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Don’t Read This Post

Do not read this post or look at the photos if you think you will irreversibly upset by torture techniques.

—

This is a supplement to my last post, in which I described a museum exhibit about torture. Interestingly, the museum—the Casa Sephardi in Granada, Spain—offered no spin on the exhibit. It wasn’t a “human rights” museum, it made no call to action at the end. It also did not make light of torture. It was just straight-out torture, torture, and more torture, leaving interpretation and follow up to the visitor.

There were creepy masks people were forced to wear to be humiliated (as in women who had allegedly been unfaithful to their husbands).

The pig mask was, of course, specifically designed to humiliate Jews, who don’t eat pork. These masks may look kind of funny (as in humorous), but they weren’t. As you can read in the paragraph in the first photo, they often also had spikes in strategic places, cut into victims’ necks, and the wearers typically died of starvation.

This confirms another lesson about torture that is relevant today: Torture is rarely used to get security information from terrorists to prevent attacks. It’s almost always used to punish people and to intimidate others not to rebel. It puts a chill on entire communities, who stop speaking out and being politically active. It’s the favorite tool of dictators.

To reinforce my point, here’s a photo of a set of branding irons. The “crimes” for which people were branded included “slave”, “blasphemer”, and “rogue.” Really—Rogue? I can think of a dozen friends of mine who would have been branded by now. I could have been branded as a blasphemer a hundred times over.

The exhibit proceeded to get worse and worse.

It included the iron maiden (not the rock band), thumb screws, chastity belts (for men and women; with and without spikes), the saw (victim hung upside down and sawed down the middle starting from the crotch), the iron bull (victim forced inside a hollow iron statue of a bull under which a fire was slowly built), the rack—with a without spikes—which pulled the victim’s spine and other joints apart one by one; the cage, in which victims were locked and suspended from a bridge where they were exposed to the elements and starved to death.

I will leave it to your imagination to figure out how the spike was used:

I didn’t take photos of most of it; it was just too horrible to share.

If you have read this post, you are either very brave or a weirdo. Or you are one of the over 50% of Americans who think that torture is okay. If, like me, you don’t agree, please go to the Center for Victims of Torture website and sign the Reject Torture declaration. Thanks, and I promise that the next post will be about Italian food or art or something more uplifting!

Back in the Homeland

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15 museums

8 flights

7 hotels

6 palaces and villas

5 train rides

4 countries, if you count the Vatican

3 weeks

2 friends who are miraculously still good friends

1 drained bank account, but totally worth it

Zero muggings, rip offs, illnesses, or other crises.

Uncountable numbers of churches, nameless restaurants and cafes, glasses of wine, paintings of the Virgin Mary, and taxi rides to and from bus stations and airports.

I’m on a plane back home after 3 weeks of traveling around Italy, Malta, and Spain. I’ve got nine hours ahead of me on the way to Atlanta, then another flight to Minneapolis/St. Paul before I land at 6:40pm. They guy sitting next to me, Ryan, is from Atlanta. He told me he was traveling on business and I immediately assumed he would be a conservative Republican who sells B2B online storage solutions or something but it turns out he works for a progressive Baptist international nongovernmental organization. We chatted about what our respective organizations do, about how different countries examine their pasts, and then touched briefly on the election results before he put in his headphones to watch a movie and I flipped open my laptop. He said half his organization’s employees are African American, and the day after the election their regular check-in meeting was just dead silence.

—

When I checked in with a colleague where I work (the Center for Victims of Torture), the day after the election, she said the office was like a morgue. We had been running a two-month anti-torture campaign to educate people about how torture is illegal. Now we may have to kick it into high gear to push back against US use of torture.

—

I’ll have a lot more to write about this trip, but speaking of torture, I visited a museum in Granada, Spain that advertised a special exhibition about torture. Lynn rolled her eyes when I asked if she wanted to go. It was about the only time we didn’t do something together.

What I didn’t realize was that the museum’s name was Casa Sephardi, Sephardi being the term for Jews who used to live in Spain and Portugal.

The exhibit started off easy, with displays of artifacts like menorahs, prayer shawls, and wedding costumes. Then came the Spanish Inquisition. Jews had done well in Spain for the most part, sometimes prospering even more under Muslim protection than under Christian rule. But, as has happened over and over throughout history, Jews became a victim of their own successes. There were religious differences, for sure, but economics was a prime motivator to get rid of the Jews so their property could be confiscated. In 1391, 4,000 Jews were massacred in Seville. This was followed by mass forced conversion to Christianity. Judaism provides a “get out” clause that allows us to convert if our life is at stake. We’re practical like that. So most Jews “converted” but continued to practice Judaism covertly.

