Boulevards Of Death

I haven't posted anything for a couple of weeks.  Some blog this is; it's more like an unwieldy rough draft for a book travel of essays or I don't know what.  I'm the last one to understand or explain why I write and how.  It's a bit frustrating.  And somehow I think Bill Bryson will continue to sleep at night.

One of the reasons I haven't posted (other than the excruciating perfectionism I put myself through when I write) is I haven't done much lately.  I'm having a harder time finding things to do every day.  Not that I'm in a bad headspace; far from it actually.  I'm pretty content.  But my life has been lacking adventure.  I've run out of malls to explore.  As I've mentioned the beaches here are pretty weird.  I haven't been out of the city in weeks.  I have visions of hiking in the desert, finding a wild, untamed beach, checking out some falconry... but without someone to hang out with during the day, how to go about it?

I find my audacious title laughable at this point.  I'll admit it was borrowed from the title of the book about Bombay, Maximum City, because I had the idea of Abu Dhabi as an exploding world capital with intersections of culture and commerce that shed light on our world.   But during plenty of cynical moments I have thought there's nothing "maximum" about this place at all, unless it were the number of malls or SUVs.

Maybe one of these days I'll be dune-bashing, or jet-skiing, or sipping a latte at Starbucks in Marina Mall, and suddenly have a maximal epiphany.  I'll keep you posted.

Let me tell you the major logistical reason why I have been having a hard time getting out.  It isn't the brutal, invincible weather.  Actually, yes it is, the weather has a lot to do with it.  Did I already mention it's really hot here?  And also really humid?  It seems so unfair to have desert heat with oppressive humidity and no hope of rain, but there you are.  You may be able to put up with the heat, and even appreciate it.  But you can't forget about it, you have to plan for it at all times.  The threat of heat exhaustion is very real.

Beyond that, there's almost nowhere to go on foot without a lot of effort and dare I say danger.  Abu Dhabi is a car town.  Well, hell, it's a car world, what do you want?  But Abu Dhabi is really a car town.  You think Americans are the car-centric ones?  AD will astonish you.  Cars rule here.  A pretty high percentage of the population own them, and fuel is cheap (duh).  Everyone drives, everywhere.  The harsh weather would 

tame those few with any pedestrian spirit at all.  And they love

cars here; Arab guys love sports cars and all kinds of car racing and just about everything to do with cars.

And everything is bent to this reality.  Abu Dhabi hardly existed fifty years ago; where there was nothing now there's an enormous wealthy metropolis.  It was practically built all at once, and

 strictly as a tribute to the automobile.  The streets are in excellent condition, and they are laid out cleverly, in something of a grid, to maximize the flow of traffic.  And flow it does, and rapidly too.  This is well and good if you're a city administrator concerned with keeping things moving and keeping your economy booming.  But there's one huge problem: when they were planning it, there was no thought about pedestrians.  None.  Abu Dhabi is pedestrian hell.

It's not that there's nowhere to walk.  Walking is possible here.  It's just very hectic, very aggravating -- and very risky.  When I took my first walk in the city, I could hardly believe my eyes.  It's as if

Robert Moses rose from his grave as an evil phantom and designed a city from scratch.  Every street resembles his monstrous Boulevard Of Death.  I've always feared and loathed Queens Blvd with a passion, along with the soulless, ugly, traffic-choked central corridor of Queens which it epitomizes.   Abu Dhabi makes Queens seem like Fire Island.

Every street is extremely wide, with at least six lanes (but effectively eight or even ten if you count the turning lanes), divided by a narrow median.  Every street is very busy; Abu Dhabi is as busy and full of hustle-and-bustle as any world capital.  And the thousands of cars move very fast.  The speed limit in the city is 60 kph (37 mph).  Which is too fast, but most drivers go a lot faster; no one follows speed limits here.

Sidewalks exist, but they were not designed for comfort.  They are often not much more than median strips dividing the street from a parking lot, with irregular shapes; and they're unusually high, making them cumbersome to climb up and down, especially for older people and kids.  There is no such thing as an unbroken sidewalk; busy lanes leading to and from the parking lots constantly interrupt.  The path is frequently blocked by lightpoles and traffic signs.  In other places, sidewalks are just the incidental concrete in front of shops or malls.

These are the vast, hot, imposing corporate plaza spaces with no life and no utilitarian function decried by progressive urban planners like Jan Gehl and William H. Whyte.  Sometimes the sidewalk gives way to nothing but a dispiriting patch of dirt, especially in front of one of the many construction sites.

And there's no relief in sight.  It's not like any other city I've been in:  there's no older, more genteel downtown area with narrower streets that are a bit safer and more pleasant.  There

are no narrow streets at all, anywhere.  No pedestrianized zones.  (What?  Keep dreaming.)  No residential streets as we would think of them.  No human scale.  Wherever people live in the city, they have to put up with the same layout, the same kind of traffic, the same confounding inconvenience and danger.  Abu Dhabi is a huge mortifying grid of Boulevards Of Death.  

