significant minority to the presence of Christianity.  Omar and I got courageous with our questions with each other, and occasionally stumbled upon untruths we each held.  He was surprised to learn, for example, that it was legal for a U.S. president to be non-Christian, perhaps a mistruth he picked up at a tea party (subtle?).  I was surprised at how approving he was of his government that is ruled via an absolute monarchy.  “Our government gets things done,” he said. Valid point.  My current government, particularly at the federal level, would never be accused of being overly, or even sufficiently, okay, even marginally, productive.  

We paddled into some deeper waters on occasion, and I suppose the topics were fairly predictable for an American and a Emirati Muslim: U.S.-Arab nation relations, U.S. role in world matters, religious tolerance and freedoms, women’s rights, who has the bigger shopping malls, why skiing outdoors is better than in a place where you have a view of The Gap, and so on.  He was surprised at some of my remarks since they are often in contrast to my brother's perspectives. My brother and I don't have a lot of common ground on a lot of this stuff, probably because he is taller, dark hair, dark eyes and with a darker complexion, so why not let those differences carry over into our politics as well. It's not a problem so long as neither one of us actually talks to the other ever about anything. My mom swears we have the same biological parents.

In the end, Omar and ended up where these conversations have often gone with others around the globe with whom I’ve conversed, which is this: generally speaking, we’re all going about our days similarly. We wake up, we do things to meet our fundamental needs whether it be going to work, getting water, attending school, or whatever that means for our respective lives, and along the way we hope the days include moments that induce a feeling of happiness, fulfillment and maybe even laughter. How that shared vision for all seven billion lives on this planet gets lost amidst religious differences, wars, terrorism, violence, oppression and so on is the most colossal of failures. Now, I just over-simplified things there, and realize there are more layers of complexity to this stuff, or so I think. Though Omar commented that maybe it really was that simple. Maybe so. 

Dinner at a swanky Arabic restaurant in the desert. 

While in Dubai, I went on the world’s fastest roller coaster (three times), went to the 124^th floor of the world’s tallest building, bought a shirt in one of the world’s largest malls, had one of the world’s greatest buffets (my label) of Arabic food at a swanky resort in the Emirati desert, and visited a spectacularly beautiful mosque. I admire that my brother can live in a place that is so hot and so unclear about its identity aside from economic opportunity, and a bit jealous that he can have a meal with four people from four different continents after sending out a few text messages.  He goes to places like Bahrain and Sri Lanka on his days off, not to mention the places he stays for layovers as part of his pilot life.  And he’s a 10 minute walk to a Lionel Richie fountain show. 

I'll need to comb my hair

Lest I get too acclimated to the western hemisphere again or that I actually deal with the litany of house projects that have piled up, I left town again.   

This is my second visit to Dubai, where my younger brother lives and works as an airline pilot for Emirates Airlines. Among the perks needed to attract skilled labor to come live in the desert 9,000 miles away and where the temperature averages 118+ degrees during the summer months are airline benefits extended to their siblings, which is not the norm for airlines in the U.S.  And those benefits include mightily discounted guaranteed reservations.  I won’t share the actual cost because it will make you hate your siblings or your parents (in the case of only children) for not choosing to work for Emirates Airlines and making you eligible for cheap international airfare.

Emirates is an airline built around a goal to have the finest in-flight service on the planet. And god bless them for that.  

 Exhibit A:

I’m not sure it’s accurate to say this was my “seat.” It just doesn’t seem reasonable to give this the same name as the thing I sit on while riding a bike. I think “large personal flying space” or “alternate reality” is more correct.  I had two touch screen devices, a mini-bar, a seat that reclined fully to 180 degrees, and so many visits by the in-flight crew to check on my well-being or to give me stuff that I was almost embarrassed.  I swear to you it felt like Christmas morning with the amount of anticipation that I felt every time I so much as caught a glimpse of a flight attendant in my vicinity, particularly prior to takeoff and shortly thereafter when the flights attendants were handing out stuff like they were on a parade float. And they smelled so nice. Sometimes I wanted them to swiftly pass by just so I could smell the pleasant breeze.  Among the freebies:  Champagne, warm towels with a hint of lavender, noise-reducing headphones, a wine list, cologne, razors, toothbrushes, and slippers. I also got a comb. People who live a business class life comb their hair. I haven’t combed mine with anything other than my fingers since 1996 so the comb made me a little self-conscious that I might be out of my league and unable to relate to my fellow passengers, though I felt certain that I could play it off. Worst case, I could walk down the aisle with the comb conspicuously placed in my hand, go in the bathroom, and then sit there playing with the different cologne dispensers for a few minutes. “That under-dressed man is in there combing his hair,” they would think to themselves. And then they would go in the bathroom after me and comb theirs. Solid plan.