The Inquisition imprisoned and tortured the Jews who had converted, sincerely or not, and their property was sold off to cover their expenses—which I guess would have included bread and water and manacles. Their families were turned out into the streets.

Surprise! They were all found guilty and executed. In 1492, all the remaining Jews were expelled from Spain. About a hundred years later, Muslims were also subjected to forced conversions, Inquisition and expulsion.

Lastly, there was the “special” exhibit about torture. It was awful, truly awful, and I am someone who works for a torture rehabilitation center. I’ll write about it more in a separate post, and stop reading here if you know you could be upset by disturbing images.

—

Here’s my take away: the displays, which appeared to be decades old, confirmed two themes in CVT’s anti-torture campaign:

Waterboarding is torture, and a medieval technique at that:

Torture is not effective in obtaining accurate information.

This is one of the reasons travel is important, especially for us Americans, especially now: so we can learn from history (Spanish history is our history), learn from other cultures, learn the truth, and come back prepared to fight for our values.

Happy Thanksgiving to my American readers! May we somehow find some harmony during the holiday season and in the year to come.

Donald Cometh, I Goeth

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I woke up at 4:30 am this morning when my cousin messaged me to say, “It’s not looking good.” I had asked him to let me know as soon as the election was called. I figured I’d feel good and slightly relieved that Hillary was in, then roll over and go back to sleep. Instead, his message had me wide awake and glued to the BBC for hours.

I won’t get into why I preferred Hillary over Donald. My political leaning probably won’t come as a shock to you. I keep thinking about how Minnesota elected as Governor a former “professional” wrestler named Jesse “The Body” Ventura about 10 years ago. People were sick of lying, do-nothing politicians and he seemed like a refreshing change, representing the Independence Party. It turned out he was thin-skinned, got into fights with the media for doing their jobs, managed to insult every voter group, and accomplished nothing.

—

I’m still on Malta. This morning I left the hotel before I knew the final election results but I felt numb and didn’t relish how I would feel once the shock wore off.

My first agenda item was a visit to the immigration office.

There is all sorts of stuff on social media about how we’ll all “just move to Canada.” I find this rather maddening. It’s sort of like how most Americans think Downton Abbey is a BBC production when it wasn’t. We have certain fixed ideas about other countries that just aren’t accurate.

We think Canada is so nice that it would allow in 60 million Americans. Sixty million depressed, angry Americans! Canadians are nice, but not that nice.

—

Here’s the thing: Other countries don’t want foreigners taking their jobs any more than we do. And you can’t just enter another country and start looking for work; they’ll want to see your work permit. You may not even be able to cross the border without one.

I moved to the UK in 2005 on a student visa and after it expired I thought I’d just get a “regular” work visa. I was quickly disappointed to learn that my chances of that were zero because I was applying for, essentially, writing jobs in the country of Shakespeare and Oxford and competing with English citizens and every qualified person from the EU and Commonwealth countries who wanted to move to the UK.

If I had gotten a job with an international company they might have sponsored me, but my career was in the nonprofit sector. If I was fleeing war, I might have qualified as a refugee but fortunately that’s wasn’t the case.

—

I checked out moving to Canada about eight years ago and it was the same deal. Unless you have a PhD in computer science or some other high-skill field, forget it.

The only country I can work in, no problem, is Israel. That would not be without significant challenges; the politics there would probably drive me just as crazy. To be honest, my biggest hesitation is that I feel too old to master a new language—one that’s only used in one country. But it’s an option.

In preparing for this trip, I read that Malta had a “pay your way in” scheme. That is, if you bought a property here and had some amount of money in a Maltese bank account, you could become a citizen and work here. I was just thinking about it as an adventure or maybe retirement option, but today it seemed more urgent. Of course my 501K probably lost 5% overnight, so I figured I might have to wait til it rebounded.

So off I went. I immediately got lost so asked a young man who appeared to be an immigrant if he knew where it was. He was Ethiopian, and he informed me, “We are afraid of what Donald Trump will do.” This would be the first of half a dozen times I heard the identical words from non Americans today.