The only way all of this is broken up for those on foot is with the strange alleys and lots which exist behind and between the buildings.  It's hard to picture if you haven't seen it, but since every street is more or less a huge boulevard, and there is no such thing as a side street or residential lane, there is quite a lot of space left in the alleyways.  I'm not sure if they planned these spaces, or if they built the buildings and streets and then just forgot about the leftover space.  A lot of public life necessarily takes place in these 

weird free zones; there tend to be lots of cornershops, restaurants, dry cleaners, pharmacies, and so on; people hang out and children play.  Sounds promising doesn't it?  If all this open space had been planned with a vision Abu Dhabi might have been a pedestrian's dream.  

But sadly almost as a rule these lots are poorly planned and regulated and pretty hard to navigate -- chaotic archipelagos of parking lots tied together by random, often barely defined access roads, and broken up by outbuildings (powerplants, toolsheds), trash dumpsters and construction equipment.  People drive and even park almost wherever they feel like it in these places, and in fact, they are almost always completely overrun by cars.  In their dull way they are as annoying as the main roads.

Obviously the cars move more slowly here, but they are if possible more reckless -- swerving up and down and all over the place, looking for parking spaces, going much faster than you are used to in a parking lot.  Drivers cut you off quite cheerfully, with no qualms at all -- so puzzling and frustrating if you're used to at least some courtesy in such situations.  The sightlines are often pretty bad because of the irregular, haphazard style of parking and sometimes cars appear very suddenly around a bend.

That's the final element in this perfect storm:  the way people drive here.  Common disparaging terms for bad driving such as "maniac" and "asshole" don't really apply in Abu Dhabi, unless they apply to everyone.  Concepts such as "defensive driving" and "following the speed limit and traffic laws" are considered quaint here; in fact, some people seriously believe that driving carefully will get them killed.  Everyone speeds, sometimes suicidally.  If you are following the speed limit, you will be quickly and dangerously tailgated.   No one signals.  NO ONE signals; in fact it seems no one thinks ahead or follows patterns at all.  It's normal to see a driver cutting four lanes of traffic with no signal, only to insert themselves recklessly in between two other cars, making up no ground at all.  It never seems daring, just pointless and stupid.  People pass on the shoulder or in construction lanes.   Obviously no one uses seatbelts and everyone uses their phones.  And obviously no one stops or even slows for pedestrians, who I suppose are seen as not much better than dogs or sheep.  Where did all of this reckless haste and obliviousness come from?  Is it an Arab thing, or did it seep over from the Subcontinent?  Who knows.

Let me illustrate what it's like to cross a street, any street in Abu Dhabi.  It truly is like a game of Frogger.  Let's start on the misshapen slab of concrete and masonry which passes for a "sidewalk."  Your objective, the other side of the street, is fifty yards away; people on the other side seem small; there are several ways to die between here and there.  You see six lanes of traffic, all constantly filled with speeding cars except when stopped by the lights.  However, even before you start crossing these six lanes you have to cross a turning lane, the curbed "channel" as I call it which arcs away from the regular street and allows drivers to constantly make right turns at the intersection.  No light or signal of any kind governs these right turns, and no one stops for

pedestrians who are waiting.  When it's busy, it's quite impossible to get across.  You look up, and see that you actually have a walk signal to cross the street, but you can't even start because no one is yielding in the turning lane.  It's maddening to see their faces, one after the other, as they swerve by so closely, with no acknowledgement.  Finally you see a short gap in the oncoming cars, and jog across.  This is not the most dangerous thing you'll do.  You are now on another, triangular curbed slab between the turning "channel" and the main road.  You are about to lose your light

 -- it's flashing.  You have a choice:  wait, or take the risk of running to get across the street.  You decide to be safe and wait for the next light.  Okay, so you're waiting.  On this curbed triangle, you are standing with relative safety, but quite close to the rushing cars which are now passing in front and constantly zooming behind in the turning lane.  It's noisy, and a bit intimidating.  You realize that at these speeds any mishap (a wreck, God forbid a drunk driver) would hardly be contained by the curb.

Finally you get a walk signal.  You very carefully look to make sure no one is going to make an illegal right turn as you step out into the street -- perhaps a driver missed the turning lane and decides to recklessly

make the right-angle turn; you've seen it before so of course it's possible.  Okay, you're crossing the first three lanes in apparent safety.  But you look and see that you shouldn't cross the next three, the opposite lanes of the street.  You don't have a signal yet, as the traffic system is allowing for those drivers to make left turns.  You stop and wait again on the very narrow median separating the six lanes.  Now you really feel exposed.  The median is perhaps three feet wide.   You share it with a few other people, it becomes crowded quickly; some of them are off the curb and in the street.  You notice others jaywalking between the cars and trucks which are zipping by very close as they make those left turns.  Some of them are making U-turns, and these are even more

intimidating as they roll right around you in about 330 degrees.  You notice the large traffic sign right next to you makes a pretty huge blind spot for everyone who crosses.  Now it's your time to cross the last three lanes.  You have to move pretty fast, as the lights don't really last long.  You keep a sharp eye out for oncoming cars from anywhere -- the way people drive here you never know.  You arrive at the opposite triangle thingey, and, of course, wait for the right turns on this side.  You're about to step across when an SUV speeds up to get into the turning lane and cuts you off pretty badly.  Could've been a close one if you hadn't been paying

 attention.

