Pass the Sheesha to the Left Hand Side

June 27th, 2005 | By Joshua | 2 Comments »

A creamy lump of hummus and olive oil, a silver pot of Moroccan mint tea, and a fat hookah packed with sweet apple tobacco–this was how we ended our first and only night in the city of Dubai. At a breezy table on the bank of Dubai Creek (actually a wide river that snakes through the city), we listened to tinny Arabian music, watched Oriental-shaped boats go by, and snuck pieces of pita to half a dozen emaciated cats.

And we sipped, snacked, and smoked the sheesh.
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Too Much Hot

June 24th, 2005 | By Joshua | 1 Comment »

A blast of thick, wet, heat met us as we de-planed; my glasses were instantly fogged, my mind too, 6:30 a.m. local time, not much sleep, and finally in a place that was utterly foreign. We found a hotel, near the Gold Souk; it was more than we wanted to pay, but the view ain’t bad:

We closed the red curtains on the view, slept awhile, then awoke to the midday calls of the surrounding mosques and went out to look for food; I asked the guy at the front desk where we should go, a mix of sign language and isolated English words. He shook his head; “You call, food come, plenty good. Not go out, too much hot. You stay.”
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Saudi Arabia Sunrise

June 24th, 2005 | By Joshua | No Comments »

Maybe it was an illusion, a trick of the airplane’s thick window, but the long, jet-black horizon looked slightly curved. Even through the tiny oval, it was massive, the land, and it pushed up against a fire-orange strip which turned to yellow and faded darkly upward into cobalt blue with stars in it, giving even more of an outer-space feeling, a curved-earth vastness as the plane dipped southward, the orange strip red now, on our left; I closed the window and tried to sleep just a little more.
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