On one passby the flight attendant asked me if I would like a mattress for my seat, and of course I said yes which was followed by a few seconds of us looking at each other oddly until she eventually said “you’ll need to get out of your seat so I can retrieve it and lay it down.” Damnit. My rookie-ness was beginning to show itself. She touched a button on a console in my personal flying space and the door to yet another compartment within my suite emerged, this one containing the mattress, which she laid on the seat and then wished me a nice rest as she pressed another button which changed the lights in my flying space from standard "reading light yellow" to a soothing tint of blue.  I was ansty to get back into my suite because I wanted to start searching for other buttons and compartments that I had missed on my first sweep.  I was disappointed in myself that the mattress compartment and yellow-to-blue light swap option had eluded me. I'm typically a thorough person.  Business class was challenging my self-identity.

The flight attendant checked back within a minute to ask if I would like to be awakened for the mid-flight snack services but also offered that if I chose to sleep through those services, I could always go to the back where there’s a lounge with the same snacks.  I thought to myself that she’s insane if she thinks I’m going to sleep my way through this luxury, and then I had another thought:

The lounge? On an airplane? 

Normally when I hear the word “lounge” I think of a darkly-lit place with velvet-clad booths and Barry White music where maybe my parents had a first date. Clearly I would have to reframe my paradigm of the term “lounge” during this 12.5 hour trip.

This aircraft was the Airbus A380, the single largest type of passenger aircraft on the planet. Depending on an airline’s layout preferences, it can seat about 550 people total on its two levels.  In the case of Emirates Airlines, the entire top deck is for First and Business class, and at the back of the top deck is a lounge. I just had a moment as I typed that last sentence in which I thought to myself that few people reading this are going to believe me.

The lounge area had a tall narrow hutch-like cabinet with a stack of mirrored shelves that presented food in glamorous ways that made me afraid to touch them, like they were on display more than available for eating. Cute little sandwiches cut into all the shapes, bruschetta with fresh mozzarella, warm cookies with fancy Swiss chocolate, raspberries on little skewers with a drizzle of balsamic.  This mirrored food tower was opposite a full bar, also with a mirrored background, and if you stood in just the right place, you could make it look the flight attendant working the bar had a never-ending series of bowls of olives sitting on her head. I robbed the photo below from the internet because I could not muster up the humility to take my own photo on-board and reveal my identity as an Emirates business class virgin.  I needed to hang with these people.

There was a period of time toward the beginning of the flight when I was a little panicked about what to do. There was a lounge, 11 episodes of Modern Family available on the personal entertainment system, a bunch of Academy-nominated and vaguely familiar sounding movies, more buttons and compartments to find, a comb with which to experiment, and I had to strategize about how to accomplish all of it.  On a busy day in my usual life, I often make an hour by hour plan for what needs to get done and when. I can’t believe I just admitted that but now that I did I feel better and I’ll probably start drinking more but Gato Negro is cheap so that's okay. I’ve never applied my hourly planning approach to a flight. Sometimes I make a list of work stuff I’d like to accomplish on long haul international flights but never have I planned it out hour by hour. But Emirates Airlines had overwhelmed me with options, and to gain some sense of control over that feeling, I had to plan.  First priority: drop the items from the list that were not dependent on being on that amazing aircraft.  That moved “visit lounge," "smell the flight attendants," and “watch Argo and Silver Linings Playbook”  up on the list and “comb my hair” and “sleep” down on the list.  “Modern Family episodes” would fill in for any unanticipated free time. I really didn’t know how much time to allocate for looking for more buttons and compartments, for example, so when that took 10 minutes instead of 30, that left room to spare for watching an episode. At work, I usually fill these unexpected brief moments of free time with eating Goldfish out of the snack bin for the nature center in which my title is "director" but clearly someone else does the work (thank you, Nicole and Kristen). 

