It dawns on me that I’ve mentioned quite a bit about the wealth floating around UAE. But I think maybe my implied disconnect between the proverbial 1% and the masses has been insufficient. The working class are definitely working. The people I’ve talked to always seem to be working — it’s an expensive place to […]

As is often the case with group tours, there’s a long time between being picked up and actually starting the tour.  Different groups are staying all over town and thus it’s always a bit of a prolonged, “we almost have everybody!” false promises. But eventually we DID have everybody.  A couple from Greece, two couples […]

Reda and her friend Ilona had pre-arranged a couple of tours for me and Ilona’s visiting cousins.  We started the morning at the Disney-fontified Dubai Miracle Gardens, a flower and garden expo wonderland that is perhaps most impressive for surviving in the desert climes.   It’s like a year-round Rose Bowl Parade Float exhibit.  Each […]

Haunted. Whether by jet lag, bad waking dreams, or bad memories, I barely slept last night. I drifted off around 9:30 PM only to wake up frantic that I missed my alarm. Dashing about the admittedly small hotel room, I fumbled for my watch only to realize it was 10:15 PM. I was wide awake, […]

The jet lag is killing me. But I grabbed a Careem over to Reda’s work place. She said it was the Gold Tower and she wasn’t kidding — we pulled into the Cluster I section of the Jumeirah Lakes Towers and there was no mistaking which building I needed: Reda would later tell me she […]

Jet lag is a real thing. I think I finally drifted off into fitful waking sleep around 5:30 am. I awoke to this “alarm clock” at 7/7:30-ish. So far my one criticism of Dubai is its construction hours start time! I opted to get up and shower off whatever vestiges of travel and slumber remained. […]

While there was a long line at immigration, it actually moved pretty swiftly. I don’t know what happened with the visa requirement — I thought I had to pay for one when I landed but maybe that’s in Oman. I stopped by an ATM to get some AED currency, partly to always have some for […]

Hurry Up and Wait – Traveling is SO Glamorous With the delays out of LAX, we arrived into CDG with minutes to make my connection. I dashed through the airport like OJ Simpson in those old Alamo (or was it Avis?) commercials, ya know, before “the juice is loose” took on new meanings. I fretted […]

These are turbulent times… I think it was 22 years ago that I found out about an especially intriguing part of NASA’s astronaut training. I somehow had seemingly always known prospective spacemen and spacewomen had trained in swimming pools as part of approximations of weightlessness. But it was only during press tours for Ron Howard’s […]

The good people at the Muscat Marathon are counting down to the race on January 27th over on their Facebook page. This is one of the more recent posts: The link takes you to an article from January 4th entitled, “Oman Sports: How to best prepare for Muscat Marathon 2017?” It advises runners that there’s […]