Name That City

I am going to describe a city and I want you to guess what city I am talking about.

There are miles of high-end shops, like LaCosta and Coach, and of course who can live without Starbucks, in malls with marble floors. On the streets there are Bentley’s, Rolls Royce’s and Hummers with dark tinted windows.

Do you have a city in mind?

I will continue.

The city is defined by the competition between developers to out do one another. Each building is bigger, grander, taller than the next, each offering one more high end item of special appeal. The city is growing so fast it is mind boggling. It is in the middle of a desert where water is a considerable issue, yet there are often accents of beautiful water intensive landscaping. Air conditioning exists in EVERY building.

Do you have a better idea what city I am talking about?

There are amazing hotels with suites for as much as $15,000 a night. Of course one of those hotel’s has a revolving restaurant on top featuring a buffet which views beyond the spectacle, miles of single family homes which have been build in just the last ten years.

Are you sure you know which city I am talking about?

All the street signs are in English.

Still think you know what city I am talking about?

All street signs are also in Arabic.



Suddenly stumped? I will give you another hint.

I have been there recently.

Now do you know?

My last hint is I mentioned it in my last entry.

Dubai is such a fascinating place I hardly know where to start.

I suppose I will start with the basics. (Imagine me taking on the drone, monotone voice of instructional movies of the past, complete with the ticking sound of the projector.) Dubai is a city of 1.4 million in the United Arab Emirates on the Saudi Arabian Peninsula.

OK, basics done.

The similarities between Las Vegas and Dubai are surprising, aren’t they?

Are they building enough?



Dubai is a lot like Las Vegas, which is ironic, because in a lot of ways it is the antithesis of Las Vegas.

Dubai, overwhelmingly Muslim, limits the sale of alcohol making it only available in very exclusive locations. I seriously doubt any gambling is allowed. There are far more burqas seen than mid-rifts. And there are no sex-appeal ads. (Well… of course there are. It is just that they dare to show women’s forearms. How Risque!)

I love Dubai. It is so culturally rich and fascinating you can taste it, come to think of it, literally. Like any wealthy city there is not shortage of high-end worldly restaurants, but I don’t think you will find any pork dishes.

The one aspect of Dubai that really reminds me of Vegas is the fast, aggressive, competitive building projects constantly in the works. It is notoriously referred to as a construction zone, no area specifically, the entire city. Dubai is currently building, what for some period of time, will be the world’s tallest building, 190 stories. It boasts the world’s only indoor ski slope. (I thought this would be a little bunny hill. It is not. It is many stories high… and a delightful break from the shopping available at that mall. It is that big gray projection out of the side of that mall.)





Its crowning architectural achievement is the Burj al Arab (or Arab Tower). The Burj, a mere 27 stories high, is designed in the shape of a wind-full sail. In the mast area, the entire atrium is open the entire 27 stories. You have seen this building, but perhaps for only seconds as Tiger Woods struck a golf ball off the helipad in some ad, or Agasie played tennis on that same helipad.





The suites in the Burj start at $1700 per night, with the penthouse suite a mere $15,000 per night. It is entirely booked most of the year. To enter the hotel, you need an appointment, usually booked a month in advance. (Hence no interior pictures from me.) And by appointment, I mean reservation, for at very least high tea, which starts at $70.

But all this grandeur must be fueled by something. In Vegas it is gambling. In Dubai, it is oil.
(This is one of the reasons why I like Dubai better. There is no seedy element.)

But it is a strange city made up of almost entirely foreigners. The natives found black gold beneath their feet, you don’t think they were going to pick up a hammer themselves do you?

The city is strikingly India, from all parts, and Pakistanis. There are also noticeable communities from various African countries and many areas of Asia.

Dubai is a promise land for many foreigners. It boasts jobs at all levels and educational possibilities less available elsewhere.

But as a working promiseland, it has a noticeable feature. The men out number the women, significantly. (I don’t know the numbers… but just walking around, you notice more men than women by far.)

And lets talk about the women and their burqas. (If anyone can find out for me why burqa are black… I will be forever grateful. This intrigues me and yet I cannot find the answer.) Dubai, as the most progressive, multicultural apex of the Muslim world, had women in all forms of what I would call, Muslim dress. I have been corrected though. A Muslim man argued that this is not Muslim dress, it is cultural dress. No where in the Koran does it dictate this particular extent of covering. It is Muslim cultural practice (or so was his argument.) I disagree slightly. I think is a Muslim sect practice. Specific garb is also important to the Mennonite Christian sect and the Jewish Hassidic sect.

I think it is naïve for us to want women to abandon this garb. We are imposing our culture on them. Many of them do not want to dress like westerners. They do not see it as freeing. They feel overly revealed. (I am 100% against the eye covering. I think that is just ridiculous, unpractical and makes women subservient.)

