Apparently I don't do things halfway. I start writing fiction, and instead of putzing around with short stories, I hammer out a full-length novel. I get my passport, and instead of vacationing in the Bahamas or Europe, I move to Dubai. And now, for my first international vacation, when most of my colleagues are going to tourist-friendly areas like Greece, Egypt, Turkey, and even Thailand, I go to freakin’ Bangladesh.
Our adventure began officially at 8 a.m. Monday morning (September 29th). A private cab took us to the Sharjah International Airport, in the neighboring emirate of Sharjah (just a few kilometers away from our apartment building), for our flight to Dhaka. As this was my first flight out of a non-U.S. airport, the attention to security (or relative lack thereof) was kind of surprising. Asha actually got through the first security gate (into the terminal) with a giant Swiss Army Knife in her pocket, which she showed to the guard and asked if it was okay for her to take with her. He said sure (the second guard, at the second security gate which lead to our particular gate, did confiscate it, but only after Asha had again volunteered that she had it on her person). I set off the metal detector, and the guard did sort of a cursory sweep of my person with the hand-held detector, then let me through. None of this silly x-raying of our shoes as we walk through barefoot. The guards threw casual glances at the x-ray machine as our luggage went through, more engaged in the jovial conversation they were sharing than in meticulous scrutinizing. Kinda interesting.
When we got through security, the immigration control agent stamped our passports with exit visas from the UAE. I guess a person is kind of in no man's land at a point like that. A man without a country. Although I guess the issuing country (i.e. the U.S., for my passport) would still be valid, though no flights from that airport flew to any of our native countries. But I digress.
We arrived in a large duty-free area, but instead of buying anything (as we had a good three-plus hours until our flight left), we headed to the food court, which, to our surprise, was not only open, but was also permitting patrons to eat their purchases right there in the food court. If the importance of this moment escapes you, it’s probably because you haven’t been reading my other entries (go back and read them!). Short version: it’s still the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and eating in public during daylight hours is illegal. Apparently the airport has their own regulations once you get past security. It may have only been nine in the morning, but let me tell you, that McDonald’s burger tasted darned good.
Fast-forward a few hours (and another burger… hey, I was hungry, and Lord knows we had no idea when the next meal we would eat would be (note: it ended up being at about ten p.m., Dhaka time), and we were in the departure lounge by our gate. Asha bought some Smirnoff at the duty free area for use in Bangladesh (because, again, we had no idea how long it’d be or how easy it’d be to get some sort of alcohol in Bangladesh… another Muslim country, still during Ramadan, and much less tourist-friendly than the UAE). I watched the baggage while the girls went to the restroom. Coming back, Rebecca started singing the ‘one of these things is not like the other’ song from Sesame Street to Asha. And she was right. The three of us were the only non-Bengalis waiting for our flight. In fact, we were the only people whose ancestry was not from the non-Indian subcontinent that we saw for days. We did meet a guy named Rashid in the lounge, though, who was of Bengali ancestry but who was raised in Canada and now lived and worked in Dubai. He gave us some tips on Bangladesh, some that encouraged us, some that made us wonder more and more what the heck we’d gotten ourselves into. He would be staying with a friend of his in Dhaka for the week. We swapped phone numbers, and he told us to call him if we needed anything.
The plane was about forty-five minutes late arriving, and there wasn’t any announcement (at least, not one that we could hear, or in a language we could understand) regarding the reason for its tardiness. Realizing that we had gotten a cheap flight and that we were going to freaking Bangladesh, we joked that they were busy building the plane. The whole trip was full of these ‘what-are-we-getting-ourselves-into, laugh-to-maintain-our-sanity’ moments. At last, the plane did arrive, and we left on an Airbus A320. We flew over the Arabian/Persian Gulf, Iran, Pakistan, and India before finally arriving in Bangladesh. Shortly before we landed, our flight attendants sprayed the cabin with insecticide. I didn’t realize that’s what it was at first, but apparently it was their attempt to abide by the health regulations of Sharjah (out of which Air Arabia is based) in staving off the spread of disease carrying bugs (we’ll see how successful those efforts were on the return trip on Day 6… stay tuned!).