Finally, you're across.  Congratulations; you will have to do it again, many more times to get anywhere and back again.   Not to mention navigating the tricky parking lots and alleys.  There really aren't any pleasant places to walk anywhere; everything is climbing and clambering and dodging and shuffling from one awkward space to the next.  Add to this the heat, which is a real factor.  With scorching light reflecting off all the concrete and steel and dust, that damned humidity, few trees, and hundreds of cars and trucks rushing, the ambient temperature feels like 130℉.  Heat and danger.  It's

overwhelming, exhausting.  It's a one-two punch that just makes you give up and want to go home.  (There, you can play Frogger more safely by clicking here.)  No wonder most

 visitors just give in and take cabs everywhere.  Cabs are pretty cheap here, and I have found most of the drivers to be pretty friendly and much better behind the wheel than the average.  (What about public transport you ask?  Well, there are no trains here.  There are buses... but let's just say that I've never, ever heard of an expat taking a bus.)

Think I'm overdoing it a bit with all the "danger" stuff?  Ask the World Health Organization. The number of people killed in traffic in the United Arab Emirates has taken on the feeling of a public emergency here (at least in the government and media; whether most citizens care is another story).  Well over a thousand

people died on the roads last year.  For a population of four million that's not only not good, it's reprehensible.  The WHO estimates the traffic death rate here could be as high as 37 per 100,000 of the population per year, and that places the UAE firmly in the running for having the deadliest roads in the world.  It easily leads the Persian Gulf region despite advantages in wealth and resources, and doubles the world average of 18.  (By comparison the deadly roads 

in the USA produce 15 deaths per 100,000 people.  The UK comes in at about 5.  Whatever they're doing in Jolly Olde to keep people alive on the roads, the rest of the world should take note.)  Indeed the UAE is ranked on the scale of road carnage with the poorest and most backwards and dangerous nations such as Libya and Angola.  This should not be.  True, the UAE is considered a developing nation, but I think its official IMF classification goes something like, "Insanely Developing Nation With Shit Tons Of Oil And Cash."  It's too rich and peaceful a place for this awful distinction.  Even the number of traffic injuries last year, 11,000, is pretty grim and mind-boggling.  And bad as it is, by all objective measures things are even worse in the capital city of Abu Dhabi.

The government and the media here have teamed up to try to educate the population about safe driving, especially young Arab men.  You want my opinion?  It's not going to work.  Aggressive, reckless driving is permanently ingrained in young guys here.  It's just how they are, and they aren't afraid of the consequences, including death.  No amount of outraged news editorials and PSAs are going to answer that.

One day on a trip through the desert, Amo and I observed with amazement the other drivers on the very long, very straight highway.  One after another SUV would pass us on the left at ludicrous speeds, coming up the straightaway as if to take off like a jet; it was cartoonish.  Occasionally they would swerve insanely in front of us to cut someone else off.  This is the default mode of driving on the highway.  The next morning I read that five young Emirati men had died that same evening when their SUV flipped after a tire blew out on a desert highway.  The police said they were speeding.  Of course they were speeding.

But what's really reprehensible is how often pedestrians suffer and die because of this driving culture.  About a third of road deaths here are pedestrians and other "vulnerable users of the road" such as bicyclists.  26 pedestrians were killed in the city of Abu Dhabi alone in just the first 71 days of this year; 117 were injured.  Just before we arrived here in July, the city was shocked by the hit-and-run deaths of three young girls as they were crossing a busy road with their nanny, who was severely injured.  As I write this, an Australian citizen lies in a coma with almost no hope of survival; he was probably also a victim of hit-and-run, struck in the early morning while he was riding his bike.  His case is particularly sobering because he was a champion triathlete, probably as fit and strong as one can be.  To hear of his life snuffed out in the blink of an eye by some wayward automotive machine reminds us that the feelings of vitality and invinciblity that characterize young men's reckless driving are pure myth -- stupid, deadly myth.

With my own frustrating experiences I'm apalled but not surprised to hear of the unlucky ones who didn't make it.  But this article and photo essay highlights the desperate choices faced by some of the poorest workers here.  People who can't afford a cab like I can, who daily make suicidal dashes across busy highways just to have lunch.  This glimpse is backed up by WHO data that most of the 1.2 million people who die worldwide each year in car accidents are poor, and half of them are pedestrians.  But as is typical in America, this problem is greeted here with a shrug or even with scorn:  it's their fault, they were jaywalking, they were breaking the law, they're crazy, they're stupid, they're drunk.

But the continual bad press from all of the bloodshed has spurred the government to improve the lot of pedestrians in Abu Dhabi.  Taking a look at the list of what they consider improvements, I'm not sure I'm impressed.  What's lowering a few curbs and painting a few stripes going to accomplish in this vast treacherous grid?  Don't get me wrong, in my short time here, I've found the government refreshingly sincere and candid about making life better and more pleasant.  This action came just days after intense media and public pressure about the tragedies with the little girls and the Aussie triathlete.  How often would you see any government in the U.S. act so quickly?  I just think that in the case of Abu Dhabi's roads, it's too little too late.  To really fix the problem, they'd have to transform the selfish, shortsighted car culture here and I don't think that's going to happen soon.

This is the mindset addressed by Gehl throughout his career.  Famously he argues that to have to push a button to cross a street (yeah, you see those buttons here too) automatically places the needs of the car over the pedestrian, makes the person on foot unconsciously feel as if they have to apply to go on their way.  I feel the same way about the pedestrian bridges and underpasses here.  I wouldn't get rid of them, they're the only safe way across some of the busier roads.  But of course there's nothing like enough of them, and they make you feel as if crossing the street is special, an undertaking, a privilege instead of a right.

