Big M

I felt I couldn't go through today without leaving a quick word on here... today is my 30th birthday. Maybe I'm supposed to be depressed, but I'm not... I'm surrounded by wonderful people, close to me here in Dubai and around the world. Could I really ask for more?

I'll write a bit more soon...

Weekends

Update! The first part of this post has a new soundtrack!



Sick and tired in the non-figurative sense at Jasmine café, a Philipino-staffed half-breed cafeteria/fast food joint in the departures lounge of the international airport in Manama, Bahrain. This is the third time in three days and second time in three hours that I find myself here – I seem to be stuck in a bizarre Groundhog Day-esque loop in the space-time continuum, and have picked a rather unfortunate location to do so. Three hours ago I was rather happy that the airport staff volunteered unasked to move me from a 9pm flight to a 7pm flight – the offer of two extra hours of sleep in my own bed before the start of a new workweek seemed like a no-brainer at the time. Of course, now that I just went for a two hour sightseeing tour of the runway, only to get towed back to the terminal with a technical problem and watch the rather content-looking passengers of the “later” flight board their plane while I’m stuck here with my greasy chicken nuggets for another three hours, the equation seems a little different.

But as with most things in life, out of the bad comes some good. I’ve been lazy writing on here lately (bit of an introspective phase - bad for writing) and thanks to that annoyance I’ve now picked up my laptop and started. Don't have much inspiration, so let me tell you about my last few weekends.



The first one to mention was a three day dhow (traditional sailing boat) trip in neighboring Oman with my friends Tracey and Alex. We slept on the dhow under the stars the first night, and on the beach around a campfire the next. During the day we would go scuba diving, and at one point we ran into a humongous turtle sitting there in it's own little world at the bottom of the sea. I couldn't fathom it - the thing was easily bigger than me. It was fantastic to make it out into nature, and I made a great friend from among the divers on the boat too.

Another weekend was all action, Dubai style. I went to a two day music festival called Desert Rhythm which featured Kanye West, Joss Stone and Madness (as well as ‘Black Violin’, an American hip-hop band that featured two gangster rapper types playing the violin… random but interesting), a Brazilian party during which my crowd somehow managed to kill two bottles of vodka (in addition to the caipirinhas), took a wakeboarding class (which is to waterskiing what snowboarding is to skiing – mercifully, my crashes to date have been somewhat less spectacular than those I’ve had snowboarding) with a former European Champion. Oh and my first ever tennis match, doubles against a French couple (and there was no way we were losing to the French, even if it was the second time I'd ever held a tennis racket).

Another two weekends were spent in Beirut, with its unbelievable night life, character, history and internal conflict (as I described in March). I spent day in Byblos, where people have been living continuously for over 7,000 years (making it the world’s oldest town), and where fish have been resting for a hundred million years (making them fossils). One of the latter now sits in my living room – two halves of a fossilized fish that swam the earth with the dinosaurs.

This Sunday I returned from Beirut - late, due to the Dubai Air Show, apparently (where a Saudi Prince decided to buy himself a private jet - obviously no less than the new Airbus A380 super-jumbo jet would do, for a cool USD 360 million. That's before spending another USD 50-100 million on the interior. The things I could do to make the world a better place with that money...). I finally made it to my house at seven and drove straight to down town Abu Dhabi, where I got just marginally after eight – let’s not get into any tenth grade math questions here, but yes, lets just say it was the first time I really ‘used’ my toy car.

Why? I arrived just in time to catch a production of Carmen, the opera. It’s a masterpiece… one of my all-time favorite pieces of music, and the production was fantastic. I don’t care if you’ve never listened to opera – you’ll know at least five themes from there just from watching Tom & Jerry or Bugs Bunny as a child. Seeing it live gives it another dimension – Carmen is a fiery, sarcastic, melodramatic, sultry and sensual vixen, which doesn’t come across in when you listen to it unless your operatic French is a lot better than mine. To give you an idea, here is a half-decent attempt at showing this on film.

I'll leave you with that for now, and try not to let as long pass until the next time you hear from me.