Busted out of DC finally. I'm currently sitting in the Vienna Airport abusing my neighbor's wireless. I have no idea what time it is because my phone, laptop and wall clock all have different readings. I'm thinking morning and don't need much more detail.
My flight to Vienna could be transcribed into a "Madeleine" book, as a busload of small children surrounded my seat. And much like a busload of small children, they sang songs most of the flight.
I didn't sleep on the flight, despite my determination to adjust quickly to Dubai Coast Time*. It's hard to sleep when leaving a city/country/continent/hemisphere where all your friends and most of your family live. Luckily I had Paul Rudd and "I Love You Man" to keep me company. 3 times.
soooo...I should have realized this earlier but Ramadan began yesterday and in my ignorance I did not predict the affects of such a holiday. Turns out most of the shops I need to visit to set up my life will operate on erratic hours through late September and it will be difficult to buy (let alone eat) food during daylight hours. Battle plan: stick to Eastern Standard Time and then I'll be awake when everyone else is breaking thier fast.
On the other hand, it's a good month to be a prisoner in the UAE. To mark the coming of Ramadan, Sheikh Mohamed pardoned nearly 600 prisoners.
Below I chronicle my practical, if superficial, conversion to Christianity:
Monitor HR:Hey Nathan, we need to process your visa for Saudi Arabia. Can you fill out the following questionnaire, including your religious persuasion? Me:Hmm, I guess I haven't been religiously persuaded. Can I put unaffiliated?
Monitor HR:No. Me: Um...
Monitor HR: Just put anything. Me: Jewish?
Monitor HR: ANYTHING BUT THAT Me: Fine...I guess I'll be a Christian.
Naturally I have to post this link: An Iranian was paid by the UAE - and handled by the State Department, and is now being tried in one of the many post-unrest trials in Iran. More here
The past four days have been quite strange - the first four days I spent away from Georgetown without knowing when I would return to the Hilltop. What I felt was a pairing of confusion and nostalgia until I came upon a curiously apt description of my situation in a biography of Salvador Dali.
When asked about the beginning of his life, Dali claimed he could remember his time in the womb, saying "It was divine! It was paradise!" He recalled intra-uterine dreams, often of "fried eggs on a plate without the plate." His words, not mine. If that sentence does not make sense to you, perhaps this painting of the same title will.
Dali's comments on birth as a traumatically confusing, rather than renewing event, mirror my feelings on leaving Georgetown. Getting on that flight out of Reagan (which cruelly flew over campus) was like "passing abruptly from that ideally protective and enclosed environment to all the hard dangers of the frightfully real new world."
So, like a newborn, I am sitting at home, eyes open, waiting for whatever comes next.
Salvador Dali, on life and birth - "...It seems increasingly true that the whole imaginative life of man tends to reconstitute symbolically by the most similar situations and representations of that initial paradisaical state, and especially to surmount the horrible 'tramatism of birth' by which we are expulsed from the paradise, passing abruptly from that ideally protective and enclosed environment to all the hard dangers of the frightfully real new world, with the concomitant phenomena of asphyxiation, of compression, of blinding by the sudden outer light and of the brutal harshness of the reality of the world..."
I recently updated my iGoogle to show both weather in Seattle and Dubai. It's a little past midnight in Dubai...and 100 degrees. If you are planning to visit, the winter months are a balmy 75*. See you then.
It's going to take 4 days from Seattle, albeit with strategically scheduled layovers in D.C. (I've been gone for too long already) and Vienna, but then I'll land in the palm-lined Dubai airport:
