The Horn of Africa

I'd wanted to have breakfast with Eva in New York City but the plans fell through and the layover was a bust. Too bad, since I spent much of the flight reading "Ravelstein," Saul Bellow's pseudo-biography of Alan Bloom, and wanted to discuss it with her. A late departure from SFO meant that my already short layover was whittled down to the point where it was moot to try to go into the city. Instead, I wandered out of the terminal and walked around for a while. It was hot and sticky. (That's a Hemingway line.)

 

Dubai is 12 hours off San Francisco and Addis is similar. I decided it was easier to stay up "later" than to go to sleep "earlier" and spent much of the flight struggling to keep my eyes open, or at least not nap for too long. I watched "The Matador," "V for Vendetta," "16 Blocks," and "Walk the Line." After that, I tried to play a word descrambling video game, but with no sleep in 35 hours, I was so out of it that I couldn't unscramble things with more than four or five letters. After some particularly frustrating stare downs with some of the longer scrambles, full of Y's and Z's, I began began to suspect some of the words were in Arabic rather than English.

 

We touched down in Dubai early in the morning. I didn't particularly feel like staying, knowing that it would cost a small fortune for even a day. Never mind the fact that at 8 o'clock in the morning it was already 35 degrees. I immediately tried to switch my ticket -- scheduled to leave for Addis 24 hours later -- for one leaving sooner to Addis, Hargeisa, or Djibouti. With no luck, I hopped a taxi and headed off to find a hotel for the night. I ended up in the Deira neighborhood, where many of the famous "souks" (marketplaces) are. The hotel I ended up at was a block away from the entry to Dubai's famous "Gold Souk."

 

By mid-afternoon, it was 46 degrees and too hot to do much walking around. I went to the Emirates Mall, on the other side of town, and ate a delicious lamb curry while watching people play in the snow at <a href=" http://www.skidxb.com/">Ski Dubai</a>, an indoor ski resort in the mall. It was good fun watching young Arabic men hike up their dishdashas with one hand and sprint forward, diving onto the inner tubes and flying down the slope.

 

Afterward, I walked down the length of the mall and back. The directory listing for this mall is about eight feet long and every shop imaginable is there. I stopped into the Diesel store and was unsurprised to see that the high-end jeans here cost as much as they do in London or San Francisco. There's perhaps more sticker shock here since the tag says "AED 950." Dubai, or at least the fancy "city center" area of Dubai, caters to a jet-set clientele. Many of the shops are custom tailors selling USD$5000 suits, USD$10000 dresses, et cetera. In addition to a ski resort, there's a cinema, a bowling alley, an arcade, an amusement park with 100' ceilings for the rides, etc. In the center of the mall, there was a queue of hundreds of kids, mothers standing by in black robes and full veils, waiting to have their picture taken with Mickey Mouse while the MC hyped the crowd, "Do you love Diiiiisney?!"

 

Eventually, I ended up at the cinema and bought a ticket for "The Road to Guantanamo," momentarily forgetting that I was in a mall in Dubai, not a mall in the states. The English portions of the documentary were subtitled in Arabic and French, but the the Arabic portions were -- "duh" -- without subtitles. To make matters worse, I'd forgotten how tired I was and in the comfy seats and darkness, I kept nodding off only to be awakened periodically by a dramatic re-enactment of an American soldier booming at one of the characters, "You fucking PUSSY! Why are you in AFGHANISTAN, you aren't worth SHIT!" After one of my wake-ups, I glanced at my watch and had a moment of delirious, sleep-deprived panic where, owing to an "AM/PM" mix-up, I thought I'd accidentally stayed in the theatre all night and was about to miss my flight to Ethiopia. I decided I'd better just leave.

 

In the early evening, I spent a few hours walking around Deira, even more abysmally tired and with sweat stinging my eyes. The older parts of Dubai have winding alleyways that remind me of Peshawar. Everything imaginable is available here and shops tend to cluster by what they sell. One area is almost exclusively fabric and clothing, another electronics, and another building supplies or household appliances. In my travel clothes, I felt under-dressed and dirty at Emirates Mall, but in the back alleys of Deira, I felt conspicuously over-dressed. Eager men with moustaches would follow me and offer me "ladies, pretty ladies" over and over and I'd turn them down in Arabic, "la(g), shokrun."

 

My whole time here, I've delighted in using my miniscule Arabic to talk to people. The airport visa desk, my taxi drivers, hotel managers -- nobody has been safe. Pimsleur claims "good day" ("sabeh el kheir") and its response ("sabeh en noor") are common, but I'm not so sure. The former means, "fine morning" and the reply means "light (of the?) morning." (Noor, nur, like Nuristan. The people of light.) I've had people respond to me with "sabeh en noor" and a delighted smile, but I've heard nobody else say it. The closest I've heard is a quick, casual "sabeh." Mornin'. I think that me using the full phrase is a bit highfalutin, like saying, "Top of the morning, sir!" would be in English.

 

I'm back at the airport now. Since I'm already almost done "Ravelstein," and the only other book I brought is "And You Shall Know Our Velocity," I picked up a paperback copy of "Freakonomics" at the duty-free store here. My flight leaves for Addis soon. I'm eager to get to Hargeisa and start volunteering (and to off-load the small mountain of thermometers from my backpack). My first order of business in Addis will be to find the Somaliland Liaison Office and get a visa. After that, I think I'll strike out for the border, maybe even getting as far as Dire Dawa or Harar today if I'm lucky.