At the Immigration Ministry, the man at the desk informed me, “No more payment scheme. You want work permit, here are papers.” Here they are, double sided. So I’m back to square one.

Those Who Fail to Learn from History

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I am sitting in my hotel room in Valetta, the capital of Malta, watching the news of the US elections on CNN. There’s not much to know yet, they show the same reel over and over.

Before it’s all over and just in case I choose to throw myself off a cliff here if the result doesn’t go the way I want it to, I wanted to write one post about this election.

There was an Afro Caribbean college kid in London being interviewed about something on TV, and he complained, “Why do we got to learn about stuff that happened hundreds of years ago, like how many wives Henry the eighth had, but we don’t learn nuffink about our own history?” Well, fair enough. He should learn all sorts of history—not just that of the white men.

But as it happens I’ve been thinking a lot about Henry VIII, because this summer I picked up a novel by Philippa Gregory at a little free library and got hooked—I’ve read five or six of her historical “bodice rippers” since. She writes about the medieval period, including the Tudors which Henry VIII was one. These books aren’t Great Literature and Gregory gets knocked for not being historically accurate, but she does have a PhD in history from the University of Edinburg and she tells these true-ish stories with so much tension you can’t put the book down.

What’s relevant to the US elections is the striking similarities between Henry VIII and Donald Trump. Both were born into wealth and power. Both had an older brother who was supposed to be the heir but who died young. Both were told from a young age that they could do anything and no one ever said no to them. Both used and discarded people at a whim, and both had thin skin and a mean streak. Of course, this is just my opinion. We’ll find out in a matter of hours how many Americans think Donald Trump is a really great guy.

My point is that they are both types that recur throughout history and if we don’t know history, we may not be on guard against electing another one to public office. Also, over and over, people think “he couldn’t be that bad” and “it couldn’t happen here.” We tend to believe horrific things only happened in the past or go on in “backward” countries. I’m sure that’s what the Germans—the people who gave us Goethe and Beethoven—thought, right before they started making lamp shades out of human skin.

Am I being overly dramatic? I hope so. But better that than being “surprised” when Trump starts shipping planeloads of Muslim Americans “back to where they came from,” which is actually probably Silicon Valley, not the Swat Valley.

—

It feels funny, that every non-American I’ve met has said something like, “We’re all watching your elections.” Americans never follow anyone else’s elections like others follow ours, and it’s a reminder of our place in the world. And they have also all said something like, “Don’t Americans remember what happened with Hitler/Mussolini/Franco?

We don’t. Actually it’s worse than that—most Americans probably don’t even know who Mussolini or Franco were.

—

I will get back to writing about this trip, but I was probably overly optimistic to think I’d post a live post every night. I spent the weekend in Sorrento, the Amalfi coast, and Capri. It rained and rained and rained. I made the best of it, I guess. Rainy days have a beauty of their own. Here are a couple snaps:

I’ve been on Malta for only a couple hours and it was love at first sight. If the election doesn’t go the way I am hoping, I may claim political asylum!

Rome

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Greetings from Rome! I’ve been go, go, going since I hit the ground so here are just a few tips I’d like to pass on before I forget them in swirl of moving around.

Go in the off season. It’s November and there are still swarms of tourists here but they surge and disappear like flocks of crows. I have found myself alone in a room enjoying a Bernini or Caravaggio more than once.

When the inevitable moment comes when you are jammed against a wall in a museum packed wall to wall with other tourists, just close your eyes and remember “they’re just like crows; they’ll go away,” instead of screaming, “I’ve gotta get out of here—I’m having a claustrophobia attack!”

Buy Dr. Scholl’s gel insoles. The combination of being on your feet for 10 hours a day, with shuffling slowly on marble and streets paved with uneven paving stones, will cause even the fittest feet to ache. Get gellin’.

No matter how much you study the map and read the guides beforehand, expect to get lost—over and over and over. Rome is a hilly city with winding streets and avenues, half of which have no street signs. Think of it as an adventure.

Similar to #4, no matter how prepared you are to see the “Top 10 Sights” according to some guide, be prepared to not be able to figure out how to even get in to the Roman Forum, or arrive at the Coliseum at 3pm to be told “She-a close-a now,” or never find that one thing in the Vatican you wanted to see because you got turned around.

Please, for the love of God—and this is a personal favor to me—please don’t buy a selfie stick from one of the hordes of Bangladeshi or Nigerian street vendors and ruin the view of your fellow tourists, not to mention not really seeing any of the sites you came 1,000 miles to see because you’re preening and posing.