It was dusk when our plane landed in Dhaka. One thing I noticed as we flew over was the relative darkness of the city, the lack of lights below, like most metropolis’s I had flown over or seen photographs of. A few streetlights, a lighted building or two, and a good chunk of headlights. It reminded me of Peter Pan’s Flight at Disney World, when the ride takes you over turn-of-the-century (that is, last century) London at night: the scene was dominated by those little sets of headlights rolling through the streets.
Finally we arrived at the gate and disembarked. Even in the terminal, there were no other westerners. ‘Welcome to Bangladesh’, a giant overhead sign greeted us. Indeed. We went to the passport control counter and were asked by the agent for our visas. We told him we didn’t have them, that we figured we could get them there, etc. etc. etc. Well, we were right. We were directed to go over to the currency exchange booth and pay fifty U.S. Dollars, returning to the passport control counter with a receipt. We did so, and got a fifteen-day visit visa stamp in our passport. Easy peasy.
After changing our money to Takas and searching unsuccessfully for some food or tourist information, we headed toward the airport exit. We met up with Rashid again at baggage claim, and he hooked us up with a driver who took us to the hotel where our friend Jorge was staying. And when we left the airport, that’s when Bangladesh really hit us.
There were armed guards with helmets and rifles slung over their shoulders making their rounds through the airport, who, like most people in the country that we encountered, would return any smile we gave with an even bigger one of their own. Kind of an unnerving sight, until they smiled at you. Several of them were holding back the mob of impoverished onlookers as cars and taxis left the airport. There was an iron-barred fence that enclosed the vehicle cue, and in each gap between bars, faces peered out at us, the unwashed masses come to see what sort of people were arriving at the airport today. The things you do for entertainment when you don’t have the technological trappings and economic prosperity of our Western world, I suppose. It kind of felt like we were on display, those dozens of eyes on us, taking in the sight of these light-skinned foreigners. Little did we know that this would prove to be a recurring theme throughout our journeys.
We got into a van with our luggage and a driver who spoke virtually no English. We spoke no Bengali, so it made for a fun match. Luckily, Rashid’s friend who hooked us up with the ride gave the driver instructions before we left, so we got to the hotel alright. The first thing I noticed when I got in the car (other than the people cramming themselves in to see the airport arrival festivities) was that the steering wheel was on the right side of the car. “Hey!” I observed. “They drive on the wrong side of the road here!” My comment was meant to be facetiously ethnocentric, but I had no idea how prophetic my words would prove, especially in the days to come.
After a van ride filled with traffic lights that weren’t working, long lines of street lamps that were broken or unlit, clogged intersections (where buses and rickshaws drove side by side), and several dark alley roadways, we arrived at our ‘hotel’. The Hotel Zakaria seemed kinda seedy, but that was exacerbated by the facts that a) this was Bangladesh, where everything is dirty and seedy by Western standards, and b) there wasn’t a whole lot of light in the lobby, the hallways, the stairwell, the restaurant, or the road outside. Ultimately, it was a nice enough place, a place to eat (where I almost cracked a molar on a piece of bone hidden inside a bite-sized morsel of ridiculously spicy chicken), sleep (once we got rid of the rat poop that was on Asha’s bedsheets), refresh ourselves (by brushing our teeth using bottled water), take photographs (like the plant that was growing in a bathtub in the hallway outside our room, or the giant cockroach in the stairwell that Jorge took up with immediately), and ride the elevator (that had no door, so we could actually touch the wall of the elevator shaft as we ascended… who needs fingers, anyway). We had dinner, explored a little, relaxed and chatted in our room, and then retired to bed. The driver that our hotel manager had secured to take us to Cox’s Bazar the next day would be arriving at 8 a.m., so we had to sleep fast. And sleep we did.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Bangladesh - Prelude to Adventure
I’ve now technically been to eight countries. I was born, and lived for most of my life, in the United States (1); I took a cruise in the western Caribbean in June 2003, spending a day each in Haiti (2), Jamaica (3), the Cayman Islands (4), and Mexico (5); I moved to the United Arab Emirates (6) in August 2008; and I spent a few hours in Oman (7) in September on my visa run across the border (read the previous blog entry for more on that little trip). My eighth country, though, was my first real international “vacation”, the first time I spent more than a day in a country that I wasn’t calling “home”. And boy did I pick a doozy: Bangladesh.
