In Transit

I'm sitting here in a lovely guest house in Dubai at 9:30 pm Dubai time. I think that's about 12:30 pm on Friday back in Minnesota. The flight from Minneapolis to Atlanta was uneventful although exceedingly crowded. A Somali woman and I helped each other make the transfer to the E concourse from the A - ooh, I love those trams! Brian arrived about half an hour after I did, coming from North Carolina.

The Dubai flight was more efficient in boarding and I was seated next to another Somali woman who had started in Seattle and was making a connection here in Dubai to Somalia (I think.) What a long trek. Being an overseas flight, each seat had its own video screen to watch movies, play games or keep track of the trip. In the cycle of screens for the travel info, data was given in English with American measurements, then metric, a series of maps at three different resolutions, all of this first in English, then in Arabic. They also include a figure of the plane with a directional arrow pointing the way to Mecca and the distance from there. The flight was 14 hours with some turbulence and too much food.

The airport in Dubai is huge. Lots of English signs. I find I can read much of the Arabic, although I have no idea necessarily what it means or if I'm pronouncing it correctly. At least I have gotten to the point where the letters mean the sounds to me - I don't translate them into English letters although I do study Dari (Farsi) in both the transliterated and Dari versions. Dari doesn't have a lot of vowels, I imagine Arabic is the same. You just have to learn them. There are symbols that are used when teaching children or foreigners which tell what the vowel sound is, whether there is a glottal or a double consonant, etc. They are not used in standard written Dari however.

I found myself wondering when I would see men in flowing robes while walking through the airport. And finally, there they were, a bunch of them all dressed in white, very uniform. I soon realized that these were the employees coming on to man the passport control booths. There were a few women working there too, all dressed in flowing black. Reminded me of Spy vs. Spy in the old Mad Magazine comics of my brother Tom's. Dubai is pretty liberal so most westerners hadn't made any adjustment to their dress. I did notice some lovely ladies with a sort of white pillbox affair with veils draping down the sides. Very fashionable, I thought. When I saw the second one and her dress was exactly the same as the first, tunic, long skirt with front slit, I realized they must be airline employees.

We exchanged $100 US into $361 dirhams so we could pay for the taxi and the guest house. The taxi driver was from Egypt, was a bit concerned he wouldn't be able to find the place, but did just fine. The guest house is lovely, secure courtyard, lovely rooms. My room is on the 2nd level and I'm in a sitting room which has computers, couches and lots of bookshelves. I could stay here for days! My room has three twin beds and its own bathroom. We'll have breakfast in the morning, then head off to the airport about 9:15 am (just after midnight for you Minnesotans) to catch our noon flight to Kabul.

Ooh, one final note: when I logged on to my blog tonight, all the commands at the top are in Arabic! It took a while to find the place where I could sign in and post.