Learn a little Italian. I didn’t do this and I keep speaking Spanish to them, which many Italians understand but I don’t understand when they respond to me in Spanish with an Italian accent. Prego—it’s not just a spaghetti sauce.

Lastly, Americans, resist the urge to refer to the old Saturday Night Live “Find the Popes in the Pizza” with Father Guido Sarducci. They won’t know what you’re talking about and if they do they’ll laugh charitably then probably roll their eyes once you walk away.

And speaking of priests, yes they are all over the place here. I started a little “Nuns vs. Priests” game of my own but lost count after about a dozen on each side. About 75% of the nuns appear to be from India, the Philippines, and other developing countries. The priests, on the other hand, are mostly young and white. I don’t know what that indicates, but here’s a calendar I bought on the street.

More about Rome later. I’m mostly having a great time, although I did have a bit of a good cry in a public garden today. More about that later.

I’m off to Sorrento tomorrow.

Ciao,

Anna

Desert Contrasts

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This is the story of how I wound up in a brothel in Dubai, a series that starts here.

—

After finishing my meal at the brothel … er, TGI Thursdays, I took a taxi back to the hotel. I apologized to Toni for yelling at her. She apologized for calling herself an American. Wait. That doesn’t sound right. You know what I mean.

I told her about the brothel and we shook our heads, imagining the young women in our lives working as prostitutes—or the men in our lives hiring prostitutes. We talked about the irony that Dubai arrests tourists for making out on the beach, but that under the gaze of the Sheikh you could drink, smoke, and fornicate if you knew how to find the place. We talked about puritanism, patriarchy, and power dynamics. We agreed that Dubai wasn’t much different from North America, in that appearance and reality were completely different, like when you read about a child molester and you could bet he would turn out to be a Christian pastor or a Boy Scout leader. We discussed the socioeconomic conditions and gender imbalances that made sex work the lesser of terrible ways to survive in a tough world.

We had a lot in common after all. We bonded. We agreed we didn’t need to spend every moment together.

—

The next day I took a bus to the Mall of the Emirates. There was a young woman sitting across from me dressed in jeans, a tight-fitting but long-sleeved T-shirt, and a baseball cap. The woman sitting behind her wore a full burqa; even the eye opening was covered with black mesh.

The bus route took us out of the old town through the desert. I could see trailers in the distance—what we would call manufactured or mobile homes in the US.

It’s difficult to build an edifice complex without cheap labor. These trailers in Dubai were home to the Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, and other migrant workers who were building skyscrapers and malls for the Sheikh. I had read about how they were exploited and trapped out in the desert before I’d left Dublin. The trailers certainly looked desolate. I wondered how many brothers, fathers, or husbands of the TGI Thursdays women were also making a living in Dubai.

—

The mall was like any mall in Minnesota. Not. It had an indoor ski resort! It had shops where you could buy every kind of burqa you desired, as long as it was black.

Like an idiot tourist I bought a three-foot-tall hookah pipe with lots of detachable, fragile parts which I then had to lug around with me on the bus, taxi, plane, and the bus in Dublin. Having my arm in a sling didn’t help. Take my advice, if you really want a hookah pipe, order it on Amazon.

Later that day I wandered around the old part of town near our hotel looking at store after store that sold gold. Who bought this stuff?

Then I saw a beautiful tunic in a shop window and went in to try it on. It was a bit big and the proprietor offered to tailor it for me on the spot. He took the opportunity to fondle me and I thrust his hands away and he just laughed. He did alter the tunic so I guess we both got what we wanted. Below is what it looked like, modeled by a woman who actually looks good in it.

I bought some stamps at a kiosk so I could sent postcards.

I will give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they convey a message about zakat, or charity.

Toni and I went to a farewell banquet in the desert that night, complete with the obligatory camel ride and henna painting of our hands. The next day, off we went back to Dublin. Here’s a photo of the men’s and women’s mosques in the Dubai airport.

I started this series as a way of examining things that can go wrong while traveling. In one week I will be in Rome. If nothing goes “wrong” there like it did in Dubai, I’ll be disappointed!

TGI Thursdays

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This is the story of how I accidentally wound up in a brothel in Dubai, part of a series that starts here.