Our travel agent actually asked us, point blank, why we would want to go to Bangladesh. Apparently it’s not a popular tourist destination. Even among my extremely well-traveled colleagues, no one had gone to Bangladesh. But we were going.
Let me back up a bit. I wrote in a previous entry about the Eid al-Fitr holiday that marks the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. I wrote about how there was a distinct possibility that the Eid holiday would be extended from the original four-day weekend to a five-, six- or nine-day holiday. I also wrote about how, if the holiday were extended, I would go to Istanbul for four nights, and if it were not, I would go to Nepal. Well, by the time the Dubai Ministry of Education finally decided to extend the holiday, all of those packages were already snapped up. Some of my colleagues and I went to travel agents, scoured the internet, and phoned airlines to find out what was left that we could afford with our single paycheck we’ve received thus far. The answer: not much. Which was disappointing, but not devastating. There were plenty more holidays coming up, and I didn’t have much to spend on a trip yet anyway. I was kind of resigned to spending the week in town, perhaps going on a short trip or two to Abu Dhabi or Oman, or perhaps on an off-road camping trip in one of the neighboring Emirates. There was a lot of Dubai yet to be explored as well, and I had just started work on a new story idea that was really starting to take hold. Then, as things often seem to do when you become content with what you have, opportunity presented itself.
Maybe ‘reared it’s ugly head’ would be a more apt description. Two groups of friends/colleagues found two different trips available. One was to Bangkok, Thailand. The other was to Dhaka, Bangladesh. Actually, I didn’t know it was to Dhaka at first. I didn’t really know the capital of Bangladesh. It’s kind of one of those things where you’re like “oh yeah, I knew that” when you find something out, like dredging the deep recesses of your mind for some bit of information that you had acquired, but really didn’t properly catalogue it for recall. Incidentally, both were on my list of places to travel to someday. Bangkok, and Thailand in general, was a significant one (along with about fifty other countries). Bangladesh wasn’t. In fact, I really didn’t know much about what there was in Bangladesh. But incidentally, that was what won me over to going there instead of the ultimately preferred Thailand.
There were two main reasons why I chose Bangladesh over Thailand for this trip: lack of funds and lack of time to plan. Thailand has many ancient historical sites, touristy destinations, and other crap that I specifically want to see. Bangladesh has… well, I really didn’t know. So there were no expectations, no plans to make, no things that I just had to see/do/experience. The flight to Bangladesh was about 700 dirhams (~190 US$) less than the one to Thailand, and the lure of going somewhere that virtually no one had gone to was kind of exciting. So Bangladesh won. Thailand will be there, but the chance that I would find another opportunity to go to Bangladesh, especially with three other willing adventurers, was slim.
The idea of going to Bangladesh was the brainchild of Jorge, a Spanish (both in subject area and in nationality) teacher at our school who has taught in Thailand and traveled to 31 countries, including Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia, India, Sri Lanka, and Iran. For him, the trip was also born out of necessity, as the trip to Athens he was planning on taking ended up being more expensive than he was planning on. He had a Bengali kid or two in one of his classes who put the bug in his ear for doing something original by going to Bangladesh, and when I caught wind from a couple of my colleagues (who will be introduced momentarily), I thought, ‘hey, why not?’ Hook. Line. Sinker.
My other two fellow adventurers were both Canadians. Asha, a PE teacher, had traveled to some rough countries before, including Uganda, Ecuador, Kenya, Tanzania, and Thailand. Rebecca, who teaches science, had also traveled to 31 countries, including South Africa, Malaysia, and Singapore. All three of my companions had roughed it in much of their travels, staying in hostels and guest houses in Africa and South America, backpacking for four months across Europe, and bicycling from Bangkok to Singapore. An adventurous bunch. But they had never seen anything like Bangladesh.