It's not enough to make streets safer; what is needed is to make them more comfortable, cleaner, less noisy, more attractive and more utilitarian.  In other words, to make them for people, not for machines.  Places people want to linger, and live their lives, not just hurry through.  Reading this interview with Gehl, covering what he accomplished in Copenhagen and what like minds have been doing to revolutionize places like Melbourne and Portland (pictured here), I 

became a bit wistful.  I've enjoyed my time here, but when you literally can't go anywhere without worrying about being flattened by an SUV, it puts a damper on things.  Makes you want to stay at home.  Even people who don't care about urban reform or sustainable living will complain about how hard the traffic is to deal with here.

Gehl has done studies which prove most people can't even realize or express how much traffic disturbs them until they experience a different, more peaceful urban environment.  The collective will to make cities not only more sustainable but more liveable is growing in the world.  It even exists here -- Abu Dhabi's rulers mean quite well, and there is no end of oil money to be spent on beautiful parks and gardens and islands for recreation and happiness.  And don't let my apocalyptic rantings be the end of discussion; there are a lot of pleasant and nice places in this city.  But crucially, every day at the street level in Abu Dhabi the larger vision is not being realized.

Heat And Dust

We are in the midst of a dust storm.  Though I'm not sure "storm" is quite the right word.  There's no wind at all.  It's more a pall of dust that has settled over the city like fog.  It even looks like fog out the window.  But when you're outside, it's very obvious that it's dust and that's as unpleasant as it sounds.  It gets in your eyes, in your hair and on your clothes, it makes your brand new Vans dirty.  You can taste it, and it gets in your nose.  Worst of all, and this is not funny, it gets in your lungs.  It's very fine dust -- that's why it's hanging in the air in this low-pressure system -- and obviously very fine particles of anything are not a good thing to breathe in.  The local news has had reports of people checking into emergency rooms with breathing difficulties, especially, of course, those with asthma or other respiratory conditions.  I don't have asthma, and I'm not a hypochondriac, but I can tell you my chest has hurt a bit and I've had some sinus pain.  Residents have been advised to stay indoors.  No kidding.  Who would want to go out in it anyway?

Well, I'll tell you.  I was up on the roof of our hotel getting this picture at about noon on Saturday, the worst

day of the dust (visibility was only 300 meters in parts of the city).  Mind you it was still a hundred degrees.  And up there I witnessed the somewhat incredible sight of several guests, mostly young women, sunbathing at the pool.  I was amused, but also disgusted.  We're not talking a bit of smog here.  This dust is very tangible -- it feels like being in a really dirty attic or warehouse.  You want to shower after you're out in it. And these silly creatures were sunbathing in it.  

I've grown increasingly annoyed at people frying themselves like fried chickens, often for hours at a time, in brutal sun -- especially when they're already an unhealthy shade of brownish orange.  How much widely-reported modern research about skin cancer do you need to ignore?  Not to mention that the motivation is vanity, and they're defeating themselves on that score too.  Any older lady can tell you too much exposure to sunlight is the first cause of aging skin.  (A friend from Sydney dismissed the notion a lot of sailors seem to have that it's romantic or traditional to have leathery brown skin:  "Yeah, I think I'm over the whole 'Having bad skin and dying young because it's romantic' thing.")  So what will these girls do when they get to middle age?  Botox and surgery of course.  The irony is Arabic women are known for having nice skin from lifetimes of protecting their faces from the sun with their veils.

But sunbathing in dirt!  As if to admit, "We have to do this to ourselves, no matter how adverse the conditions, no matter how foolish it may seem."

Today, as the dust has largely blown away for the time being, come even grimmer reports.  Apparently it's from Iraq, brought by a northwesterly wind (an ill wind indeed), and goes away only briefly before returning later in the week if weather forecasts hold.  A friend who spent some time in this part of the world tells me he's seen this go on for up to eight days.

Worse, it's not natural.  For a couple of days I had myself convinced I was experiencing some harsh but hallowed truth about the Middle East.  I justified the depressing shitty brown haze I was seeing out the window (on the worst days obliterating my view of Lulu Island and the Gulf) as something that just happens here.  When I posted something about it on facebook, my friend Anne challenged me to read Herodotus, and then sent me this excerpt from The English Patient:

There is a whirlwind in southern Morocco, the aajej, against which the fellahin defend themselves with knives. There is the africo, which has at times reached into the city of Rome. The alm, a fall wind out of Yugoslavia. The arifi, also christened aref or rifi, which scorches with numerous tongues. These are permanent winds that live in the present tense.

There are other, less constant winds that change direction, that can knock down horse and rider and realign themselves anticlockwise. The bist roz leaps into Afghanistan for 170 days—burying villages. There is the hot, dry ghibli from Tunis, which rolls and rolls and produces a nervous condition. The haboob—a Sudan dust storm that dresses in bright yellow walls a thousand metres high and is followed by rain. The harmattan, which blows and eventually drowns itself into the Atlantic. Imbat, a sea breeze in North Africa. Some winds that just sigh towards the sky. Night dust storms that come with the cold. The khamsin, a dust in Egypt from March to May, named after the Arabic word for “fifty,” blooming for fifty days—the ninth plague of Egypt. The datoo out of Gibraltar, which carries fragrance.

