Dewed on Arrival

It started as these things usually do, with a trip to JFK with the folks. They dropped me off at a new terminal this time, for ETIHAD Airways, the official airline of Abu Dhabi and the Emirates. My father says they claim to be the fastest growing airline in the world. After waiting for 15 minutes in the wrong line for the wrong airline I re-oriented myself over to the Etihad line. This touched off the beginning of what I imagine will be a long line of skin tone misunderstandings. Waiting in line with about two dozen Indian men and nobody else I was beckoned over to the first class kiosk. An Arabic looking kid came over and fetched my suitcases and in about 30 seconds I had my tickets and my bags were checked. As the kid went to move the luggage onto a cart the ticket agent hollered, “No, he’s only coach.” I had to take my own bags over to the station down the corridor for them to be hucked into another set of scanners before they made their way onto the plane. After the wonders of about two minutes of first class treatment I was tossed back onto a line with all the smelly plebes.

After that I waited in line, and then waited on line again. The mass of humanity tangled and sprawled behind me, often confused at the lengths American airports will go to compensate for the fact that they very often buy outdated and inferior scanning equipment.

 “Do not put your shoes or your bags in the plastic bins, they go directly into the machine!”

“Put your passport and ticket away, you don’t need them here!”

“Jackets, belts, change and wallets go in the bins!”

“Take your computers out of your bags and put them in the bins!”

These things could have easily been communicated by signs so they didn’t have to be screamed out by frustrated employees every thirty seconds, but so it goes. There are moments of awkward comedy watching various non-English speakers placing their bags in the bin, their belts over their arm and carrying their shoes in their hands while they tried to walk through the metal detectors.

Once I got to my terminal it was remarkably empty save for a few dozen Indians, everyone but me in fact, was Indian. Apparently Abu Dhabi was a very common connection destination for flights into Mumbai, Delhi, and Bombay. I sat next to an interesting fellow toting a stuffed bear the size of me. He turned out to be an Indian Anthropologist specializing in native medicine.

He said he had been in China, India, and Thailand and was about to go to Sri Lanka for three months after a brief visit to his wife and daughter in India. The purpose of the study he was engaged in was to analyze all these old fashioned herbal medicines so that he could present their potential uses to major pharmaceutical companies. We talked for an hour or so before boarding with breaks in between for his IPhone chats with his wife. When it rang her picture filled the screen and words scrolled across the top of the screen “My Love.” Many of the Indians I’ve met in China have been hopeless romantics.

Once on the plane it didn’t take long to understand why this airline was on the rise while most American carriers were gasping for breath. I don’t think I have ever seen such a diverse bevy of beautiful stewardesses on any airline before. There was a gorgeous Korean woman, then two stunning African women and one foxy Arabic girl to complete the quartet. If this was the first indication of the machismo of the middle east then score one for Medieval patriarchal culture. American equality, political correctness, and feminist movements have destroyed the god given right of every hot blooded American male to be surrounded with sexual icons between take-off and landing. We’re left with a bunch of aging, overweight and grumpy gay guys who secretly love it every time the flight runs out of chicken and you stare helplessly at him while wondering if the fish will kill you before the plane touches down on the tarmac. Apparently they gone so far as to take your beers as they flee out the inflatable wing slide on a bad day.

Though this flight, despite its smorgasbord of lady parts, was far from full, and I had my own little row of two seats to myself. Though the ability to stretch out and be comfortable is fantastic I’ve found that the people I meet on these transatlantic flights often help kill the time from one continent to the next. As I stared aimlessly out the window the plane began its ascent without issue and New York and JFK faded into the black distance. The lights kicked off and one of the beautiful African stewardesses came to offer a hot towel and a drink. My first instinct was to get wine or a beer because it was free, and I wanted to pass out in a few hours. My second instinct bitch-slapped my first instinct and reminded it that if I showed up to a country under Sharia Law reeking of booze the potential for a quickly accelerating downhill year was also quite possible. So, stupidly, I had a coke.  

