...

Well I've been back for about two and a half weeks now, and I was straight back into uni, which is why I haven't had time to wrap this up properly. And I don't have time now, either, except to say that there are a few more stories to tell, which I hope to get around to sooner rather than later. I've had my film developed, and the results aren't terribly exciting, but there are a few worthy of enlargement and framing. So rather than show you three rolls worth of photos, I might just hang three of the best on my wall and show you that.

Logic of the hotel

Why is it, in hotels, that the bottle opener (fixed to the wall) is in the bathroom? Why not somewhere in the bedroom near the bar fridge? Maybe there's a real reason for this, I'm no hotel expert, but here are mine:

1. Most people drink their beer on the john: when they sit down and discover that these crazy foreigners don't use twist tops, it's mighty convenient to find that bottle opener there.

2. To discourage binge drinking: if you can't make it from the bar fridge to the bathroom to open that beer, you probably don't need it.

3. Safety of the kiddies: if the bottle opener was next to the bar fridge, every 7-year old would figure out why.

Any other suggestions?

The Muddle East Awards

Some overdue highlights.

Neolithic breakfast waiter: The Mercure, Luxor

This is where Sophie and I discovered that hysterical giggling keeps waiting staff at bay. This one particular guy would lumber over bearing a pot of coffee and kind of let out this long, deep grunt. It was too much to bear, and it wasn't long before we were practically snorting with laughter. We are nice people, really.

Identically cloned policemen: Egypt

I thought I was seeing things. Cast from the same mould, I tell you. Black hair, chiselled jaw, neatly trimmed moustache, serious yet handsome. All of them. Every single one. Pristine white uniform with pistol and rifle... sexy.

Bounciest bed: Crowne Plaza, Petra

After much jumping, flopping, crashing and diving onto, these came out on top.

Briefest flirtation: Holiday Inn, Amman

A series of smiles and waves between balcony and lobby in the space of about two minutes. What a smile it was.

Strangest dream: Crowne Plaza, Petra

My memory of this dream begins in a sort of department/hardware store, though I dimly recall something leading up to this point. There with me is Ian, an acquaintance from Melbourne, whom it would be difficult to find someone with a more disjunctive personality to my own. He is being violent, smashing things and I am failing to subdue him with words... then somehow or other, I think someone else says something, I have the realisation that Ian represents another personality inside me, and so it is in fact me that was smashing things. At this point I let out a soul-wrenching scream and collapsed to the floor, blacking out. I came to as people were carrying me into a whiteish building. But it was not nurses and a hospital, but people I used to work for at Linden art gallery, carrying me into their own splendidly decorated home. I groggily noticed white walls, nice rugs and a side-board w/mirror, and then through an interior window I saw a collared cheetah resting on a lounge. From the side-board, a kitten of similar markings to Krupnik stretched out to attack my hand, and left strange holes in it from which blood did not flow. Anyway, that's all I really remember. I blame it on the food.

Back in Muscat, almost home

I almost can't believe we survived our 10-day tour with so few hiccups. Maybe it will only be later that I discover that I picked up a rare fungal disease from putting my hand in the Nile. No, it looked very clean, very nice. It was so good to hear the Bulgarian girls again this morning. Coffee is sort of the reverse here as to Oz: you can find Turkish coffee everywhere and usually made quite well, espresso is rare, but 'American' (ie: filter) is common. Sophie still hasn't found her resident or drivers licence cards; I've told her to give in to the fact that they're currently doing the rounds of the Gulf black market. Having dinner with Lakshmi and her family at their home tomorrow night.

Dubai redeemed

The book on Keith Haring turned out to be a lovely cloth-bound edition published on the occasion of an exhibition of his work. Carefully selected works and essays, with special features such as a piece of black card similar to that which covered old New York subway advertisements that he would draw on in chalk and a centrefold. It was a bit dusty and but hardly what you would call tatty, however Sophie, ever the discount girl, suggested I ask for one. The guy at the counter carefully inspected the book inside and out, and pronounced a 20% discount! Had probably been sitting on the shelf for five years. Nice. I'll show it to you next time you visit.