—

The hostess at TGI Thursdays looked at me like I was an alien, then slowly led me to a table in the center of the restaurant and left me with a menu, which was all in English.

She had an African accent and I didn’t hear enough of it to ID which country, but I’m pretty sure her real name wasn’t the one on her nametag—“Hi! My name is Emily.”

She was about six feet tall, string-bean thin, and wore stiletto heels and a barely-there mini skirt. I vaguely wondered if she changed into more modest clothes to get to and from work, but I didn’t really give it much thought.

I was hungry by now, so I was happy when the waiter appeared almost immediately. He too looked at me strangely. Whatever! What was wrong with these people? I ordered a club sandwich and a beer, then settled back and looked around.

Have you ever walked into a situation and thought nothing of it until it was too late to get out of it?

All the other women in the bar were either African or Asian, and none appeared to be older than 20. They were all dressed like “Emily”—in high heels, mini skirts, and low-cut blouses. They were literally hanging on the arms of fat, middle aged white men, many of whom were talking loudly, so I could hear their Australian, English, and American accents. North American, that is—I’m sure most of them were Canadian, ha, ha. These were oil workers, no doubt, and I was in a brothel.

The girls (I’ll call them girls because many appeared to be 17 or 18 years old) tittered and cooed at everything the men said, as if the men were the most fascinating, funny, and appealing male specimens ever.

“Ooh, Keef, you so funny!” a girl laughed near my table. Keith was 50-something, ruddy faced, rotund, and very drunk. He sat tilted as though he was about to keel over.

As all this sunk in, one of the few Arab patrons approached my table. He was like a human cliche of an Arab man: wearing a kaffiyeh, sporting a Saddam Hussein-style black mustache, and smoking a cigarette in a short gold holder. He leered at me as he circled my table several times.

I had the urge to bleat like a lamb. Then he aggressively pulled out the chair opposite me and asked, “May I join you?”

“No!” I exclaimed, perhaps a bit too loudly.

A giant Sudanese bouncer sidled up to me and the Arab guy slinked away.

“Do you know where you are?” the bouncer asked in a low voice.

“Yeh-yes…” I replied, feeling sheepish (in the embarrassed sense, not in the about-to-be groped-or-worse sense).

“I will stand next to you while you enjoy your meal,” the bouncer said.

What could I say but, “Thank you?”

My club sandwich and beer arrived. They were like any club sandwich and beer you would get anywhere else in the world. I ate, drank, and did what I commonly do when I am dining alone; I wrote in my journal. In this case, I took detailed notes, which is how I can write this narrative years later.

—

It’s not a very remarkable story. I’m sorry if you’re disappointed that something more dramatic didn’t happen. It was an eye opener for me. I had seen adolescent girls in Jamaica with the proverbial obese middle-aged German men stuffed into Speedos. I had read about human trafficking and sex workers in my master’s program.

But this was how the business actually worked. Supply and demand. I figured the maze I had walked through to get to the entrance was a means of shielding passersby from what was going on inside, and also of signaling to people like me who just wanted a sandwich and a beer, “This is something you should think twice about!” Obviously I was too dense to get it.

To be continued …

Ugly Americans

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This is the story of how I accidentally wound up in a brothel in Dubai, part of a series that starts here.

—

The days ticked away in Dubai. Toni and I went an excursion a day; the most memorable was a “desert safari.” I have been on a real safari, and it involved living things. This did not, and I can recommend that you skip it if you’re in Dubai unless you love roller coasters. It involved careening up and down and sideways—sometimes at a 45 degree angle—in sand dunes. I was sick to my stomach and stayed that way until our driver blew a tire and we got to wander around in the desert while he repaired it.

A couple rushed up to me and introduced themselves as being from Iran. They asked if I was American and then exclaimed, “We love America! America people!” This was heartwarming, and it happened to me again when I was hiking in the Jordanian desert last year. Yes, many of our government’s policies are terrible, and it’s good to know that people get the difference between the US government and the American people.

—

After breathing in dust for hours, Toni and I decided to go see a movie. She asked the cashier about something—was there a good restaurant nearby or something like that.

“No English,” he smiled at her.

She repeated her question, speaking slower and louder. He shook his head to indicate he really didn’t speak English, and she went for a third try, louder and slower. Standing next to her, I murmured under my breath, “This is embarrassing. He doesn’t speak English.”

“Okay!” She laughed and said to him slowly and loudly, “I’m sorry—I’m American!” Then she did an about face and walked quickly into the darkened theater.

