Dubai Arrival (11.4.07)

It happened! I had to leave Cairo :(. It was a bittersweet departure for me, since despite swearing on the first day that you couldn't pay me enough to live in the grungy, loud, in-you-face, hustle-and-bustle city of 17 million people, by the last day I had gotten comfortable with some of its ideosyncracies. But it wasn't until I hit the sterile and stratified world of Dubai that I really missed Cairo.

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Flight was at 9:00, so I got approximately 1.5 hours of sleep between packing, hanging out with Let Me Inn staff, and getting up at 5:45 to get to airport. I can no longer be considered to be traveling "light", since both my backpack and daypack are stuffed to the gills and straining at the zippers and I have a duffel bag that is also full to the brim with over $1000 worth of costumes for the troupe.

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I don't remember much of the flight from Cairo, though I remember very clearly not really being ready to leave Zizo, my new friend and guide through the Cairo craziness, when it was time to check in at the departures hall. At the Cairo airport, the check-in desks are AFTER security, so I ended up saying my final goodbye through safety glass. I was also mortified to be leaving with an unpaid hotel bill. I had a mix-up about how much money I could get out of the machines in a 24-hour period and ended up having some fairly embarrasing situations of having to borrow money and then not being able to pay them back. I think Western Union is in my future.

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I was fast asleep during most of the 4-hour flight to Dubai, and upon arriving noticed a distinct change in infrastructure at the Dubai airport. Enormous wallboards advertised real estate development and Rolex watches and signs were everywhere and well-lighted. Standing in line at passport control took well over an hour, despite the fact that there were probably 20 lines open. There must have been 600 people in the lines at any given time, with a good third of them being dark-skinned Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis who are likely coming to work on the booming construction crews in Dubai.

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I got my luggage and headed for the taxi stand. Another shocker! Instead of two dozen young guys hollering at you to be your guide or to find you a taxi, you get in a very civilized que and a large sedan pulls up with a uniformed driver. Very few words are spoken at anytime in the exchange (contrast this with the half hour of banter I had with almost every Cairo taxi driver whether they spoke English or not). The windows are up, the airconditioning is on, there is a meter running, and the entire ride is eerily silent. No road noise, no wind noise, honking, no pedestrians in the road, no bartering on price. The roads in Dubai are well paved, though they aren't real creative with their naming. While the major throughfare get actual names, the rest are just given a neighborhood number and a street number. Thus, my current apartment hotel is on Al Rollo Street near street 22. Its not really a grid system, so the naming of the streets seems strange.

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Whereas at the airport it seemed that 100% of the staff was Emirati, with the women wearing slimming black abayas and sequined black headscarves and the men wearing the traditional white shirt-dress and white headscarf/black headband combo, the hotel seems the be staffed entirely with Indians. It is impossible to know which language to speak here! I think that English is the happy medium, but today (Monday) I was approached by a group of foreign tourists who wanted to take my photo by the Creek. I asked where they were from and they said Iran. When I asked if they spoke Farsi, they answered in Arabic and said they only spoke arabic...hmmm.

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I have two nights at this hotel and decided I was going to make the most of the $100+ that I am spending on it. I went for a short walk to get my bearings, check email, and pick up some dinner, and then spent the rest of my waking time (not so much) channel surfing the multilingual cable channels. I enjoyed Indian soap operas, clips from old Arabic movies and modern music videos, and both CNN and Animal Planet in English before falling asleep while skimming an instructional video that I purchased from Mohamed on my last night. I will have to work harder at being a tourist tomorrow!