Riyadh, Saudi Arabia Blog Avoidance Syndrome

Time to pack up and start the long trip home from Saudi Arabia. Shot at least half a dozen clips for the new video -- some of the toughest I've done. A good start, but there's a long way to go. I will be very, very glad to be home in...wow, like, 40 hours.

Over the last month, I've been posting regularly to friends on my personal Facebook page and procrastinating about the big, long entries I usually put in my blog. I just now finished the one that's been sitting on my computer for three weeks, and I'm pretty sure I'll never get around to the rest.

I tried to find an easy way to automatically repost those entries here on my blog, but if there is such a way, it's beyond me. The Facebook features of this blog service go in one direction and not the other. So what I'm going to do for now, as an experiment, is just manually paste all my super-short Facebook entries from the last month into this journal.

In the future, I hope to find a system that is both timely, accessible and reasonable for me in terms of workload. I hope this short term solution is reasonably entertaining and not too annoying.

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Matt of Arabia.

 

Gaza City, Gaza

Of the 1.6 million people in the Gaza Strip at this moment, I'm pretty sure I'm the only tourist. Fell asleep listening to kids playing in the ocean and ladies smoking sheesha pipes in the downstairs restaurant as Israeli patrol boats zipped by on the horizon. It takes more than a day to understand this place.

 

Gaza City, Gaza

The long, lonely walk into Gaza.

 

Tel Aviv, Israel

When the Israeli immigration officer opened my passport and saw stamps from Lebanon, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq, she looked at me like I'd pooped in it.

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Walked the 3.5 mile length of the Palm man-made island in Dubai. Least possible place I have ever been. Nothing can be that big. The whole thing is obscene.

The 20 or so residential towers that line the trunk of the palm.

About halfway across, the trunk ends and the eight long, thin fronds (for maximum beach front real estate) extend out with gaudy villas packed along all of them. A monorail continues straight out into the ocean toward the Atlantis resort at the far tip.

 

A monorail stop in the middle of nowhere. A mall will supposedly spring up around this station at some point.

Continuing the journey to Atlantis, the road turns into a vast, empty tunnel under the ocean floor before rising back out at the end.

 

  

 

I have to admit, the water park was pretty fun. Was too wet to take pictures of the inner tube ride through the shark tank and the almost vertical water slide that shot gallons of water up my nose.

Inside, they've got the Lost Chambers, which is worthy of an adjective I never thought I'd use in Dubai: classy.

Take an aquarium and remove even the vaguest pretense of science or education, then swap in some elaborate sets posing as archeological remnants of a lost civilization. What I enjoyed most about this is they don't actually explain any of what you're seeing. It's up to you to imagine and interpret.

Through one window you can see a distant throne room where the king and queen once held court. Schools of fish swirl around the giant, empty chairs. It's actually beautiful and haunting, rather than the anticipated: tasteless and cheesy.

Kabul, Afghanistan

Afghanistan went right according to Afghaniplan.

 

And yes, by the way, that is an adolescent Afghan albino acrobat standing over my head; a circumstance that is, to say the least, unlikely.

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

New low point in my life: succumbing to food poisoning on the runway in Karachi and hwarfing all over my clothes...and my iPad...5 times. Got loads of fun looks from the other passengers. They moved me to the back of the plane and threw blankets over me cause I kept yelling that I was cold.

Just finished an IV drip in Dubai to get the salt and potassium back in me -- that's apparently why I felt like I was freezing. Going to try to avoid shrimp for the rest of this trip.

Karachi, Pakistan

Had a rocking good time in Pakistan. The Karachi Tribune told the whole saga in surprisingly blunt, sordid detail. Yay, freedom of the press!

Baalbeck, Lebanon

Weirdest thing I did today: Visit the Hezbollah "museum" outside Beirut. Of course, Hezbollah's idea of a museum is a pile of guns, some posters of dead children, and a bunch of "Death to Israel" signs. I need a shower.

    

Oh, also, the ruins next door from the Roman city of Baalbeck were pretty fantastic.