The adventures began before we even left the country. Just deciding to go to Bangladesh (figuring out where we were going to go, the length of our vacation changing at the last second, the frantic search for flights, the ‘sure, why not?’ decision to go to Bangladesh of all places) set the roll-with-the-punches, fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants tone that would become par for the course during the trip. Jorge had bought his ticket before Asha, Rebecca and I did, and he left on Sunday (September 28). The three of us who were to follow him bought our tickets on Saturday (September 27) under the pretense given to us by the travel agent (who asked us why we wanted to go to Bangladesh) that we could get our visas at the airport upon arrival. He said that his information said that the country ‘strongly advised’ visitors to get visas prior to arrival, but that they are available at the airport. So we bought our tickets and decided to go to the Bangladesh Consulate in Dubai the next day (Ravi, the travel agent, called the main consulate in Abu Dhabi to confirm that his information about visas was correct, and he also found that we could get our visas beforehand, with same-day service (if we arrived at ten a.m., we could have the visas by one p.m.)). We left early, which really didn’t help us get to the consulate on time. No one seemed to know where it was. Lots of people thought they knew where it was, but unfortunately there were about three or four conflicting accounts as to where it was. Eventually we found it… and realized why no one knew where it was: it was tiny. It was really just a crappy two-story house that the Bangladeshi government decided to convert into their consulate. And I use the term ‘convert’ loosely. The second-story waiting area was a living room full of china cabinets, furniture from the seventies, packing boxes, and all sorts of other knick-knacks that looked like they belonged in the attic of some pack-rat grandmother.
After waiting for a while, the Assistant Consul (actually I don’t know what his title was, but he was the only guy other than the Consul General who had an office, so I’m deeming him as such for now) heard our inquiry and gave us some forms to fill out. Halfway through, we realized that we didn’t have a lot of these things that the form was asking us for. A sponsor letter? An invitation from the government of Bangladesh? Seriously? We asked the guy about it, and he said that we needed sponsor letters from our employers. Oh, and no, you can’t get same-day service. In fact, it’s eleven o’clock, our office is closed. What time did you open? Nine. Seriously? A two-hour workday? No wonder no one ever gets to visit your country. And no, you can’t get visas at the airport. You were told wrong. Wait, no, you can, Mr. Burns. Americans okay. No one else can get visas at airport. Crap. But the guy’s story changed several times while we were talking to him. Either he didn’t understand what we were asking at first, or he just didn’t know what the heck he was talking about. I kinda figured it to be a mixture of the two. So, no visas were to be gotten before we left, and in theory there weren’t going to be any available at the airport. Jorge’s flight left in about an hour for Dhaka. Maybe a quick turnaround flight. Maybe a reprise of Tom Hanks’s role in The Terminal. Or maybe, just maybe, we’d all manage to get into the country.
We left the consulate to grab some ‘sponsor letters’ from our school, just in case those might help our case with immigration officials in the Dhaka airport. On the way out of the building, though, a poster in the stairwell caught my eye. “Visit Bangladesh,” it said, “Before the Tourists Come.” Wow. Well, we were sure gonna try. And we wouldn’t be disappointed...
Our travel agent actually asked us, point blank, why we would want to go to Bangladesh. Apparently it’s not a popular tourist destination. Even among my extremely well-traveled colleagues, no one had gone to Bangladesh. But we were going.
Let me back up a bit. I wrote in a previous entry about the Eid al-Fitr holiday that marks the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. I wrote about how there was a distinct possibility that the Eid holiday would be extended from the original four-day weekend to a five-, six- or nine-day holiday. I also wrote about how, if the holiday were extended, I would go to Istanbul for four nights, and if it were not, I would go to Nepal. Well, by the time the Dubai Ministry of Education finally decided to extend the holiday, all of those packages were already snapped up. Some of my colleagues and I went to travel agents, scoured the internet, and phoned airlines to find out what was left that we could afford with our single paycheck we’ve received thus far. The answer: not much. Which was disappointing, but not devastating. There were plenty more holidays coming up, and I didn’t have much to spend on a trip yet anyway. I was kind of resigned to spending the week in town, perhaps going on a short trip or two to Abu Dhabi or Oman, or perhaps on an off-road camping trip in one of the neighboring Emirates. There was a lot of Dubai yet to be explored as well, and I had just started work on a new story idea that was really starting to take hold. Then, as things often seem to do when you become content with what you have, opportunity presented itself.
Maybe ‘reared it’s ugly head’ would be a more apt description. Two groups of friends/colleagues found two different trips available. One was to Bangkok, Thailand. The other was to Dhaka, Bangladesh. Actually, I didn’t know it was to Dhaka at first. I didn’t really know the capital of Bangladesh. It’s kind of one of those things where you’re like “oh yeah, I knew that” when you find something out, like dredging the deep recesses of your mind for some bit of information that you had acquired, but really didn’t properly catalogue it for recall. Incidentally, both were on my list of places to travel to someday. Bangkok, and Thailand in general, was a significant one (along with about fifty other countries). Bangladesh wasn’t. In fact, I really didn’t know much about what there was in Bangladesh. But incidentally, that was what won me over to going there instead of the ultimately preferred Thailand.