I was shocked and furious. “Since when are you American?” I demanded.

“Canada is in North America,” she said patronizingly.

“So you’re American when you’re making a fool of yourself, but Canadian the rest of the time?”

“I don’t need to explain myself to you,” she said. “They don’t understand things unless you make it very simple. They’ve probably never heard of Canada. But they have certainly heard of America,” she said pointedly.

We were the only patrons in the theater and it was a double header of Bollywood hits. It was in Hindi with Arabic subtitles, but you didn’t need an English translation to follow what was going on.

If you’ve never seen a Bollywood movie, here’s a summary of how they go, from my limited perspective: There’s a five-minute scene where they set up the boy-girl story involving forbidden love, mistaken identities, controlling elders, and a mischief-making best friend or auntie. Then dozens of people dressed in matching costumes leap into the frame and perform a riotous song and dance number, preferably in a field of wild flowers, on a beach, or in the middle of moving traffic. This is repeated over and over with different costumes and settings until everyone lives happily ever after.

I sat through half an hour of it but I was so fuming mad that I decided to leave. Toni gave me a withering glance as if to say, “You’re insulting their culture.” I knew I had been harsh and would have to apologize later, even if she didn’t acknowledge her part in our verbal scuffle.

I hailed a taxi. “Take me some place I can get a beer,” I requested.

And that’s how I ended up in a brothel. Because surely, a woman traveling alone and drinks alcohol must be a whore, right?

—

The driver dropped me off in front of a place called TGI Thursday’s. Thursday, in the Middle East, is their Friday. It had what looked like a maze of tall screens leading to the entrance. I hesitated, but the driver had wasted no time in disappearing, so in I went. I zigged and zagged and then emerged into what did indeed look—at first glance—like a TGI Friday’s in the US, except for the gigantic portrait of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum hanging over the entryway.

To be continued ….

Finally, Dubai

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This is the story of how I accidentally wound up in a brothel in Dubai, part of a series that starts here.

—

Toni was very serious. She was a teetotaler. She didn’t get my sense of humor. She was divorced and her kids were out on their own, so she was seeking. She had grown up somewhere in the boondocks of western Canada and was fascinated by eastern traditions like meditation. I was an on-again-off-again meditator but she was seriously devoted and would go on to live in an ashram in India and become a follower of some swami rami someone or other. Like most Canadians, she made a point of telling people she was Canadian so they wouldn’t mistake her for an American. Since I had fled the US, in part, to escape the George W. Bush era, I couldn’t really blame her.

—

When we arrived at our hotel I realized why the package had been so cheap. When most people think of Dubai, they probably picture phantasmagorical hotels like these:

Our hotel was in the old part of town and was a concrete bunker something like this except the windows were slits:

I suppose all that concrete kept out the heat, and in retrospect we were staying in a more authentic part of town, if anything about Dubai can be called authentic.

The first thing I did was go to the bar and order a beer. The two bartenders looked at each other sideways, clearly uncomfortable. One disappeared, maybe to consult with a manager. He came back and wordlessly opened a beer bottle, then wrapped it in a cloth napkin and slid it across the bar to me. Message received: I was a whore and an alcoholic, possibly both.

Toni disapproved too, and after pointing out the maple leaf on her back pack to the bartenders, left to go to the room. “I don’t drink alcohol,” she reminded me when I showed up with my beer wrapped in its shroud of shame. “But if I did, I wouldn’t drink it here out of respect for their culture.”

“They sell beer here,” I said. “So what you’re saying is that you respect their culture of treating women unequally.”

Toni harrumphed furiously and shot back, “I don’t know. I’m going to have some silent me time now.”

—

Our package included some free tours. I had bought a beautiful scarf in the airport to drape around my head. Not like a hijab, more like a glamorous, Audrey Hepburn-style nod to being in a Muslim country. I thought it advisable to leave my Star of David at home.

When I stepped outside, a wall of searing heat descended on me. I started sweating profusely and the glamor wilted.

Toni made up and were picked up at the curb by a guy in a giant gas guzzling vehicle—the only kind allowed in Dubai, apparently. He drove around and pointed out the sights. It was mind boggling, as you would expect if you’ve seen photos of Dubai. Then he took us to a “museum.” I was excited to learn about the history and culture of the Emiratis.