There is also the ——, the secret wind of the desert, whose name was erased by a king after his son died within it. And the nafhat—a blast out of Arabia. The mezzar-ifoullousen—a violent and cold southwesterly known to Berbers as “that which plucks the fowls.” The beshabar, a black and dry northeasterly out of the Caucasus, “black wind.” The Samiel from Turkey, “poison and wind,” used often in battle. As well as the other “poison winds,” the simoom, of North Africa, and the solano, whose dust plucks off rare petals, causing giddiness.

Other, private winds.

Travelling along the ground like a flood. Blasting off paint, throwing down telephone poles, transporting stones and statue heads. The harmattan blows across the Sahara filled with red dust, dust as fire, as flour, entering and coagulating in the locks of rifles. Mariners called this red wind the “sea of darkness.” Red sand fogs out of the Sahara were deposited as far north as Cornwall and Devon, producing showers of mud so great this was also mistaken for blood. “Blood rains were widely reported in Portugal and Spain in 1901.”

There are always millions of tons of dust in the air, just as there are millions of cubes of air in the earth and more living flesh in the soil (worms, beetles, underground creatures) than there is grazing and existing on it. Herodotus records the death of various armies engulfed in the simoom who were never seen again. One nation was “so enraged by this evil wind that they declared war on it and marched out in full battle array, only to be rapidly and completely interred.”

Dust storms in three shapes. The whirl. The column. The sheet. In the first the horizon is lost. In the second you are surrounded by “waltzing Ginns.” The third, the sheet, is “copper-tinted. Nature seems to be on fire.

I've never read The English Patient but this is a capital passage and it makes me want to check it out.  

But for our dust, natural's not in it.  It's a relatively new phenomenon according to expert and anecdote alike -- and getting worse.  It's the result of the draining of marshes in southern Iraq combined with drought and other factors, such as power outages cutting off irrigation and the damming of rivers in neighboring Turkey.  So it's a man-made disaster taking place, that we here in the UAE are taking in, literally.

The above-linked article (credulously quoting a Kuwaiti researcher) attempts to also fix undue blame on the movement of troops and vehicles in the war grinding sand into dust.  It's added to the problem, but most other sources I found put troop deployment further down on the list.  As another expert from the World Water Council thankfully pointed out in the same article, we're talking about billions of tons of dust here -- I was disappointed by that bit of sensationalism on the part of The National.  In any case the drainage of the Mesopotamian marshes has been taking place for decades.

Here's an article from five years ago that describes an ecological catastrophe of historic proportions.  These marshlands, fed by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, may have been the birthplace of civilization as we know it, and the way they were systematically destroyed under Hussein ranks for some on the scale of all-time 

environmental rapes and pillages with the deforestation of the Amazon.  Now, I don't mean to let the war off the hook, not at all.  If anything it would prevent the social and politial steps necessary to restore the marshes, put any vision of the long haul on the back burner.  Save the environment vs. feed your kids and stop terrorists from blowing everybody up, your choice.  Meanwhile Iraq is now 90% desert and at this rate the remaining arable land will be gone in 20 years.

It was just such poor land management combined with severe drought that created the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.  And sadly this is an even older story.  All historians agree that erosion and desertification caused by overfarming and overgrazing has taken its toll throughout history; they only argue the extent of it.  It may have led to the fading or collapse of Minoan and Harappan civilizations, and others worldwide including certain prehistoric Native Americans.  This science blogger, apparently not one to hedge his bets, believes the Sahara desert is an entirely man-made disaster.  So, bitter a truth as it seems, destroying our environment is not some post-industrial, postmodern nightmare and we can just make it go away.  No, it's something humans have pretty much always done.  We're good at it.  How perfect that the deforestation of cedar trees appears as a mythical tale in the Epic Of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest stories known, hailing from that very same ancient place that is now being turned to dust.

Notes:

• There could be a positive in all of this dust.  Here's an article on how some research shows windborne dust from erosion may actually add nutrients to the Persian Gulf's ecosystem.
  
• After my friend mentioned Herodotus, the next morning I saw this terrific article about a writer who follows his historic footsteps, even into war-ravaged Iraq.
  

Call To Prayer

After the 13-hour flight, passing through immigration, and the 40-minute ride from Abu Dhabi International Airport to our hotel on the Corniche, Amo and I checked in.  Too tired to start exploring the city, we decided to have dinner in the hotel's restaurant, curiously named The Hamptons.  There are certain times while abroad when you realize a bold or naïve person has named a place after another, more famous place in America.  There's a Brooklyn in Australia.  It's a suburb of Sydney.  I'll never forget seeing it on a highway sign.  No possibility of coincidence; the very unique name was originally seventeenth-century Dutch

("broken line") pounded into something else by centuries of use in New York.  What was the thought process there?  Nothing about New South Wales says Brooklyn.  It just seems funny and wrong.  To be fair I've always thought the naming of Athens, Georgia and Paris, Texas to be pretty charming.  Perhaps Europeans feel differently when they see those names on road signs.

