HAPPY GEORGETOWN DAY!

It's the most wonderful day of the year.

Dune-Bashing

Having been away from main campus for nearly two weeks, I needed my Georgetown fix and thusly pilgrimaged to SFS-Qatar. I met up with the Student Affairs crowd, who are Class of 2008 and 2009 and other affiliated people for the weekend.

The highlight was dune-bashing, a desert staple, especially in cities where there is little else to do. In Doha your weekend options are pretty much dune-bashing or refining more gas. Which is fun, up to a point.

Friday morning our cars (we dune-bashed in 4x4 SUVs) pulled up to the Georgetown apartments. Out of the first car jumped a Qatari man in his late 20s. Dressed in, no joke, a fedora and a vest. In fact, he looked like the bearded version of someone I had seen before...but where...oh wait yup here ya go:
We piled into our SUVs and plowed off into the desert south of Doha. Our driver, I'll call him JT, switched the music from traditional Qatari songs to his Akon mix and we were set. The dunes were untouched - it was almost like skiing fresh powder. Except for you're in a car. Dune-bashing is a lot like a rollercoaster. There's a lot of dread as you drive up, and then you scream like a little girl on the way down. In fact, I took video of just that. Unfortunately, it won't upload to Blogger...

It was hard to get good photos but here are the other two cars in our caravan. They often stayed unnervingly close:

Furaya - From the Archives

Ah, there is nothing like starting a new case that leads me to procrastination. Perhaps it's the anticipation of helping a new client. Or the excitement of a new city to conquer. Most likely, it's the 3,000 pages of reading I just received and am expected to be an expert on by Sunday. In a natural millenial reaction, off to Facebook I go...

I realized I never chronicled my second trip to Lebanon in March. If I've seen you since the, I mostly likely raved about the country, and if I end up in this region after this fall, I may just move myself over there.

This time around, I went with a bunch of colleagues, and our first stop was a two-day ski trip to Furaya. Beirut is right on the Mediterranean, but the mountains don't waste any time in reaching respectable altitudes right outside the city limits. It reminds me a bit of British Columbia, with the mountains descending into the sea. The weekend was replete with more local beer and snowboarding in what turned out to be 75* weather. Apparently most of the laws of nature don't hold in the Middle East. Snow won't melt in Lebanon until Syria tells it to. (Too soon?)
Me boarding in swimtrunks and some members of my then-project team

Back in the DXB

*I'm restarting this blog with a newfound fervor after running into an anonymous reader while Stateside. S/he asked for further reporting on the anomalies that are daily life in the Arabian Gulf. I am happy to oblige.

After nearly two weeks back in DC, seeing friends and family on and off the Hilltop,

I'm back in Dubai. It felt like a dream for the first few days, being back here in this land of unreality, until I spent Friday afternoon at Mall of the Emirates stocking up on supplies. Dubai boasts some 194 nationalities among its expat population. All of them were in front of me at the checkout line at Carrefour.

I forgot that amidst the high-rises, man-made islands and new squadrons of helicopters transporting sheikhs around town, Dubai is a city like any other, full of people just trying to make a living. Some people earn this living by suffering slave-like working hours in the summer heat, and others by siphoning off the never-ending flow of oil from Abu Dhabi.

Yup, from the look of things, my future posts are going to be more orientalist than my past ones.

{That beautiful shot of Healy rising out of the tulip bed is courtesy of Taylor Burkholder's photographic genius}