Dubai: Leaving, Losing, Loose Ends, and Getting Home

Dubai, UAE. January 2012.

Time to leave Dubai. Loved the weather. It was exactly what I sought before getting back into the cold Georgian winter for the next few months.

I also liked my first foray into the middle east. Liked it in the sense that I made the foray. My experience pushed some cultural buttons of mine that I know will be interesting to explore more deeply in the future, such as how what a person wears, i.e. an abaya with full head covering, can provoke such complex feelings in me.

(By the way, one sunny morning I walked behind a man who was wearing the traditional white Arabic dress. It was transparent; I wasn't close enough to discern if he wore underwear.)

I saw nary a dog in the five days I was in Dubai. A number of cats, though.

Some photographic loose ends

A metro entrance. Each metro entrance has a disinctive design. This is the Dubai Mall metro station. 

Flats for rent in Deira neighborhood. In USD, the prices translate, left to right, at $490, $544, $599, and $680 per month

Metro station interior. Dubai, UAE. January 2012.

No fish allowed on metro. Also, no gum chewing. Dubai, UAE. January 2012.

Approach to Palm Deira metro station. Dubai, UAE. January 2012.

Typical toilet in Dubai. Note the spray nozzle on left. Ubiquitous for cleaning oneself, and then toilet paper.

Dubai airport misadventure

Dubai, UAE. January 2012.

Went through two or three security checks upon arrival at the Dubai airport. Was walking down a corridor toward my gate when I did my periodic body check for all of the necessary artificial appendages: purse, backpack, camera ... camera.... camera? Damn. Looked in my backpack and my purse. Not there. I backtracked to the security station I'd just left. (This required me to walk up a ton of steps that had going-down escalators and no going-up escalators.)

Arrived back at the security station, explained I'd left behind my camera either at this station or the one before, and the staff there gave me a negatory and pointed me to a supervisor. Snippy supervisors exist in all countries, all cultures, and she was one of those creatures. She was immediately on the defensive, stating that no one had taken it. (Who said anything about taking it? Sheesh.) Did I have it in my purse, perhaps?

In a deadly polite voice, I responded, "Madame, I don't believe it was taken. I have looked in my purse. Would you care to look there yourself?" and I opened it up for her.

"Where do you believe you left it?"

I said I wasn't sure at which station I might have left it behind.

To which she responded, "So you are unsure where your camera is."

"Madame," I said. (If I were a cobra, this would have come out as a hisssssss.)  "It is either at this station or a previous one."

By this time, a call had been made to the previous station, and it had been reported back that there was no camera there. Which she reported to me. And she'd called out to the station nearby - did they see such a camera? Nope, they said, no camera here.

I said, "May we just walk over and look?"

Which we did, she reluctantly so. As we approached the station, I cast my eyes about, and by God, just as she was confirming that there was no camera to be found, there I saw it, on the floor next to the x-ray machine. It had fallen out somewhere in the process of being pushed through - NOT by me.

So I retrieved my camera from her hands and as I was about to utter the words, "thank you," she trumped me with "you're welcome."

There's a little coda to this story. During my layover in Azerbaijan, I realized my wristwatch, which I keep looped around my purse's handle, was missing. I'm willing to bet it got pulled off (accidentally) at that same security station in Dubai. I'm hoping so. Every morning at 6:45, it beeps for 20 seconds. In my imagination, it startled the bejesus out of that pompous little group before they tracked it down.

Azerbaijan

Airport in Baku, Azerbaijan

In-flight movie on Azerbaijan Airlines

The airport cat was still hanging about.

Same in-flight movie on the leg to Tbilisi.

Back to Rustavi

Took a taxi from the airport to Rustavi.

In short order, I climbed into a comfortable bed. My hostess, Nely, gave me two hot water bottles to keep me warm.


Related posts on my trip to Dubai here.


And a slide show here:

To Dubai: Baku Airport

Heydar Aliyev Airport cat, Baku, Azerbaijan

 
The Heydar Aliyev Airport in Baku, Azerbaijan. This is where I spent six hours of my life today.

It doesn't take much to entertain me, and I felt quietly adventurous when I found myself culled from the transit herd after we debarked from the Tbilisi flight in Baku, and was the recipient of that carefully noncommittal phrase, "have a seat, please" which can be the precursor for anything from a few moments of mundane delay to a full-blown, meltdown-worthy travel crisis.

I learned in Ethiopia that the best course is usually to relax and let the local processes unwind as they need to do. So while a gentleman carried my passport and boarding pass hither and thither, I pulled out one of my classic sci-fi paperbacks and read. I had six hours to kill, and this was as good a way to do it as any other.

In due course, I was escorted upstairs, pushed through a security check, then squirted out into the international gate area.

A curious place. Several duty-free shops and kiosks, one open cafe-bar, but other than that, mostly wide and empty corridors. A smallish lobby for travelers; not many chairs. Some travelers consumed more than their share of the limited seating by stretching out and sleeping.

A paucity of electrical outlets.

No means to exchange money. I was given to understand by the somewhat sullen cafe guy that he only took AZN, the Azerbaijan currency. I checked with the duty-free shop; confirmed there was no place to change money. This seemed to be borne out by the fact that no one in the waiting area was eating or drinking anything. Found out hours later that the cafe guy does, indeed, take USD for purchases. I got something to drink, at least. And lesson finally learned (hopefully): Pack some sort of munchie for these plane trips with long layovers - never know what, if anything, will be accessible to me, plus saves money.

I found an electric outlet in the wall in one of the corridors, outside a store. Nothing to do but to plop myself down on the floor and plug in my laptop. The airport does have free public wifi.

And then I saw a cat.

Heydar Aliyev Airport cat, Baku, Azerbaijan

Friendly, too. He cuddled right next to me on the floor and took a nap.

And then I made friends with a 16-year old girl from Kazakhstan. She's been studying English for two years, and I was her first chance to talk with a native speaker. She's going to Dubai for a shopping trip with her mother and aunt. We talked about terrorists in Kazakhstan, school, Kazakh food, and making it big in Hollywood. She introduced me to her mom and her aunt.

Ran into a Texan couple who work in Baku, one for the embassy and one as an English instructor. They've been in Azerbaijan for two years and like it there.

Eventually, our waiting room time ended and it was time to go. The in-flight movie looked like it was a 1960s Hollywood Western, the colors kind of faded, set in a mountainous, steppe-y sort of place with horses and the like, only it was Azerbaijani. Cool.