And I don't think the namer of The Hamptons restaurant at the Hilton Corniche Residence in Abu Dhabi had anything else in mind but, you know, the Hamptons.  There are many things very fine and great about Abu Dhabi, but not much of it has to do with the delights of eastern Long Island.  The hotel beach clubs here are functional but decidedly not fabulous -- there are just too many factors, climatic and cultural, working against them -- and guide books tell you straight up to avoid the public beaches.  And the more some tourists make like they're in South Beach or Ibiza, or the Hamptons, the sadder they seem.  As for names, there's so much other inspiration here.  Or do they just get tired of naming things after pearls and desert flowers?

(The shop down the road named Rodeo Drive is more on target.  They know from shopping around here.)

Anyway this was the third dinner I'd had in a row.  I'd had two dinners on the flight as we lost part of a day going east.  The morning, and breakfast, just sort of evaporated.  I was eating dinner at 10:30 PM mostly because it seemed like the thing to do.  The quiche I ordered was pretty tasty, but I noticed that most of the vegetables on my plate had been frozen.  There had of course been nothing but frozen veggies on the flight.  Now I was starting to get concerned that vegetables in Abu Dhabi would in general be limited in availability and poor in quality.  In my jetlagged mind, this theory made too much sense.  This is a desert after all -- what if they just can't get good veg here?  I was entirely wrong of course.  Never mind.  Silly me.  That's another story.

It was at this time I found out our hotel is dry.  No alcohol served at the restaurant.  No bar at all.  There are bars in hotels in Abu Dhabi, but not ours.  We had already planned ahead, buying a couple of bottles of wine and some rum at the duty free in the airport.  But though alcohol is legal in Abu Dhabi...  Well, that's about it.  It's legal, not much more.  You begin to realize that possessing it and enjoying it is a "thing."  It's not an option in most restaurants that aren't in hotels.  You have to strategize, know where and how to get it, and go out of your way.  It all has to be licensed, signed and sealed.  Those who sell it must declare they are not Muslims.  (No one would think to lie about such a thing for profit.  Sharia, Islamic religious law, exerts tremendous authority here as in all Muslim nations.)  If you are stopped by the police with alcohol in your car, and you aren't on the way home, you can be arrested.

I had a virgin Piña Colada with my quiche.  I had been awestruck by the heat and humidity during our brief moments outside after arriving.  It was 96 degrees out though late at night.  The fruity drink went down pretty well.

We went right to bed after dinner.  We were not so much exhausted as stretched a bit thin by the flight.  And up for adventure as we were, the various enormities of suddenly living in a foreign culture were starting to weigh on us.

4:45 AM.  The pre-dawn call to prayer sounds.  Just like that we are wide awake, just like that we're in another world and no mistake.  We are situated quite low in the hotel and apparently there is a mosque right outside.  The loudspeaker on its minaret makes it seem the call to prayer, the adhan, is occurring right in our room.  It's amazing.  It's captivating.  It's loud.  You don't come out of a half-sleep, or some dream in which it was incorporated, slowly realizing what you're hearing.  No, first you were asleep and now you're as awake as you ever will be, and you're being called.

There are five daily prayers in Islam and the corresponding adhan is called out before each one:  dawn, noon, afternoon, sunset, nightfall.  In the past, a cleric would climb the minaret of the mosque and make 

the call with his voice.  That must be something to hear, and perhaps I'll get a chance to hear it the traditional way somewhere on this trip.  These days it's mostly done by loudspeaker, and can be pre-recorded.  (It's also broadcast on Muslim radio and TV.)  You can listen to an adhan by clicking here.  It was recorded in Saudi Arabia and is probably close enough to how it would sound here in the Gulf region.  But the one at the nearby mosque which we've been hearing most often is more melodic and fluid and lovely.

To my ears the adhan sounded at first rather like a prayer itself.  Its lilting tone works on the ears in the same way as Gothic chants and Om Nama Shivayas.  In actuality it's a testament.  The words are:

Allah is the greatest

I bear witness that there is no deity greater than Allah

I bear witness that Mohammed is the messenger of Allah

Make haste towards worship

Come to the true success

(The pre-dawn adhan adds the line:  Prayer is better than sleep.  Indeed!)

There are mosques everywhere here.  There are three in one intersection near our hotel, and another visible a block away.  Aside from the fact that most of the population is very devout, I think the reason for this is that in Islam, prayer is daily maintenance.  While skipping the highly ritualized prayer is tolerated, still at least one is more or less mandatory each day as a means of spiritual and moral focus.  Therefore the pragmatical need for a lot of places to pray.  There are mosques attached to gas stations in the desert.  For those who can't make it to the mosque, there is plenty of consideration.  There are prayer rooms in every mall.  Each hotel

room has a handy quibla, the direction towards Mecca faced by the devotee, on a sticker fixed to the ceiling.

And one very quickly gets used to hearing the call all the time.  We're now in a different room than on that first morning, on a different side of the hotel, and the call is not as immediate anymore.  In some ways I miss it.  But you can't go for long without hearing it as you are out and about.  For those with Western ears, nothing places you in the Arab world more effectively and totally.  You might be at an ATM, or walking out of a Subway with a sandwich, but you hear the adhan and suddenly falcons are swooping, caravans troop across the desert, a sandstorm is blowing, domes and minarets loom.  Mind you it can be intimidating too.  You wonder if you should stop walking, or hurry up, or make some gesture of respect.