After the initial drink phase had ended and the pre-dinner phase had begun I opened up Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game and started reading. Halfway through the book chicken arrived in front of me, after the book was finished I decided to check the map, surely after a meal and finishing a 350 page novel we must be nearing our destination. After tapping the panel in front of me, hard, and after likely inserting bees and snakes and woodpeckers carrying bee shooting snakes into the nightmares of the passenger in front of me I got a look at our flight path. We’d traveled some 3,000 kilometers, with 8,000 to go. We hadn’t even cleared the Atlantic yet.

Having just finished about 15% of the literature I’d brought with me to last a year I decided to scan the movies. The list of films that don’t even merit the effort it takes to steal them from the internet included Dragonball Z and The Fast and the Furious. I started with DBZ.

The next 15 paragraphs describing the downfall of Hollywood and decline of the American mind have been deleted to save the reader.

During the course of these cinematic tours de force my brain felt like it was being pounded by a dozen monkeys with rock hammers, quoting George Bush in a southern twang. Which is to say, I felt dumber.

The rest of the flight would pass in a state of unsleep aided by both an IPOD and re-runs of old sitcoms on the chair screen. The unsleep would grant me my first travel moment of the trip though as the plane began its slow descent from 41,000 feet. When the plane points its nose downward it will still be a long time before I see the lights of Abu Dhabi, that jewel in the dunes. Instead when I open the window slat above the right wing of the plane I see the last gasp of the day. The horizon feels impossibly large without any shapes coming up from the ground to meet it. The last colors of the day do not seem to retreat down behind the trees and mountains as they do in New York but are simply snuffed out by the black bowl of the sky suffocating a feeble flame.  The Earth, the desert, and the sand glow in bright orange which fades to yellow as the light moves up. The sky bleeds its last midnight blue from beneath the black and where the colors of the sky and sun meet a hazy green aura shimmers. It is the first truly clear sunset I remember seeing from a plane, a desert sunset; and for me, it marks my entrance to into this new phase of my life. I begin to get excited again.

And then as quickly as the spectacle began it was gone and we were on the tarmac of Abu Dhabi Airport, situated in a city that most Americans will probably forever remember as the magical faraway land to which Garfield is always threatening to send his arch-nemesis, Nermal. It is indeed a magical land, the airport is exactly what JFK would look like if it had class and an Asian fetish.

The first thing I would notice though is the utter lack of concern from the baggage people. I waited in line with my backpack behind a pair of obnoxious German tourists, who joked, JOKED with the baggage people. They gave them a hard time about taking off their belts among other things. As I slid my bag through the x-ray machine the bored looking technician was busy looking at a video on his IPhone while facing the opposite direction from the screen showing the contents of my bag. Here I am in the heart of the Muslim world, spitting distance from Saudi Arabia, and terrorism registers as a danger somewhere between the Bubonic Plague and a hangnail. I would learn quickly that the leading cause of death in most of the Arabian Peninsula is by car accident, and one would have to go many orders of magnitude down in Oman or the Emirates to reach terrorism. In fact you are about a thousand times more likely to die in a car accident with a terrorist on his way home from a gang-praying, or pin the beard on the infidel, or whatever the hell it is they do for fun than actually getting caught downwind of the plot. I imagine in the deep south drunk driving fatalities with members of the KKK outnumber lynchings by about the same ratio.

But let’s get back to our Asian fetish. The Abu Dhabi airport apparently stays open twenty four hours a day, brightly lit, and duty free to all who pass through. As I strolled carelessly through the aforementioned metal detectors I was buffeted by Filipina hawkers waving coupons to the various luxury shops around the airport. I heard Chinese, English, and a Philippines dialect a number of times before I finally heard someone speak Arabic. If you are poor, will work for peanuts, and speak English Abu Dhabi welcomes you for employment. It doesn’t hurt your chances if you’re attractive either. I imagine the only thing that keeps the leggy Eastern European women away is the climate. More importantly than merely employing cute little Asian women at all the shops is that everyone is actually friendly, willing to help, and they don’t even heave an audible sigh when you ask them for directions. Hospitality…at an airport, the world seems upside down sometimes.