I underestimated how much time it would take to go to the bathroom, and this threw me off schedule. The slow down occurred for lounge reasons. I had to walk past the lounge to get to the bathrooms and there was always a different selection of food each time I passed by, and I felt compelled to assess whether the ingredients in those foods could be purchased at a regular grocery store.  Saffron-infused cupcakes. Tahini eggplant kebabs.  You get the idea. Another element that slowed me down was the social norm in the lounge area on interaction with fellow passengers. I couldn’t just casually stroll by with my comb and go directly to the bathroom.  This was a club, clearly. And as a new (and temporary) member I had to undergo the initiation. I never joined a fraternity in college, but the feelings that emerged with the prospect of interacting with my fellow business class travelers on Emirate Airlines are what I associate with being an uncertain 18-year old trying vainly during pledge week to please-oh-please just fit in and plaster with me with embroidered Greek letters.   

Flight attendants, or “cabin crew” as they are more often referred to by a lot of international airlines, are easy for me to talk with.  My father is a retired airline pilot. My younger brother is currently a pilot; remember he's the source for this trek in Emirates Airlines fantasy world. My older brother is a pilot in the Coast Guard. My mom continues to defy her age and her peers and still works as a flight attendant, though she has matured (marginally) from those early days when she started in the 1960s when she would compete with her co-workers over who could shove their body most snugly in the overhead space. As a child, my mother adopted a favorite prank that included a piece of fake snot about 12 inches long that she stuffed in her nose in a wad, pretended to sneeze, and then it would just hang there while everyone in the near vicinity moved away, grossed out and uncertain about what to do exactly as a foot of snot dangled from her nostril. In one instance a woman went into her bra to get my mom a Kleenex.  The kicker: my mom rarely revealed it was a prank.  She would wrap that snot up in a napkin or Kleenex, and then carry on.  This wasn’t something she would do at kids’ birthday parties for a joke or in private settings only, mind you. They occurred most often in restaurants. Nice restaurants.  

She was/is also a master of the so-called “little white lie” though you might argue with her liberal definition of “little.” Telling your toddler son to lay collapsed in her arms so we could get to the top of the wait list at a busy restaurant because “he needs food with his medication” may not qualify as “little” in the big book of lies. To this day when I call her there’s a 50/50 chance she will pretend not to understand English, using a language she made up, and continues the charade until I either hang up or threaten her with the worst assisted living facility I can find when she's older, or by proclaiming that if she doesnt drop the charade I will start calling her by her first name and reserve the title "Mom for my dad's second wife, who he married when I was 35 years old.

Anyhow, the point I was on the road to making is I can speak the language of “airline” and know that the term “deadhead” isn’t always in reference to Jerry Garcia and when someone “works a turn” they are not referring to an act of prostitution but instead to the scenario when a flight arrives at its destination and then turns right around and goes back to where it came from.  So the easy entry point into lounge conversation would start with cabin crew. 

I met a really, really nice cabin crew member who is doing what so many ex-pats do in Dubai: work a ton to make a lot of money with the intent to return home within a decade or so. In her case, she is from the Philippines and working to save money to send her two sons to school, who remain in the Philippines and live with their grandmother.  She’s not living in Dubai to create an opportunity for her own self-indulgence – as many people here appear to be doing-- but instead living abroad and away from her own children so they will be able to attend university because, as she stated often, their education is the most important thing to her in the world.  “I know they are loved and nurtured,” I remember her saying, perhaps concerned that I was passing judgment on her decision to move away from her children. I loved her convictions, and that led to some talk about my work at a university and my small non-profit that supports education in Kenya, and then someone overheard the conversation, and next thing I know, I stood in a small circle of four people, none of from the same country but all in whole-hearted agreement about the importance of education for the well-being of ourselves and our world, and two with reasonably well-combed hair.  

I arrived Dubai mostly exhausted and jet lagged despite the 180-degree seat. Argo and Silver Lining Playbook were both amazing movies, I found a compartment right under my arm rest that held more pillows, the white wine that was fourth on the list of eight was delicious, and I shouldn’t eat a raspberry skewer and eggplant tahini at the same time.  

Over and out.  More soon on the actual Dubai visit.