Quick update while I'm waiting to get tired enough to sleep.
Istanbul seems to have been a success. Still waiting on final feedback but the initial feedback is good. The meeting with the IT press went off pretty well, I was actually thinking during the interview that when I was a journalist, I never let my subjects off the hook so easily.
The city was good but I was so mentally fried after the company business was over that I wasn't ready for dealing with a huge city. People are super friendly, but like Russia it's a real sink-or-swim hustle culture. You have to spend a lot of energy just doing the usual things, if you want to avoid having people take advantage of you. It's a crazy big city with a lot of frenetic energy, in all the good ways and the bad ways which that implies.
Dubai has been something else altogether. It's the most surreal place I've ever seen, including San Francisco. And it's grown from a tiny mud-hut trading hamlet to the most luxurious and super-modern city I've ever seen, literally right out of the desert in just the last 50 years. I would not have believed this place if I hadn't been looking at it with my own eyes all day.
First impression- walking off the Singapore Airlines 777-300 and seeing a huge poster in the DXB concourse that listed a special offer for buying an apartment in a new series of residential buildings now under construction. Buy an apartment and get a free Jaguar luxury sedan. And then all the buyers are entered in a raffle. First prize? A six-seat private jet plane.
(Side note- all the stories I've heard about Singapore Airlines appear to be true. They do have the best service, best food and cutest flight attendants I've encountered yet.)
I didn't have time to make this a working trip - I'd have loved to score some interviews while I was here and write a story about the politics & economy - but I couldn't spare the time or mental energy. I've still learned a hell of a lot in just the last 36 hours though. Enough to infuriate me further over how ignorant and naiive I've been about the world. And continue to be despite best efforts.
Started off today with a tour of the Jumeira Mosque as part of an "open doors, open minds" initiative started by Sheikh Mohammed to foster better understanding between expats and Islam & Emirati culture. The most important part was a long Q&A between the attendees and Mohammed, not the Sheikh but one of the students of the mosque, where Mohammed spent 45 minutes answering some pretty tough questions. I had a lot of questions of my own but I shut up and watched the exchange because I thought the questions the crowd was asking said as much about Western perceptions of Islam as Mohammed's answers said about the religion itself. I'm really glad I went.
Next was a tour of the Sheikh Sayeed al-Maktoum house, which had exhibits of photographs and artifacts from the history of Dubai and the UAE. The photos from the 1950s are unbelievable- a creekside village of mud and palm frond huts with a few sandstone military buildings was all there was then. Today it looks like Berlin did in the 1990s after the wall fell- a forest of cranes and steadily rising architecture. (It's even more intense in Dubai than Berlin because here shifts of construction workers go at it 24-hours a day.)
Then I spent the afternoon walking around the spice soukh and gold soukh in Deira, on the east side of the "creek." Just walking around among the people, smelling and tasting spices I'd never experienced before, haggling with merchants and feeling lucky to be alive. In one spice shop (not really a shop since the spice merchants work in open ended enclaves that face the internal covered walking streets), I saw an open canvas bag of Japanese takasago treats, so I said "Ah, takasago!" The shopkeeper then demanded that I teach him all the Japanese words I know (which mostly came from reading "Shogun" and whatever pathetic Japanese I picked up in San Francisco while fruitlessly trying to pick up the sushi girls there). He wrote the words and translations carefully into a pad, in a language that looked like Tamil or some Indian dialect, and then in exchange for the favor he gave me a break of five Dirhams (20-percent) off the price of the spices I wanted.
After the soukhs I met my hosts at a marina-front mall/hotel/restaurant complex near their apartment and we ate & shopped more till everything started closing around 11pm. Tomorrow morning I plan to take a swim in the Persian Gulf and then go out into the desert with a company that leases 4WD vehicles for half-day excursions - dune jumping with the 4WDs & then eating a bedouin dinner at sunset surrounded by nothing but desert and sky. Apparently, a lot of people who see Dubai for the first time don't want to leave, and make plans to come back permanently. This doesn't suprise me at all.
Lots more, and loads of pictures. But need to try to sleep now, Insh'allah.
Posted by case at January 28, 2007 09:30 PM