This is the Muddle East

Are hotels all over the world surprisingly inept, or just here? We ordered breakfast to our room this morning, two of the "Healthy Breakfast": Bircher muesli, yoghurt, sliced fruit, dried fruit, nuts and fruit juice - yum. Sophie asked for tea, I asked for coffee. What did we get? Three weet-bix, toast, a bowl of yoghurt and two pots of coffee. Ok, at least they got our fruit juice right, and the grapefruit turned out to be the pink variety, which is extra nice. But what the f*#k is going on here??? We had to call reception to get the rest of our breakfast delivered, and even then only ended up with about 1.5 servings - hopeless! I don't want to seem like too much of a whinger (but you know I am), I just want to highlight the simple things that get bungled. In Amman, the driver dropped us at the airport, but he dropped us at arrivals instead of departures. Speaking of Amman airport, there's free entertainment in the carpark (as in Petra town, too): stray kittens playing around a tree. Mmm, very cute, but kinda sad, too. We saw many stray cats in Jordan, most of them quite young. Passed a pack of stray dogs on the way from Petra to Amman, as well as a dude hearding his goats, one of the dogs even had a go at the car.

Dubai

Been here since yesterday afternoon, and although it has very little of the traditional Muddleness, the city is fairly lacking in soul and heritage like Muscat and Amman. Currently in an Internet cafe/bookshop which is really curious in its book selection... there's heaps of books, but as I perused, I realised that I did not recognise a single book (yes they're in English). It seems to be a repository of failed books. Books that just didn't make it. It's mostly textbooks or pseudoscience, let me reel off some titles that I can see: UFO, World War 3.0, Knock 'em Dead, Banking Symbols, Supermotivation, The Incredible Machine, Model Memos, Fighting Words... every cliche in the book is here (ho ho). However, I did just spy a large hardcover book on Keith Haring, so I'm going to finish up and check it out. I'm quite ready to be back in Melbourne, or at least amongst my own culture... even to just hear some good music, have a normal day, talk to ordinary people instead of hotel staff, etc. Oh, went to check out the Soot music shop here in Dubai, one of only three or four in the world.... this multilabel clothing store called Five Green had a measly eight or ten pieces of vinyl. :( Oh well.

Welcome to the Muddle East

So most of what I've been saying has been recounting events, but now I want to try and share a bit of the flavour. They couldn't have organised crime here because of what the name implies, instead they just have corruption. Gina's husband Peter is almost at his wit's end doing business here, because nothing gets done without bribery. Or take the airports for example, there is rarely a queue in existence: you'll be checking in for your flight, and the next guy is leaning his elbow on your counter holding his passport, waiting for you to leave. Egypt was the craziest, especially the roads. Ignore the lanes, forget your indicators, just go for it and honk like crazy so that others hear you coming through. But everyone is doing that at the same time, on three or four lane roads without traffic lights that bend and swerve and do round-a-bouts and fly-overs and such. It seems that the only rule is that if you get in first and honk the most, others give way. It felt like you don't need to look behind you, because everyone is actually watching out in front of them to see what you're doing, because you might do anything. The only time indicators really get used is when you chuck your hazard lights on in the middle of traffic, just to let those behind you know that you've had to slow down to 60 km/h. Our first taxi driver had, honestly, six or eight mirrors all over his windscreen so that he had eyes in the back of his head. The second taxi driver just had a huge convex mirror, and liked using his arm to indicate turning left. They're funny salesmen in the tourist area the Egyptians, no-bullshit phrases like "I don't know what you're looking for, sir, but I'm sure I can sell it to you. Just tell me how I can get your money from you as quickly as possible." Or the Jordanian at Petra offering a ride on his donkey "Ferrari? Air-conditioned taxi?" Getting back to the 'organisation', I was reminded of a class at TAFE many years ago, where in order to explain different organisational structures, the teaching aids (props) gave racial names to them. So there was the Western model, which is your typical pyramid hierarchy, one box at the top connected to more below by lines and repeated. There were one or two more structures, maybe a flat model which is just one horizontal row of boxes, one connected to the next. The last model was just a whole lot of boxes scattered randomly with no lines connecting them at all; this was the Arabian model. Yes, schooling really taught you things back in the days before rampant PCness. Oh, when we went to catch our flight from Luxor to Cairo, our ticket had 11:15am, and our boarding pass had 10:30am. And, there was no-one at the gate or anywhere nearby to ask about it. It wasn't till about 11am that some dude yells out "Cairo! Cairo!" that we were sure. Then when we get to Cairo, a member of airport staff tells us that we have to go upstairs to get our connecting flight. He then says, "by the way, can I use your passport to buy something from duty free?" Then there's the passport photo issue - some customs officers didn't even look at my photo. I'm fairly sure about this, because it usually took two or three looks and a shake of the head before the rest would dubiously stamp it and return it to me.

