Tuesday, June 21, 2005

Wanted: outside airconditioner with variable icicle control

With all the sabre rattling and ructions that have been happening in the middle east lately, you could be forgiven for thinking that it's a dangerous place to live. In fact, the millions living in South Korea for the last few decades in, technically a war can testify that it's not all gun toting, raping and pillaging.

The same goes for Dubai. In fact, the KLM flight to the city, where you can still sweat your balls off at 11pm at night in a wife beater singlet, passed over Baghdad. During that time, I had glanced at the TV screen for the compass direction toward Mecca and surruptitiously placed the complimentary Dutch blanket on the floor and recited the best of the Koran I knew (i.e. nothing). I think that got us through unscathed at 38,000 feet. The United Arab Emirates is a conglomeration of seven emirates; a couple of these in Dubai and one surrounding the captial - Abu Dhabi, where I'm staying at the moment.

Every national demographic has some sort of witty intro conversation that when they meet a fellow stranger. For England, it's the romantic and magical grey drizzly skies and the country's penchant for little sunshine during the winter months. For the Australians, it's their stirling effort in the cricket against the English and Bangladeshies. For New Zealand, it was who's going to fill the hole that Graham Capill left in the Cristian Heritage party, at least that was when I headed back to Europe - poor Gazza. Anyhow, here in Dubai it's the creepy temperature. You'd probably wonder if anyone goes outside when it's about 35 degrees and 80% humidity by 8 o'clock in the morning, and creeps up to around 42 and lingers there till around 7pm. It then plunges to back down to 35 for a few minutes, then hurtles back up to the high heavens. No prizes for guessing that for the summer months, it's indoors time. It's pretty weather for me - the closest I can remember was when I disembarked an Air New Guinea flight in Lae for the first time in mid summer. At 10 years of age, I wouldn't say I was donning the wife beater and sweating myself silly, but whatever the equivalent at 10 was, I would have been doing it.

Still, I've spent a couple of days in Dubai and a few in Abu Dabi (all work stuff) and I can sense that I've grown more tolerant of new places. For example, you can jump in a taxi and it seems that learning English was a distant memory at University for the driver, while instead they were squandering someone's money in bars (or juice bars, depending on your religious flavour). Now don't mind that asking them:

"Do you accept credit card?", is responded with a quick: "Yes".

In fact, every question is responded to in this manner, followed by a glance in my direction for guidance on the appropriate body language to display, and I'd grow progressively suspicious. Whereupon my arrival (after two detours to "here you want to go") I'd show them my credit card and just get a blank stare and rapant hand waving that indicates:

"No, I don't take credit card. Don't you understand 'No' you simple foreigner tourist? Now what are you going to do?".

The weekend starts on Thursday, so I'll have a chance to go walkabout and grab some photos and hunt down a beer. I'll be here for a couple of months, at least, so I'll be having plenty of time to see if I can do some real gun toting in the desert.

Stick 'em up!

Thursday, June 16, 2005

Show us ya clogs

For some reason I woke up this morning feeling distinctly seedy. Not in the sense that people or things went where they shouldn't have, but just from hefty doses of yeast drink ingestion the night before. I was my last real night of soaking up a taste of Amsterdam before I head down to Dubai for a few weeks on Friday.....for the second time. In typical middle east fashion they had reneged on the original date I had to fly down down.

Anyhoo, it's given me extra time to enjoy the sweet nectar of the Honey that is Amsterdam - clogs and all. Last Wednesday night Emile, some of his workmates and I went to see Mylo. I'm sure the guy was lip syncing some of his music but the crowd had better things to do than form a lynch mob. I've been here for just over a couple of weeks and stayed my way between hotels and Emile's place in true prostitutional form.

There were a couple of really nice days here and had to relegate myself to sitting in the park down the road from Emile's place with my laptop hammering out some stuff for work with Dutch talent wandering around all day. Emile lives in a lively suburb called De Pijp (pronounded "pipe") and has a vertical slice of a lot of what exemplifies suburban cloggy culture. A large daily market with the hurly burly of one you'd find in the stix of Bombay. There are also plenty of coffeeshops around to satisfy anyone's THC habit. For you straight arrows, normal Dutch cafes also sprawl on to the footpaths with the locals drinking their Beerjes - typically either Amstel or Heineken.

In a couple of weeks I'm flying back to Amsterdam for an hour, then flying on to Copenhagen for three or four days to check out the Roskilde festival - 50 cent......yeah what a blowout. Then flying back on Sunday to Amsterdam and hanging there for a day or so, then back to Dubai.

Wednesday, June 01, 2005

My humour enters the dryer parts of the Gobi

Is it wrong to find every week that you're finding more and more of the cartoons and captions in The Economist funny? It used to be a wry smirk, but now it's increased in intensity to an audible chuckle reading about their cynicsim of Mugabe's elections. Oh what a riot....Ardent cynics will retort that I didn't have a sense of humour to begin with and it's not possible to go lower than rock bottom anyway. I rekon I'm a bit of a funny buggar, so we'll go with the assumption that I can tickle funny bones from time to time.

Imagine if you will that a sense of humour as a sliding scale. As you start "getting" humour that you once thought to be reserved for crusty old fossils, does it mean you lose the ability to laugh at toilet humour? The way I imagine it is you have a window of what you rekon is funny. This sliding scale moves with your ability to laugh at new stuff. However this scale has several dimensions, in much the same way that calling someone an ultra liberal doesn't necessarily mean they're anarchist (see http://politicalcompass.org/).

So let's try a simple test. Have I lost my sense of humour?.......doodle...... Yep, still funny on this side of the keyboard. But at the same time, I don't laugh any more at dudes with wacky ways of walking or speech problems.

So it's ok to laugh at grown up newsmagazines and still have a filthy sense of humour when you're out with your mates on the waste. There, all justified to myself.

Now I'm going to see if there's anything cool on the bloomberg channel here in my hotel room that I'm staying at during a business trip. I'm also pondering over whether I need to press my trouser pants overnight and if my new business cards have arrived at the office.

See: young at heart...going forward!