The flight from Abu Dhabi to Muscat (which you should know is pronounced “musket” not like musk rat) is only about an hour. So, naturally I would be sitting next to a wonderfully interesting human being who would have been a great neighbor for the previous thirteen hour flight. The guy on the aisle side of our three-seater was a Belgian surgeon named Zach. He had lived in Muscat for the last nine years with his wife and kids. He grew up in Belgium went to medical school in France and worked there for a time, and spoke five languages with fluency or very near it. He had basically re-affirmed most of what I’d heard about the country until then, that it was incredibly safe and friendly and offered plenty of adventures to the outdoorsy types. You can camp anywhere in the country that isn’t a backyard, and even then they’ll probably let you if you ask nice. Though some in my family have made the claim that this area “is nothing but dirt and sand” there are sizable mountain ranges across the country with their associated flora and fauna. The scuba diving is top notch, and it’s within easy reach of a kind of scuba Mecca in this part of the world, Sharm El-Sheik in Egypt. If you look at it on a map, you’ll also notice that pretty much the whole thing is a beach. Bars and Clubs are largely absent from the country outside of the capital and a kind of Sharia Law partially hand-cuffed by modernity held sway in the courts.

We talked about a number of subjects until my curiosity got the better of me. He was if nothing else a swarthy fellow, not black but not white, not Asian or Indian, he had what I’d call a perplexing skin tone. So I asked a question typical to travelers, which is to say a theoretically appropriate question with thinly veiled racist overtones; “So where is your family from?” He smiled because he knew what I had really asked was something like, “So what kind of mulatto-quadroon are you anyway?” Zach’s family history, if he’s to be believed, started in Northern Africa 400 or so years ago until they made their way into India for a couple hundred years and sometime in the last 100 years made their way into Europe. I didn’t go into how he could possibly know this, because he seemed pretty confident about it. His children would be a mix of all that blood with a white Belgian woman. I have no doubt that they will be extraordinarily beautiful kids.

When our hour was up Zach and I parted ways when I went to pick up my visa. After that, there was another line, this time for immigration. One of the benefits of travelling to another country, being illiterate and ignorant of both practical and cultural realities, and being in the minority when you arrive, is that unlike living at home almost everyone you meet knows a hell of a lot more than you do. Most people have some kind of story to tell, advice to offer, etc… So waiting on line is a much an opportunity to chat as it is a nuisance or hindrance. On this particular line I met a couple of Canadians who were staying in Muscat for six months for a cover band gig at a hotel bar. After a quick introduction I got the guy’s card and the name of the bar where they were playing. So after a few minutes in my new home I had a 6 month ground zero for bar crawling in the capital.

As we parted ways and were shed from the line to our immigration stations I pulled out my passport and gave it to the Omani at the desk. He was dressed as all Omani men are dressed with their long white dishdasha (say it three times fast) and a little fez hat with some kind of pattern on it. It is not the “towel” of the Saudi’s or the “device” as my friend Matt lovingly refers to the headgear of the Palestinians.

“Where are you going in Oman?”

“I’m teaching at the College of Technology in Shinas.”

“Oh, Shinas”

He puts his head back down and thumbs through a quickly filling passport.

“So many stamps!”

“I get around a bit”

Smiling, he returns to the his own sets of stamps and finding two empty pages hits them with the tell-tale thud travelers know will yield a new nation to their unending questions.

“Shinas…it is a very small place. You should get a car and then you can drive to Dubai in less than one hour. Also the city of Sohar is less than one hour South of you and you will find many big shops and Kentucky Fried Chicken and so on. Good luck, please enjoy my country.”

What?!

Advice? Smiles? From an immigration official. Good wishes? This is unheard of, absurd, outrageous and contagious. It is far and away the most pleasant experience I’ve ever had at an immigration counter.

I went to the baggage carousel to wait for my luggage and “By Allah’s Shiny Beard!” the luggage was already there. No sooner had I grabbed my suitcases when I was greeted by a man in a Dishdasha. To make a long story short I met an Omani man in Thailand who was a muckity muck in the Muscat police department. He was apparently high up enough in the police department to stroll into the baggage area to wait for me to arrive. We walked together outside to where a young guy from my company was waiting with a placard.