The museum was gleaming and glitzy, with crystal chandeliers, marble floors, and sleek escalators that might have been designed by Lamborghini. Strangely, the displays reminded me of shop windows in New York or London. Wait. They were shop windows. These weren’t historical artifacts or objects of art, they were items for sale. All of them were labeled as originating in Iran or Egypt or other places that actually had cultural traditions, and nothing was going for less than $1,000.

—

Back at the hotel, I went to check my email at the computer kiosks in the lobby but Yahoo wouldn’t load. What the hell? I Googled “weather in Dubai” and a local site came up that claimed it was 85F. That was weird. I had checked Dubai weather in Dublin and had expected 110F today.

It didn’t take me as long as it had in Cuba the previous year to realize that the Internet was controlled by the government. I was in for a six-day involuntary Internet sabbatical.

To be continued …

Having Some Good Craic Despite Being Cracked

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This is part of a series about living in Dublin and accidentally eating a club sandwich in a brothel in Dubai.

—

I had moved to Dublin from Oxford, and after a rough landing I was settling in. My flat felt safe. I reckoned that, since the addict had broken in shortly before I moved in, odds were that the flat wouldn’t burgled again until long after I had moved on. Magical thinking, I know.

Dublin did feel like a magical place, but not in a good way. The flat was close to some old castle that was a stop on the Haunted Dublin! tour. I don’t believe in ghosts or paranormal anything but there was something dark about Dublin.

And Dublin was ugly. I had moved from Oxford, city of dreaming spires:

To Dublin:

As usual I am exaggerating. Oxford is beautiful but it is swarming wall-to-wall with crowds, like some science fiction movie about overpopulation. Dublin has some lovely buildings, but unfortunately too many like the one above. It too was heaving with crowds, tourists but also EU newcomers from Slovenia and asylum seekers from Nigeria.

I thought about how the English had subjugated the Irish, taxing them, viewing them as sub human, and doing nothing while a million Irish died during a succession of famines. The architecture says everything about who was the conqueror and who was the conquered.

—

I didn’t have much in common with my new friend, Toni, except that we were in our 40s while everyone else in Dublin seemed younger, and we were both determined to take advantage of being “over the pond” to travel as much as possible.

The Sunday papers advertised great deals on travel packages. “See Sunny Spain! Only 400 € for 5 nights inclusive!” Inclusive meant airfare, hotel, some meals, and drinks in a resort populated by English speakers who would never be made uncomfortable by having to speak Spanish.

Sunday morning. I texted Toni. “Wanna go to Dubai?”

“Tell me more,” she responded immediately.

“Only 500 € for five nites inc airfare & hotel,” I read from the ad in the Irish Times.

“Wow thats cheap lets go!” She was in.

—

But first I went to St. James Hospital to have my collar bone x-rayed. I was no longer on the National Health System; in fact I was uninsured, so I would pay cash.

I walked down Vicar Street to Meath Street to Bellvue to Marrowbone Lane to Robert Street, on to Newport Street, to Pim Street, past the Guinness Storehouse, followed the curve of Grand Canal Place to Echlins Street and finally to James Street.

Total distance: 1.6 kilometers, or just under one mile. That’s Dublin. There may have been a direct route but now I knew I could stop at Guinness on the way back— and use my right arm to lift a pint.

The hospital reminded me of a Mexican bus station. The waiting room was furnished with a motley assortment of worn plastic chairs, the windows and linoleum floor were grimy.

I paid up front; I think it was 80 €. I was called in after the x-ray was developed, and the doctor said, “There’s been no progress. It’s still broken and you’ll have to keep it immobilized for another eight weeks, at least.”

I was shocked. “But it’s been six weeks!” I didn’t mention that I hadn’t exactly been resting and taking it easy, that I’d been climbing a ladder up to a top bunk at a hostel, then washing windows and scrubbing floors in my two-story flat.

“How old are you?” he asked.

“46?” I expected him to say, “Wow! You look so much younger—I never would have guessed you’re even 40!”

Instead he said, “Well at your age, things take longer to heal.”

My age?

“If it doesn’t heal after eight more weeks, you’ll need surgery to screw in a plate to hold the two ends together.”

Surgery? A plate? F— that!

There’s nothing like someone telling me I’m in a bad situation to make me come out swinging, to declare that things are great.

I was going to Dubai, and it was going to be a blast!

Breaking Free

Living Well, Despite what Life Throws at You

Tag Archives: travel

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