Re-Entry
on Random Uganda (Uganda), 13/Jan/2010 08:58, 34 days ago
a few pictures from dubaiJanuary 12thSixteen hours is a long time on a plane. Three weeks seems like a long time for a trip home for the holidays.It seemed like I had just recovered from the upper respiratory infection I caught on my flight home (or was it the hangover from the 2nd annual west coast vodka and latke party) and I was just reaching the point of taking warm tap water for granted and then suddenly I was once again strapped into seat 37c of the Emirate 777 in the section of the plane reserved for screaming babies and tubercular coughing fits.The holidays were a blur. I would like to say I reconnected with all of my family and friends, but that would be a lie. Mostly I concentrated on reconnecting with Nancy. Everybody else pretty much had to come find me in Noe Valley. We did manage a little road trip (the only kind of roadtrip available to you when the family vehicle is now a mini cooper) to Yosemite in search or our own little piece of the white Christmas everybody else in the northern hemisphere was wallowing in. And I did work a few night shifts in the ER at Seton—just to show my face and temporarily overcome the lurking anxiety that a year long sabbatical in the third world might ruin me for ‘modern medicine.’ (those of you in America will be happy to know that I can still burn through your healthcare tax dollars with the best of them…)And then suddenly I’m kissing Nancy goodbye at SFO (she was actually getting on a plane to NYC the day before I left) and watching the aircraft safety video. I will say that flying steerage on Emirates is slightly better than some of the other airlines I’ve flown recently. The seats are more comfy and the added19mm of legroom goes a long way to warding off those pesky DVTs and the entertainment system has the widest screens and most baffling array of controls in the air today. In the 16 hours from San Francisco to Dubai I managed to read half of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson and watch5 or 6 movies—even if I did fall asleep for at least 250 of the 500 Days of Summer.Another nice thing about Emirates is the free hotel room (and buffet dinner/breakfast) that comes with a layover of 8 to 23 hours (and a ticket price over a $1000). So while I was checking into the Millennium Airport Hotel—at 8pm when my internal clock was saying 8am after a night of a few fitful dozes—I noticed a sign for the ‘Dubai City Lights’ tour. How could I resist?The Dubai City Lights tour consisted mostly of 90 minutes of freeway driving in the frigidly air-conditioned van with occasional stops for our driver, Hassan, to poke me awake and offer me the opportunity to make photographs of yet another shopping mall or hotel built‘in the traditional style’—ie like a sheik’s palace. For those of you who haven’t been to Dubai lately, the city planners are, if appearances don’t lie, on crack. Aside from building artificial islands shaped like palm trees and huge indoor ski slopes, there are so many skyscrapers under construction that they have more foreign construction workers (many from south asia who reportedly get paid less than $10/day) than citizens.Oh yeah, and they’re broke.Highlights included the Burg al Arab hotel (the‘world’s only 7 star hotel’), described by Sam Wollaston in the Guardian as "...fabulous, hideous, and the very pinnacle of tackiness—like Vegas after a serious, no-expense-spared, sheik-over", and the Burg Khalifa (formerly the Burg Dubai—recently named after the Abu Dhabi sheik and president who bailed out the Dubai economy) the new tallest tower/building in the world—more than twice as high as the Empire State Building and 40% higher than the Taipei 101 (formerly the world’s tallest). The Guardian has labeled the new tower “a bleak symbol of Dubai's era of bling.”It was hard to really take in the height of this giant needle in the middle of the night, standing in the entry of yet another shopping mall and surrounded by palm trees wrapped in christmas lights. It wasn’t until we were sitting on the tarmac at Dubai International a few miles away that I came to appreciate just exactly how tall a building that rises nearly a kilometer above the desert floor is. Pretty effing tall. As we did a fly-by from a safe distance I wondered if, like the pyramids, Dubai will be some archeological tourist site a thousand years from now…And then about 8 hours and one stop in Adis Adiba later, I was standing in the Visa line at Entebbe (I still don’t have a work visa yet). Joseph said that Christmas in Kampala was quiet—‘everybody left.’ I’m not sure if he meant the kampalites or the VSOers on whom his taxi business depends. At the very least, there weren’t any riots.And then about a day later, after wandering around the hospital in a daze and the faintest pretense of coming to work, I’m sitting in the private garden of the Ugandan Parliament (one of the hashers had booked it for the Monday hash), recovering from a mad run around city center, drinking a beer with Julian (dirty dick) and David (federo—prince of Buganda) and it dawns on me. I’m back in Kampala. Again.