There were two main reasons why I chose Bangladesh over Thailand for this trip: lack of funds and lack of time to plan. Thailand has many ancient historical sites, touristy destinations, and other crap that I specifically want to see. Bangladesh has… well, I really didn’t know. So there were no expectations, no plans to make, no things that I just had to see/do/experience. The flight to Bangladesh was about 700 dirhams (~190 US$) less than the one to Thailand, and the lure of going somewhere that virtually no one had gone to was kind of exciting. So Bangladesh won. Thailand will be there, but the chance that I would find another opportunity to go to Bangladesh, especially with three other willing adventurers, was slim.
The idea of going to Bangladesh was the brainchild of Jorge, a Spanish (both in subject area and in nationality) teacher at our school who has taught in Thailand and traveled to 31 countries, including Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia, India, Sri Lanka, and Iran. For him, the trip was also born out of necessity, as the trip to Athens he was planning on taking ended up being more expensive than he was planning on. He had a Bengali kid or two in one of his classes who put the bug in his ear for doing something original by going to Bangladesh, and when I caught wind from a couple of my colleagues (who will be introduced momentarily), I thought, ‘hey, why not?’ Hook. Line. Sinker.
My other two fellow adventurers were both Canadians. Asha, a PE teacher, had traveled to some rough countries before, including Uganda, Ecuador, Kenya, Tanzania, and Thailand. Rebecca, who teaches science, had also traveled to 31 countries, including South Africa, Malaysia, and Singapore. All three of my companions had roughed it in much of their travels, staying in hostels and guest houses in Africa and South America, backpacking for four months across Europe, and bicycling from Bangkok to Singapore. An adventurous bunch. But they had never seen anything like Bangladesh.
The adventures began before we even left the country. Just deciding to go to Bangladesh (figuring out where we were going to go, the length of our vacation changing at the last second, the frantic search for flights, the ‘sure, why not?’ decision to go to Bangladesh of all places) set the roll-with-the-punches, fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants tone that would become par for the course during the trip. Jorge had bought his ticket before Asha, Rebecca and I did, and he left on Sunday (September 28). The three of us who were to follow him bought our tickets on Saturday (September 27) under the pretense given to us by the travel agent (who asked us why we wanted to go to Bangladesh) that we could get our visas at the airport upon arrival. He said that his information said that the country ‘strongly advised’ visitors to get visas prior to arrival, but that they are available at the airport. So we bought our tickets and decided to go to the Bangladesh Consulate in Dubai the next day (Ravi, the travel agent, called the main consulate in Abu Dhabi to confirm that his information about visas was correct, and he also found that we could get our visas beforehand, with same-day service (if we arrived at ten a.m., we could have the visas by one p.m.)). We left early, which really didn’t help us get to the consulate on time. No one seemed to know where it was. Lots of people thought they knew where it was, but unfortunately there were about three or four conflicting accounts as to where it was. Eventually we found it… and realized why no one knew where it was: it was tiny. It was really just a crappy two-story house that the Bangladeshi government decided to convert into their consulate. And I use the term ‘convert’ loosely. The second-story waiting area was a living room full of china cabinets, furniture from the seventies, packing boxes, and all sorts of other knick-knacks that looked like they belonged in the attic of some pack-rat grandmother.
After waiting for a while, the Assistant Consul (actually I don’t know what his title was, but he was the only guy other than the Consul General who had an office, so I’m deeming him as such for now) heard our inquiry and gave us some forms to fill out. Halfway through, we realized that we didn’t have a lot of these things that the form was asking us for. A sponsor letter? An invitation from the government of Bangladesh? Seriously? We asked the guy about it, and he said that we needed sponsor letters from our employers. Oh, and no, you can’t get same-day service. In fact, it’s eleven o’clock, our office is closed. What time did you open? Nine. Seriously? A two-hour workday? No wonder no one ever gets to visit your country. And no, you can’t get visas at the airport. You were told wrong. Wait, no, you can, Mr. Burns. Americans okay. No one else can get visas at airport. Crap. But the guy’s story changed several times while we were talking to him. Either he didn’t understand what we were asking at first, or he just didn’t know what the heck he was talking about. I kinda figured it to be a mixture of the two. So, no visas were to be gotten before we left, and in theory there weren’t going to be any available at the airport. Jorge’s flight left in about an hour for Dhaka. Maybe a quick turnaround flight. Maybe a reprise of Tom Hanks’s role in The Terminal. Or maybe, just maybe, we’d all manage to get into the country.