Amman

Boring. Caught a bus to downtown, the old part of the city. Stayed on the bus till the terminus, which is surrounded by stalls. It stinks badly there, and there are lots of locals doing shopping for crap. I just noticed that the brand name on the mouse that I am using is "Nopoos". Downtown was more crap. The people here dress in fairly ordinary western gear. Most women's clothing is bad '80s stuff, but of course they wear a head scarf, too. So when I noticed a Gulf Arab in his pristeen white dishdasha with three or four black abaya + burka clad wives in tow, it really stood out.
We had dinner in the Chinese restaurant at the hotel, which is called Beyond Rangoon (which is in Burma), and met the chef, Chung, who was quite friendly. There were one or two weddings on at the hotel every day, punctuated by loud Syrian percussion (apparently). Lady that worked in the gift shop was, not surprisingly, sick to death of hearing it.

Luxor

Luxor is something like a thousand kilometres south of Cairo, and also on the Nile. It's where the Valley of the Kings, Karnak Temple, Luxor Temple, and a swath of other crumbling places can be found. They like their obelisks, too. Anyway, we reached Luxor after an overnight train trip that wasn't too bad, although I'm surprised that I slept at all because the train seemed to continually shudder and vibrate, and the door made this awful metal against metal squeek sound at the big shudders, but I fixed that by stuffing a curtain between the door and the jam. Which reminds me: When is a door not a door? When it's ajar. Hah, hilarious, no? I'll try it on the Jordanians and see how far I get. Which is actually where I am now, a dingy Internet cafe in Amman near the bus terminus. But anyawy, Luxor... look, I have to say that I have generally been under-awed by the ruins and temples, etc. I love the history and ideas behind them, but seeing them in the, uh, stone isn't always impressive. Luxor temple was pretty cool because you were walking amongst gigantic pillars, and the sheer size of them was impressive. This feeling was even surpassed at the sound + light show at Karnak temple, where similar pillars were lit from below, enhancing the towering sensation. That, however, were the only good few minutes from an otherwise crap 'sound + light' show. What's more fascinating is the people we met, but it's certainly trickier to explain. It's so strange leading the 'tourist life' or being on the "tourist trail", as it's so far removed from my every day life. Here, we tend to get ushered from one tourist trap to another, whether it be a ruin or a restaurant, where the locals see you as a walking ATM machine. Pop you in the right chair or shop, and comes the money. Fortunately we're not completely foolish, just partially, and usually avoid the traps. But I'm so sick of the crap quality of everything that we keep experiencing, that they can get away with just because you don't know where else to go, or because it's covered in the varnish of "being on the Nile", etc. Like the hotel and restaurant, ok, the hotel wasn't crap, just tacky, but the restaurant food was crap, and we didn't even get to see a menu when we ordered so we didn't know what the price would be. It was more than we expected but not exorbitant, but then they didn't even accept VISA and they exist to rip off tourists!! Bizarre. So we had to stiff them 4 Egyptian pounds since we didn't have enough to cover the bill. :) Our tour guide, Ahmed, did select the restaurant for us because they were also able to provide an authentic Arabian minstrel to soothe our ears, so I can't complain too much. Well, yes I can. Not about the music, which was cool - the Arabian version of a guitar and a soulful crooner more reminiscent of the Imams that sing the call to prayer than of a typical guitar singer-songwriter. Earlier in the day, we did have a felucca ride on the Nile before sunset, and that was fucking bliss. For the actual tours of the ruins, etc in Luxor we had a nice guide, Hala, who was actually an Egyptologist, and she was pretty funny once she warmed to us. I think it was the first time I had a chance to flirt with anyone for the whole bloody trip.