I was given the example of going to a nude beach. Everyone there may be nude. But I would not be comfortable wearing nothing. It is not something I am used to. So even though it is perfectly acceptable to be nude, I may choose to stay clothed. If women are more comfortable in their traditional garb, who am I to protest.

As the Middle East moves culturally more to the west, women are gaining the choice. As long as women are free to make their own choice, I don’t care what that choice is.

So let’s say you need a burqa. I walked into something which resembled a WalMart called Carreflours. One of the funnier things, but natural I suppose, is the fact you can by burqas off the rack at this superstore. I guess they have to buy them somewhere. (There were high end burqa stores too.)

In the Carreflours you could pay with at least five different currencies at the checkout counter. (I wish now I had made a note of which currencies.) I naturally paid in dollars. I paid in dollars everywhere I shopped in Dubai, the bookstore, the pharmacy, the department store, etc. No one ever hesitated to accept US dollars. And consider this, how many American’s do you think visit Dubai? Yet they readily, like most of the rest of the world, accept dollars. It is odd.

I spoke English to everyone I encountered and found each person fluent.

I suppose they have to order their Tall Mocha Latte’s at Starbucks too.

Or burgers and donuts.

Cape Town Pictures

OK, I finally uploaded my Cape Town pictures. (It has only been a month.)

First, the pictures I failed to take. I really wish I took more/better pictures of the fences to illustrate what I meant in my last blog about vicious. Next time.

As if there will be a next time. Cape Town is an amazing place, but I would not go out of my way to get there. And lets be honest, every way to get there is out of the way.

Cape Town's amazing central feature, Table Mountain, with clouds spilling over the top, as seen from the Waterfront.



And the view from Table Mountain, complete with me, to prove I was there.



That, by the way, is what I look like after thirty hours on planes and in airports, at what is four am in my brain, when my hotel room is not ready.

Now some quirky pictures. In every port, there is a defining trinket being sold to tourists. For example, in the Amazon, stuff piranhas are sold, in Venice it's Carnival masks, in Dublin it is all things Guinness.

Well in Cape Town, there are lamps. Lamps, you ask? Yes, lamps. But of course as the representative trinket from Cape Town, there is something unique about these lamps. Decorated by engraving, they are actually ostrich eggs with a bulb inside. Here is a group of them.



And here is one close up so you can appreciate the engraving.



Now onto the strange. The woman who walked into the public bathroom as I was taking this picture surely thought I was crazy. (I mean wouldn't you be weary of someone taking pictures in a public bathroom?) But I had to take a picture of this "sink."

In the bathroom were multiple faucets over one single inclined slab of well polished marble. Water running from the facets ran down the incline to a barely noticeable gap between the splashboard and the slab, the drain. It was just an interesting concept for a sink.



And finally, the choice sign from Cape Town.



Apparently the parking requires commitment.

Coming soon... Dubai.

Cape Town

Cape Town is a physically astonishingly beautiful but politically and socially troubled. It is clear that life is improving (mostly evident by new building and the maintained infrastructure) but I think it is also clear that it is not improving as fast as the public would like. The upper class is still mostly white. The office workers definitely seemed disproportionately white while service jobs were entirely black. Where I stayed, it was a modern metropolitan area like anywhere in Europe or America, complete with four coffee shops per square block. But outside of town are shack towns of mostly immigrants fleeing bad conditions in other countries.

In my traveling of the world, I have decided there are only two types of places in the world, places people are emigrating from, and the places they are immigrating to. Everywhere falls into one of these two categories. Cape Town is a place people are immigrating to. Many Europeans, experiencing extraordinarily favorable exchange rates and longing the marvelous year-round warm weather, are retiring to Cape Town. Importantly, Cape Town has summer during Europe’s winter, meaning it is a great place for European “snow-birds.”

On the other side is the mass emigration from the rest of Africa. People fleeing social, political, economic or religious problems in their homelands get to Cape Town and learn it is not the panacea. There are so many more immigrants than jobs that many places post in their windows “No Jobs,” meaning they are not hiring and people should not ask. Jobless and penniless, they build shack towns out of debris where there is space, outside of town. Crime is out of control in South Africa, and it is understandable. There is a huge population that is simply hopeless. No money, no jobs, no place to live, no way of feeding themselves, crime seems the only way to survive.

We in California complain and complain about our immigrants. We have no idea how good we have it. In the end, our immigrants can find work and places to live. Imagine having an immigrant population that could not work or find a place to live. People think the immigrants would stop coming, but it would be a decade before they stopped coming. They would simply be a drain on the economy instead of contributing to it. That is the lesson of South Africa. Immigrants who can work, feed themselves and pay for shelter are less of a drain on the social system than immigrants that cannot. The immigrants are coming either way.