We left the consulate to grab some ‘sponsor letters’ from our school, just in case those might help our case with immigration officials in the Dhaka airport. On the way out of the building, though, a poster in the stairwell caught my eye. “Visit Bangladesh,” it said, “Before the Tourists Come.” Wow. Well, we were sure gonna try. And we wouldn’t be disappointed...
Monday, October 6, 2008
Pimp Our Jeremy
WARNING: The following entry contains some facetious and/or satirical remarks regarding my ‘sexiness’ and related subject matter. The nature of these remarks should be apparent to those who know me, but in the interest of staving off interpretations of me as a self-absorbed Narcissus, here’s your disclaimer.
A few of my young female colleagues took an interest in pimping out my wardrobe fairly early on. For those of you who may be unfamiliar with the expression, it basically means an overhaul or makeover of sorts to make the thing to be pimped out more flashy, visually pleasing, and sexy. When I went to the happenin’ birthday party of Genna, an effervescent and delightfully British colleague of mine in the English department, she and Christine, another of my English department friends, decided to take up the cause as well. Unleash my God-given potential of being even more of a looker or something like that. Given, I got the numbers of two girls while at the party, so I wasn’t struggling too badly in that department. But I’m all for having girls dote on me, and in the interest of my fashion awareness and increasing the number of ladies gawking at me, I went along for the ride.
Our first payday was Wednesday, September 24. We were going to go to the mall that day, deemed by the girls as "Pimp Our Jeremy" day (a play on the MTV show "Pimp My Ride"), but there was a department meeting, and Genna had dinner plans, so we postponed it to Friday: an all-day affair. Alas, Asha, Rebecca, and Martine, other friends who wanted to help pimp me out, were unable to come on Friday, but they get me for subsequent rounds (actually, Asha already took me out to Karama, a knock-off bazaar kind of place here in Dubai, and both she and Rebecca got to give their opinions on clothes I bought in… but no, that’s another entry).
Friday. Genna, her husband Paul, Christine, and her boyfriend Morgan (also a teacher at our school; science) took me to the Mall of the Emirates. First stop: hairdresser’s. I had let my hair grow longish of late, not really sure what I wanted to do with it. The cut I got is similar to one I had for a while in the States, albeit spiked with hair wax. Already a hundred times better, the pimp-ers concurred. Then to the new digs. Tried on lots of clothes at different stores. Ultimately, I walked out with only one new outfit (it was rather expensive), but the jeans and shoes are nice staples that I’ve already built upon with other new (and decidedly less expensive) shirts, and I broadened my fashion horizons. The result? Lots of stares and wows. Seriously. Asha, Rebecca, and Martine were amazed. Asha actually stared at me for a full twenty seconds with her mouth wide open when she first saw the new look. Between that, the gym, and my increasingly adventurous spirit (see forthcoming entries on my Eid break travels), those ladies won’t stand a chance. I’m trying out my new look this weekend at the clubs (since they’ll be open for the first time since Ramadan). It may be October, but Dubai just got a little hotter.
A few of my young female colleagues took an interest in pimping out my wardrobe fairly early on. For those of you who may be unfamiliar with the expression, it basically means an overhaul or makeover of sorts to make the thing to be pimped out more flashy, visually pleasing, and sexy. When I went to the happenin’ birthday party of Genna, an effervescent and delightfully British colleague of mine in the English department, she and Christine, another of my English department friends, decided to take up the cause as well. Unleash my God-given potential of being even more of a looker or something like that. Given, I got the numbers of two girls while at the party, so I wasn’t struggling too badly in that department. But I’m all for having girls dote on me, and in the interest of my fashion awareness and increasing the number of ladies gawking at me, I went along for the ride.