This was planned by e-mail and achieved the exact result I was looking for. The liaison from the recruitment company, instead of being confronted with a happy if somewhat bewildered American, was assaulted with questions from a high ranking Muscat Police Chief taking care of his friend. My hope was that this exact confrontation would ensure a more smooth transition than the usual fob-off that ESL Teachers get from these bottom feeding recruitment companies. A few months later the jury’s still out on that though.

After a brief look through my paperwork and cheerful conversation my police wasta (friend) was off and I was ushered through the city in a used Carolla. My erstwhile guide would attempt to put things out to me that he thought an American would appreciate like Mcdonald’s, KFC, the imposing and beautiful Sultan Qaboose Mosque, and another object which merits some more specific description.

The LuLu Hypermarket is a building that might look like a Wal-Mart, if you were tripping hard on some good acid, and staring into a kaleidoscope.  Months later I still don’t know what inspired the construction of these monstrosities across the country, but suffice to say it’s a two to three story supermarket/mall with a goofy sounding name that looks like something a gay, Japanese James Bond villain might construct on his moon base in the 1960’s. It is coated with neon lights of remarkably clashing colors running in different directions, blinking, running back and forth and peppered with iridescent quasi-Arabic characters. Once you step inside a LuLu Hypermarket though…you are very likely underwhelmed by the fact that it’s simply a garish supermarket.

After my brief tour of fast food restaurants and the like the car sped down the dark spaces of the city between the hamlets of flurried activity. Muscat has a population of about 700,000 but through the limited view I got of the city it seemed to lack a truly central core, and appeared more like an interconnected web of small towns. We approached one of these areas, called Qurm, and my heart skipped a beat as I laid eyes on one of the coolest looking hotels I’ve ever seen. It sat atop a rocky hill overlooking the apparently famous Qurm Beach. I didn’t want to say anything for fear of ruining my chances at a single night of swank and plush. We approached the hotel along the promenade of the beach where the sidewalks were filled with people at almost midnight. At some point though approaching the hotel turned into going past the hotel and I returned to reality. I’m an English teacher working for a scummy recruitment company, and my port of call turned out to be pretty much the cheapest hotel in Muscat.

The Qurim Beach Hotel may have been a top of the line hotel in whatever decade it was built, but now seemed simply the low cost haunt of English teachers and sub-continental middle management (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh etc…are usually known collectively as the sub-continent). The single rooms can be adequately described as coffins, with beds barely wide enough for a pair of Olson Twins let alone one fat bastard from West Virginia. The coffins have all been partitioned from what were likely enormous rooms when the place opened.

Once I had settled into my tiny room I had a decision to make. It was well after midnight and my company was picking me up around seven in the morning to take me to whatever hole I was going to live in for the next year. I would be living two and a half hours away from the capital and didn’t know how likely or how expensive it would be to come back soon. My funds were, after all, abysmally low. I decided to grab my IPod and walk along the boardwalk, where I saw what seemed like a huge group of people when we drove past.

I changed into shorts and sandals and ventured out into the sweltering night. It was a week night, which I quickly found out fell between Saturday and Wednesday. The holy day of Islam is Friday, so Thursday and Friday were now my weekend. Trees towered outside of the hotel, probably planted whenever it was new, and as I walked the noise of the beach area came on before I saw anything. I heard the engines of cars gunning and revving and I wondered if this place was about to go all Tokyo drift on me. The truth was far more adorable. The beach was covered with signs that warned people to avoid swimming. This seemed odd considering how many people were walking along the sand.

As I contemplated the point of a beach where I couldn’t swim the rattling of rice rockets grabbed my attention again. The road in question was a dead straight run for about a mile, a seemingly perfect place for drunken teenagers to drag it out. At least, that would be the case, if there weren’t about a dozen sets of speed bumps across the straightaway. That didn’t stop these kids though, they were gunning the engines of their American cars and kicking it all the way up to second or third gear for each 30 meter stretch of road before they had to slow down for the next speed bump. It’s hard to believe I know, in Oman, in the country’s capital, the biggest city in the land, was filled with townies. I fucking hate townies.

