Day 122-127

I'm on the Arabian Peninsula! Oman, specifically. I don't really know how this happened.

A synopsis of a sort:

I left Delhi the morning of the twenty-second. I was sick at the airport, actually: one last bout of that bacterial bullshit that has been chasing me since Leh. It was quiet funny, really. At the check in counter I felt myself overcome and told the girl I had to scoot to the bathroom - "just wait five minutes, sir" ... "Nope, gotta go right now... bye!" Planning to throw up, I instead blacked out for a few moments on a bench halfway to the toilet. As if thanking me for getting a flight far away from India's dirty side streets and tourist ghettos my body decided to (finally) take care of itself and using a flash sweat it pushed the sickness right out of me long enough to let me check myself in and board my flight. For once I was able to get by without taking any antibiotics.

Flying with R, we stopped at Bahrain to change planes. R and I made a mad dash through customs so that we could spend a few hours poking around Manama, the capital. The city proved to be a curious, though agreeable city. Bahrain is quite a wealthy country, as is most of the peninsula (save Yemen). It's also a very EMPTY place, with a population of little more than 600,000. As a result, the streets of the capital are wide, clean and well maintained. It's a place full of American chain restaurants - TGIFriday, Chillies and Pappa John's are all well represented on the ground.

The people in the city are friendly, too, seemingly happy to encounter genuine tourists in a place where most people come only for business. We were given a lift by Khalil, a sales rep for Johnson and Johnson who happily explained that he's lived his whole life in the capital and that he loves the town and "knows everyone." Khalil really was a hoot... so happy with his work selling beauty products that he insisted on showing R every single page of his product catalogue while despairing the fact that he had no free samples to hand out.

Anyways, we wandered a bit around the bases of some impressive skyscrapers, sent a few postcards and then hurried back to the airport to get our connecting flight to Dubai. The departure area in the Bahrain airport, like all of Manama is a wide open and empty place, punctuated by high end retail spaces and chain restaurants. There many not be many Bahrainis on this planet, but those that DO exist seem to be in possession of some coin.

And then... Dubai.

Dubai is HOT. Forty degrees in the shade. Fuckin' 39 in the sun. NO relief! The heat is what visitors notice first. Then, one notices the cost of it all... ten dollar cab fares, eight dollar coffees, and the rest. R and I did get a good deal at a hotel by way of an Internet reservation, but I think I spent as much in Dubai in three days as I did in a month of India. Whoops.

But all in all, it's a pretty nice town. It's one of the wealthiest cities on the globe and also one of the most opulent. Fitting the THEME of it all, R and I spent an entire day at the City Center Mall, a sprawling retail complex of several floors. We enjoyed some retail successes at the bookstore and also at the movie theatre. Just getting to the mall was special experience - we staggered through 40 degree heat for about an hour, arriving exhausted and dehydrated, all the while mumbling platitudes about how awesome a guy Lawrence of Arabia was.

Even our hotel was, all by itself, a real fun experience. It was rather enlightening to see middle aged Saudi visitors dancing and getting drunk on forbidden Heineken in the hotel restaurant, all while wearing the usual white sheets and headpiece. We even had a very beautiful Arabic hooker knock on our door, trolling for business. One images that the Islamic world is not always like we think it is...

I'm in Oman now. Have been here for a couple of days. I'll write a bit about that next time.