Our first payday was Wednesday, September 24. We were going to go to the mall that day, deemed by the girls as "Pimp Our Jeremy" day (a play on the MTV show "Pimp My Ride"), but there was a department meeting, and Genna had dinner plans, so we postponed it to Friday: an all-day affair. Alas, Asha, Rebecca, and Martine, other friends who wanted to help pimp me out, were unable to come on Friday, but they get me for subsequent rounds (actually, Asha already took me out to Karama, a knock-off bazaar kind of place here in Dubai, and both she and Rebecca got to give their opinions on clothes I bought in… but no, that’s another entry).
Friday. Genna, her husband Paul, Christine, and her boyfriend Morgan (also a teacher at our school; science) took me to the Mall of the Emirates. First stop: hairdresser’s. I had let my hair grow longish of late, not really sure what I wanted to do with it. The cut I got is similar to one I had for a while in the States, albeit spiked with hair wax. Already a hundred times better, the pimp-ers concurred. Then to the new digs. Tried on lots of clothes at different stores. Ultimately, I walked out with only one new outfit (it was rather expensive), but the jeans and shoes are nice staples that I’ve already built upon with other new (and decidedly less expensive) shirts, and I broadened my fashion horizons. The result? Lots of stares and wows. Seriously. Asha, Rebecca, and Martine were amazed. Asha actually stared at me for a full twenty seconds with her mouth wide open when she first saw the new look. Between that, the gym, and my increasingly adventurous spirit (see forthcoming entries on my Eid break travels), those ladies won’t stand a chance. I’m trying out my new look this weekend at the clubs (since they’ll be open for the first time since Ramadan). It may be October, but Dubai just got a little hotter.
A Short Little Jaunt Across the Border to Oman
The visa that I have for the United Arab Emirates right now is a visit visa that lasts but 30 days. My employment visa, like that of many of my colleagues, is still being processed by the government. Unfortunately, even though I am employed in the country, my visit visa is no longer valid after thirty days. So on day number 29 (September 19), I rode on a bus with about thirty of my colleagues (the bus was pretty much filled to capacity) over the border to Oman and back on what is commonly referred to as a visa run. UAE exit stamp, out of the country, into Oman, Oman entry stamp, Oman exit stamp, back to the UAE, entry stamp, home. One nice little loophole about being from one of the 34 countries that the UAE gives automatic visit visas to (as most of our new faculty is). In theory one could do this indefinitely, live in the UAE and just go abroad and back when your visa is just about up. Once was enough for me, though.
The bus picked us up from our apartment building on Friday morning (the first day of the weekend out here). 6:45 a.m. on a weekend. Way too early, but I was excited. This was the first time I had left the city of Dubai since arriving, so I got to see the neighboring Emirate of Sharjah (which our apartment building is really only a kilometer or so away from), as well as some dunes, mountains, and wildlife.
A few of my sightings, discoveries, and experiences on our short little jaunt across the border:
- The almost-perpetual haze visible when looking long distances in Dubai isn’t smog or construction dust; it’s desert sand in the atmosphere. The haze was just as bad, if not more so, over the isolated dunes as it was over the city.
- Lots of wild camels: camels grazing on desert brush, camels sleeping, camels eating out of a roadside dumpster.
- ATVs and offroad vehicles cruising the dunes.
- A herd of goats walking across a field and into a gorge via a real live goat path.
- The mountainous region southeast of Dubai known as Hatta, whose mountains largely look like they have the consistency of a tall gravel dump.
- My first exit visa from a country!
- I got chastised by an Omani border guard for taking a picture at the border of a sign that struck me as funny at the time. Oops.
- My time in Oman (for this trip at least) consisted of spending two hours in the welcome center, collecting travel brochures and maps, watching a rugby match in Arabic and the Oman travel video on the overhead televisions, and chatting with my colleagues while our passports got processed. Well, that and walking to and from the bus. I did stand on Oman soil, so it counts as a country I’ve been to.
I’m not done with Oman, of course. There’s still plenty to see there, from the sights of Muscat (the capital city) to the fjords of Musandam, and I’ve still got another visa run of sorts to do once my employment visa actually goes through. But it’s another stamp in the passport (technically, another six, all told, what with all the exits and entries), another adventure had, another memory made, another few dozen pictures taken. Especially the one I got yelled at by the border guard for. I’m definitely keeping that one.
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