But I tried to ignore them because I really didn’t have anything approaching a good context to judge this quasi-hysterical behavior. I punched up some rock tunes and strolled down the Corniche (corn eesh). What the hell is a Corniche, you ask? A corniche is a boardwalk, or pier, or promenade, or esplanade. I can only imagine the word was used by the British Empire a few hundred years ago and that even the Brits don’t use it anymore, but for some odd reason every city in the Gulf has at least one “corniche.” A quick googling tells me it was a French road built into the side of a cliff between Nice and Monte Carlo, but the French never controlled Oman, so its use here still bewilders me. Anyway, the corniche was absolutely filled with people, and when I say “people” I mean men. Most Slayer concerts have more women present than the average night out in Oman.

I walked down past at least two dozen low tech picnics, where young guys were listening to music, some dancing, playing guitar, cooking skewers of meat, and in general having a sober good time. I wasn’t quite ready to join any of them, and was in more of an observation mode, and before I knew it I was out of corniche, out of lights, and out of people.  I found myself in quite a pleasant spot actually, on my right side was the dead black space of the Gulf of Oman, and on my left some kind of space reserved for a marsh or swampland. There weren’t any concrete monstrosities, neon shops, obnoxious hotel signs or other signs of humanity around. I took off my head phones and listened to the sound of the sea for a few minutes, but before long another sound intruded on the serenity of the moment. Thankfully it was not the call to prayer, but it was music.

I heard a voice, and I crossed the street, walking back toward the corniche while following the sound.  I couldn’t place the voice, or see who was singing, but the sound was mesmorizing. It was a haunting, funereal dirge in Arabic. As he sang it was hard to believe that a few blocks away teenagers were showing off their mustangs and huge groups of people were partying near the beach. I have no idea what the words to the song meant, but I don’t think it was important either. It was a nice reminder that traveling often comes down to a series of perfect moments, that no matter how alien or familiar your surroundings might be, that there are things that break down every wall that you erect within yourself and find some greater truth about the human race. But of course, these moments are only that, and a minute later the singing ended and I happily strode toward the corniche melee.

In a semi-circular rock alcove cut into the sidewalk a dozen or so young Omanis sat barbecuing and hanging out. I stopped, looked over, and within a few seconds was shouted at. “Hello! Welcome! Come sit down!”

And so I did, and was immediately buffeted with a combination of food and questions. The boys were all college students in the city. One was from the tourism college, a couple studying engineering, and another trying to become a pilot. Their English down to a man was as good as my Arabic was bad. They were naturally curious about this errant gringo that had come among them, and were surprisingly positive about their feelings toward Americans.

“Obama!”

It seems that the Obama effect, despite what most newspapers were saying about opinion in the Middle East, was doing as much good as the Bush effect had done the opposite. The next pro-American assault came in the form of Metallica, Garth Brooks, and 50 Cent blasting from their cell phones. This may be the first and last time those three artists will ever find themselves on the same playlist. As the conversation continued on and one of them spotted me laboriously trying to swallow down the hunks of meat and bread and sauce arrayed before me one of them offered me a drink. “Water, Pepsi, or Dew?”

“Wait what is Dew?” And almost before the words were out of my mouth the Holy Grail appeared from the cooler, the sweet nectar of the Gods. “Omani Beer,” the engineering student told me as he tossed the can over. I could hardly believe that the first country that yielded my favorite beverage so easily was an unknown hamlet in the Arabian Gulf, but they are a Mountain Dew nation.

The conversation rolled on, one of them played guitar for a while, they constantly talked about all the women they couldn’t have. It should also be noted that none of them were wearing the national dress we associate with Muslims, all were in a t-shirt and jeans. After another three dozen cars, blasting hip-hop, and gunning their engines across the 90 foot drag strip I finally asked, “Why does everyone here drive like they have a tiny penis?” I made sure to accompany this with a gesture to get the point across.

They laughed, they agreed, and they sighed. The logical conclusion to this thought wasn’t hard to follow though. Take a huge population of adolescents and twenty somethings, take away beer and women, add a car and what do you get? Oman.

At sometime around 3:30 the guys packed up all their garbage, got back in their cars, and went home. I put on my IPod again, entirely happy with the evenings turn of events, and got ready to say goodbye to this strange new city, unsure of when I’d return. Tomorrow I’d be off to my apartment, my city, and my job, and new madness would surely await.