Elephants and Chai

If you've lived in the Gulf for a while, it's no big deal when your friends go off on a vacation to India. It's a normal thing, a 3-hour flight, like an extended weekend with the gals in Napa Valley. But to a lot of us, especially those from clean and remote North America, going to India is still exotic, a little scary, and well, a major undertaking. Or so I thought.

We decided to spend my two-week college break in India, largely because of the airfare (under $300 per ticket) and because our old pals from Colorado are now living in Bangalore and they extended an invitation to their home. We bought our tickets, borrowed a guide book, visited the pharmacist and off we were, two packs of malaria pills and one family-sized immodium pack later.

Our decision to stay in Southern India was made mostly with the kids in mind. India is big (who knew?) and road travel and day trips are slow. (...think 4 lanes of cars on two-lane roads, sharing with cows, cycles, monkeys, rickshaws and ladies carrying firewood on their heads..) We visited our friends in Bangalore for three days which included an all-day outing to Mysore. The palace there, where Indian royals still live, is well worth the potholed-three-hour treck from Bangalore, and the Hindu imagery painted and sculpted throughout the place is amazing. But poor 5-year-old Rosie, just when she was getting the hang of being a Christian in a Muslim country, we take her to a place where the gods have 12 arms and the heads of elephants. Surely, we tell ourselves, this confusion is really just a world-citizen in the making.

Our Banglore friends helped us arrange family-friendly lodging, first in Tea Country near Munnar, and then in the Backwaters, where the most popular activity is touring the canals via houseboat. Tea country is gorgeous and rugged, mile upon mile of nearly vertically planted groves of Tea, where every morning we looked out onto the green hills dotted with colorful and quiet tea workers picking the leaves by hand.

The best thing about hanging out in this part of India for me was the Masala Chai, a spicy Indian black tea served uniquely wherever you go. It's amazing with the caffeine that I got any sleep at all. The kids favorite part was surely the animals - the nature, the mango and papaya trees, cashew trees, vanilla beans, fields of lemon grass, cardamom, and coffee plantations, which all offered a natural background for outings, which was new and vibrant and funny, including a one-armed monkey eating coconuts and a guy chopping fruit with a giant cartoon-sized knife. We went on every India tourist's 'must-do' elephant ride where we fed the enormous laid-back animal whole pineapples onto the end of his curled trunk while sitting on his back. The boys absolutely loved the feeding part, and they were game to wait again in line, not for the ride, but to get the elephant to pluck food from their hands with his trunk. We also cruised the backwaters on a houseboat for a day, where we saw villagers doing their wash, rice workers out in their fields and Kingfishers diving for dinner. Billy enjoyed the bird viewing, which included cormorants, egrets, cranes, kingfishers and lots of other diving birds with funny names and beaks and bright green feet. But I'm sure he also agrees with me that the local fruit, chili omelets, and Indian sambar for breakfast made each day excellent before it even got started.

Burj Dubai, Oops, I Meant Burj Khalifa

The opening of the world's tallest tower, The Burj Dubai, happened last night. Because the entire tower premises was reserved for VIPs, getting close was not an option, but we were lucky enough to watch it from the rooftop of a freind's villa. The view was lovely, and the 75 degree temperature was perfect for an evening outdoors.

If you follow this link, you can get an idea of what we saw.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yuk8bU-B5y4

The Burj Dubai (now renamed the Burj Khalifa by the Sheikh) is impressive against the modern but not very tall skyline of Dubai. It's over 800 meters tall, contains more than 50 elevators, houses Armani's flagship hotel, as well as deluxe residential flats and the world's tallest open-air observation deck, where a mere 50 dollar fee gets you access on the 'fast' elevator. And yes, it is shamefully impressive when you realize that so much of country's development has resulted in a massive world-famous debt crisis.

But alas, I have a job, and friends with cozy rooftops as well as an excellent family to kick around town with, so the debt crisis is as unreal to me as it might be to those of you who've never set foot in the middle east. The only really noticeable debt-related issue for us right now is that brunch reservations are easy to come by and the beaches are delightfully under-crowded. And oh yes, Billy's job has painlessly come to an end.

So we carry on with visits to our favorite stomping ground, the one-year-old Dubai Mall, which sits at the base of the Burj, where we've been dining regularly, not only to check in on the progress of the giant tower, but to take in the tallest choreographed fountain show in the world.

Check it out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYeFFyFJxqk

National Day

This week, the women at our college are celebrating National Day, and the country's 38th birthday, draping Emirati Flags over the doors, and wearing Sheikh Zayed-inspired buttons, sashes and even black, red and green nail polish. The atmosphere is so festive (green eye-shadow anyone? or gumballs with royal faces on them?) that it's been hard to accomplish anything serious in our classes.



Yesterday, to top off the festivities, we sojourned out the college gates on a 28-bus police-escorted convoy. The stated goal was to inspire national pride in the emirate's 'cultural and Islamic gems'. The highlight of this trip though, was an audience with His Highness (HH) Sheikh Sultan bin Mohammed Al Qasimi, Crown Prince and Deputy Ruler of Sharjah, and his entourage. This royal personage and his escorts are not much older than our students. He is handsome, well groomed, and fashionable (see Ray Ban shades in picture). And though most of the students do not consent to being photographed themselves, not one of them was without a camera to capture the arrival of the Prince.



You can see that hundreds of students joined this trip, but what you don't see are the students left behind. A small number of our students, who are 18-23 years old, are still tightly controlled by their guardians (brothers, husbands and fathers) and were not allowed on the excursion due to the 'improper' amount of time being spent 'in public'. There are days when elements of this culture do send me scratching my head (or worse). But then something always reminds me that 30 years ago, when this country had just been founded, the situation was even more archaic. Colleges didn't accept women, girls were married off at 14, and females did not drive. So in the grand scheme of things, the fact that most of our students were allowed a fun day out, with their pals, their Blackberries and triple-hued makeup, I'd say progress is being made, one National Day at a time.

Desert Commute

Since we moved from Sharjah into Dubai I've been enjoying my desert commute to work. We live on the edge of Dubai and the college is on the edge of Sharjah. So to avoid traffic, I head out onto a desert road and over the dunes into the neighboring emirate's outskirts. Though it doesn't compare to the colors of my San Francisco commute over the Golden Gate Bridge, or the gorgeous drop into Boulder on Highway 36, there is an elegance to the desert scenes, the camels, the sand, the mosques and the palms. Here are a few pics from a recent evening ride home.