While researching this I came across a blog written by a Muslim American.  She complains that news broadcasts, even NPR, will invariably use the adhan as an audio intro for any story about the Arab world, whether it involves religion or not.  Though I agree with her about avoiding gross generalizations, I can easily see why news programmers make such choices.  You hear the adhan and there is no doubt about place.  And it's hard to avoid.  Islam is so dominant in this part of the world, and one hears the call so often.  The malls, the fast food joints, the manifest desire for Abu Dhabi to be the Hamptons or Beverly Hills stand in stark contrast.  Babylon is chanted down.  

Or is it?  Is all the materialism of this place really at odds with the fervor heard in each broadcast of the call? I haven't quite worked it out yet.  But if there's one thing Arabs are known for throughout history, it's commerce and trade.  Maybe Gucci and Starbucks just fit right into that centuries-old continuum, the complex weave of intersecting trade routes and cultures here in the Gulf.  People might have been selling leather bags and coffee here a thousand years ago while that call sounded.

Aside from all that it sounds nice.  I know I'm really coming off like a tourist here.  You know, someone else's proud tradition, someone else's fierce testament, is my romantic soundtrack.  That comical truth hit me the other day when we poured some technically legal chardonnay and had a toast while the call echoed in the warm pink air at sunset.  Perhaps it was such a moment that inspired our President to call it "one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset."

Amo happens to share that sentiment with him.  Amo is not a Muslim.  Nor is he.  If you find any of these statements contradictory or controversial, maybe we will stick to talking about the weather.

Flight

The flight to Abu Dhabi was set to leave JFK at 10:40 p.m. on a Saturday night.  Etihad Airways, 13 hours overnight, on our way to a three month excursion into the unknown.  Neither of us had ever been to the Middle East nor even close.  But we had been too busy packing and arranging things for the last couple of weeks to get freaked out about it, or really study our guidebooks.  We were in a state of placid upheaval.

As we were seated I was curious about the passengers and the airline itself; wanted to see how they would compare to what I had already read and heard about the United Arab Emirates.  Most of the passengers seemed South Asian rather than Arab:  this did not surprise me as I knew that the working and middle classes in the UAE are dominated by immigrants from the Indian Subcontinent.  There was no one at all in the economy class (the "Pearl Zone" -- I think first class is "Gold Zone") in the national Emirati dress of dishdashas and burquas; the other Arabs aboard were in more conventional dress.

The music being piped into the cabin was a rather pleasant "world ambient" mix.  I wouldn't buy such toothless music for home consumption (I listen to a lot of ambient but I'm very picky about it), but I heartily approve of its use in public instead of the usual cheesy R&B.  At such times I feel we are living in a world for which Brian Eno fought hard. 

13 hours would be the second longest flight I'd ever been on.  I was curious to see how Etihad would stack up against Qantas.  I have pretty good memories of my two Qantas flights across the Pacific four years ago, especially compared to the state of things on the soul-sucking American carriers.  The main reasons for this:  food, free booze, Volcanix, and Qantas socks.

The food thing is simple.  Those Qantas flights four years ago are the last time I've gotten anything to eat on a plane.  It's amazing how much a thoughtful little meal or snack, however stale or bad tasting, can smooth out the rough parts of flying.  The free alcohol thing doesn't have to be explained either.  (On my Qantas flights I enjoyed a good amount of Aussie red wine to get me in the spirit of things.)  I also found out then, as if anyone would doubt it, that Tetris is a great way to kill time on a long flight.  The version of Tetris that Qantas had licensed for its in-flight entertainment system is called Volcanix -- it features blocks which occasionally explode and complicate things in a very fun way, but it's essentially the same game.  I played that thing for hours.  Better than any relaxing drug.  I played it so much that the films I tried to watch bored me (but Garden State and Collateral would have bored me anyway) and I turned them off to play more.

  

The socks were the mystery bonus.  They came bundled in a cloth bag with a sleeping mask and toothpaste.  They were Aussie navy blue, one-size-fits-all -- which on me made them ankle socks -- and oddly shapeless but soft and comfortable with a very loose weave, perhaps being very cheaply made.  I guess they were meant to be some comfy socks to put on and wander about the cabin in case you didn't want to scuff up your regular socks, or you were ashamed of your feet.  Whatever their original intent I kept them and wore them for many years.  (Amo gave me her pair too.)

Okay, so for this Etihad flight:   food -- check.  No chance of being denied a meal on a 13 hour flight.  We got two meals, and they were not horrible, though of course they initially messed up Amo's request for a vegetarian meal.  For the culturally curious there was seemingly not much in the way of Middle Eastern fare on the menu.  We got pasta, frozen vegetables, risotto, and salad.

The alcohol we were worried about.  Etihad is based in a Muslim nation, one that is for the most part dry except for a few hotels and specially licensed bars.  I don't know if this sounds bad, but I really don't like to fly without drinking.  Whatever you may think of alcohol's limitations as self-medication in everyday life, it sure does take the edge off the very real anxieties produced by hurtling in a metal machine five miles over the ocean.  Takes them off in a very real, very practical way.  Anyway, we were pleasantly surprised by having drinks offered to us.  Hell, they could have charged us considering a lot of their clients don't drink, kind of like a tax on being Christian or whatever, and I probably wouldn't have minded.  But it was free.  