The crime has yielded an odd utilitarian art form in South Africa, if you can call it that. I have never seen so many different types of fences that could be described, in a word, as vicious. The fences were designed in two categories: rip you to shreds or impale you. I only saw a couple fences that tried to obscure their purpose with decorative design. I now thoroughly believe, you can judge a place by its fences.

On a completely different note, the hotel I stayed at had the strangest elevator system I have ever encountered. In the elevator, there were no buttons, none. Outside the elevator, there were a lot of buttons. Instead of pressing up or down before boarding the elevator, there was a panel where you pressed the exact floor you wanted to go to. The panel would reply with Elevator A, B or C. If it said Elevator A, when Elevator A arrived, you got on. Once in the elevator, you pressed no buttons (as there were none). The elevator, knowing from the panel which floor you were going to, would stop on the floor you had pressed on the panel. If you changed you mind and wanted to go to a different floor, well you were out of luck. You had to go to your prescribed floor or the floor that someone else had predestined the elevator to stop at prior to their boarding the elevator. The whole idea was just odd.

Cool: The beauty of Cape Town and basic things that are totally different, like elevator controls.
Stupid: How difficult striving for a better life can be.

Cartagena

(I wrote this post on Columbia a month ago. I am in Kenya today.)

Cartagena was a surprise. Everything I know about Cartagena, Columbia I learned from the movie Romancing in the Stone (Kathleen turner and Michael Douglas, 1984) or from CNN reports on Columbian drug lords.

Its poor reputation was not improved by things I had heard from crew members who had been there, mostly relating to crime.

So why on earth was our ship making this miserable stop?

Because Cartagena is beautiful.



It has two primary attractions, the old city and the fort. The fort is by far the biggest stone military installation I have ever seen. I have been to castles around the world, and this fort out sizes them all by many times. It is huge. I did not have time to more than drive by it, so its grand size is all I can comment on.

The old city was an architectural delight in a style I will call brilliant new world fusion, emphasis on bright colors and architectural elements from wherever the builder felt like.



The result was ornate wooden balconies hanging below tile roofs and above hard stone walls. Somehow it all melded together into a Mediterranean-style warmth.



It was so perfect and so attractive, even in being random, that when someone said “This is like Disneyland” I understood what they meant. It was perfect, bright and colorful.



There were certain consistencies. The natural color of wood was prized and the ornate posts of the wood balconies were all the same. The colors, while of every element of the rainbow, were all equally bright. Bougainville of every color seemed to climb some portion of every building.



(I love sundials.)



I get in trouble with my co-workers regularly for saying, "It looks just like Santa Barbara." But the next picture really does look just like Santa Barbara.

In fact, it makes me think of the Wells Fargo Building on Figeroa and Anacapa, in Santa Barbara. After taking the picture, I tried to find something to prove that it is actually not in Santa Barbara, but I couldn't. So you will have to take my word on it.




All in all, Cartagena goes on my list of places I am glad I have been to, would like to go to again, but will not be a singular destination point, unless the politics change.

Cool: The beauty and surprise of Cartagena
Stupid: The politics and crime that prevent it from being the glorious destination its beauty deserves.

There Was A Superbowl?When?

Out here, on the ship, with only movies from a video locker and a couple news channels, we are completely ignorant of current media culture.

I have no idea what TV shows are popular and probably would not even recognize show names. I have no idea what movies have come out or are coming out. I don't know any of the celebrities.

Now people who know me, will say this was always true. I was never in turn with media culture. This is true. But it is simply impractical to even try to stay in the know out here. I would have to run ashore in English speaking ports and buy the relevant magazines, People, or whatever.

So, the Superbowl took place in Miami. I found this out the day of the Superbowl. (It clarified why my mother, who lives in Miami said the place was shut down for Superbowl, three days before the event. Before that I thought, "Gosh, I really doubt the Dolphins are playing. Why does Miami care about the Superbowl?")

It was the Bears and the Colts. I still have no idea where the Colts are from.

Perhaps more poignant, I am not even sure who won. Seriously.

The 560 people I live with consist of about 30 Americans and only Americans pay any attention to the Superbowl. Of those, assume 20 had to work during the Superbowl. The other ten were hardly aware it was going on. It was not as if we have been exposed to the three weeks of media hype.

As I chat with friends online since the game, people make references to commercials I have not seen, and may never see.

Out here we are completely removed from media culture, and since I am from effectively a media culture, that means I am completely removed from my culture.

It makes for a very strange isolation.

Not that I am complaining.

This is a picture from St. Kitt's yesterday. (I think it looks startlingly like Ventura, but people say I always say places look like home.)



Being removed from the shared experience of media culture is isolating. But look at the picture above, which would you choose?