The really charming thing was the surprising discovery of Etihad socks!  Yes, the stewardesses 

gave us each a cloth bag bundled with the same items as Qantas, including the weird socks.  Presumably made by the same supplier, but instead of navy, they were a buff or cream color, the same as the Etihad stewardesses' scarves which hang down from their caps in a strangely half-assed concession to Muslim veils.  I guess?  If I'm wrong about this and these half-veils are some great tradition someone please let me know.

(Note:  the synergy in the picture, with the Etihad stewardess in front of the Sydney Opera House, is entirely coincidental; it's the first pic of an Etihad stewardess I found on google.)  To complicate my judgment, all of the stewardesses were Filipina.  As I would soon come to discover, most of the hotels, fast food restaurants and retail stores of Abu Dhabi are staffed by immigrants from the Philippines.  Maybe the half-done look of the scarves had something to do with this bit of culture clash -- in fact I noticed a few of the Filipina stewardesses removed their scarves during bulk of the long flight.

The plane had an in-flight system similar to that on Qantas.  (I've never flown Virgin, so its fantastic in-flight systems are only rumor and legend for me.)  And sure enough it had a serviceable version of Tetris.  No exploding blocks though.  I dove right in.  Amo was a little miffed that I didn't want to watch a film with her.  Her idea was to start the same film on our personal systems at the same moment.  I wasn't sure if watching the same film on two separate tiny screens on the back of others' chairs while wearing headphones would constitute quality time.  (Though maybe it'd be cool to do this type of thing on a proper soundsystem, play several copies of the same film at once with slight delays to see if one can get dialogue in a film to do a Reichian pulse?)

This flight became a really weird non-ordeal.  The seats have much less legroom than Qantas and I was of course pinned behind a guy who leaned back all the way.  I'm very tall and this left me with almost nothing.  But for some reason I was chilling.  One very poorly made rum drink, and some pasta and frozen veggies, and I was good to go.  In fact I can't believe how few games of Tetris I actually played before I was ready to pass out.  Note that I do not use the term "sleep" for that state which overcomes me on an airplane.  It's more a mere lack of consciousness.  And then comes the inevitable time warp.  You're zooming toward Asia, toward tomorrow.  They turn the lights out in the cabin after dinner.  You don't know how long the lights are out.  You wake up seemingly every five minutes to shift your legs.  You pass out again, sort of wake up again, have hours passed?  You hear clinking off in some murky distance which indicates a meal is on its way.  Ah, breakfast!  Wait a minute, it's going to be 8pm in Abu Dhabi when our flight lands.  Hmmm.  Sure enough, it's more pasta and frozen veggies and a salad.  I'll have to wait until afterwards for coffee.  Should I have a drink or not?  (A Bloody Mary perhaps?)  

I realized we were across the terminator line and the sun was up.  I could see very bright

sunlight peeking in through some of the closed window-shades.  We were in the middle and therefore had no control over the shades.  I wondered where we were.  For the entire flight, the animated map of our journey on the entertainment system had not been working correctly.  But I figured we must have been somewhere over Africa.  I got up to wait in line for the bathroom and kill some time.  I looked out over the forward part of the Pearl Zone cabin as I waited.  More passengers were awake than asleep; most of them were on their little entertainment systems, and most of them were watching Bollywood films.  What's funny is that every little monitor had a different Bollywood film playing, but most of them had the same cast.  I think I saw Shahrukh Khan about a dozen times at different stages of his career, sometimes dancing, sometimes shooting a pistol on a motorcycle with a girl clutching him, in a weird colorful video collage in the dark Pearl Zone.  Folks, if you didn't already know, it's a Bollywood world, and we Westerners with our action films and cheesy R&B just live in it.  My time in Abu Dhabi has only reinforced that truth.  

Amo had watched a Shahrukh Khan film too; I can't remember the title, and I wouldn't know how to spell or pronounce it if I could.  But peeking over her shoulder it was obviously a somewhat sophisticated film-within-a-film, a kind of late-career satire of his own fame.  Later I asked her if it was good and she said it was.  I remarked on how good looking he is.  She agreed wholeheartedly.  I asked her if she would dump me for him.  She said he's too short.

The head became available and I went in.  Instantly I gasped.  Outside the porthole, there below me, was Africa.  It was astonishing.  Brown and yellow mountains, valleys and plains stretched away endlessly under a perfect blue.  Little puffs of perfect white clouds cartoonishly, almost joyously raced past in the miles of air below us from time to time.  I could see rivers reflecting the sun like veins of light.  I was so captivated I just stood there for a while.  Then I did my business and looked again out the porthole.  Everything had changed.  The vista was even more breathtaking.  We were over an enormous crystalline body of water, the horizon curving to remind me that indeed this is a planet, with a vast peninsula receding into a distance.  I'm not sure which one.  I wondered at the time if it was the Sinai, but my perspective may have been overwrought by my amazement -- can one see the entire Sinai peninsula from a jetliner's toilet window?  I don't really care; I'll always remember it anyway.  And I love puzzling over things like that, love living with mysteries.  Spending time looking at maps and trying to work them out.  And I will be just as delighted if I find out one day.

Reluctantly I left the head and returned to my cramped seat.  It was dark as ever in the Pearl Zone.  Everyone was awake, but everyone was staring at their videos.  I had the melancholy realization that even with the chance beckoning to look at this world on a brilliant day from five miles up, most people would rather watch TV.