My husband Alex is coming to visit. His initial flight was canceled, and his new itinerary takes him to Cameroon by the circuituous route of Boston- New York- Dubai- Nairobi- Yaounde. Despite the inconvenience he is thrilled to see another part of the world, and he has always enjoyed spending hours and hours lookign out airplane windows examining geography from the air. Here's an excerpt of the e-mail he sent to me from the Dubai airport. Enjoy!
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This is one of the coolest trips I've ever been on. We flew in over the
Persian gulf and the man made resort islands that they have been
building here. It looked a little like Los Angeles from the sky except
for the minarets and mosques.
The gulf here has an almost indescribable color. I can't do it justice but I can say that it varies from dark blue to the color that copper turns when its very weathered. That copper green color shows up everywhere there is an up-welling of current and everywhere a ship has sailed. So each large ship had billowing clouds of blue-green water for miles behind. As we were taxiing towards the terminal I saw the ski area. Yes, the ski area. Actually, its more of a ski facility.
The flight had almost no one on it, and Emirates airlines is a joy. They have a camera on the nose of the plane and one on the bottom looking down that you can tune in to on the computer video system at any time. Since the seats around me were empty, I set one of the monitors to the forward camera and one to the down camera and then I could watch out the window too. I was in hog heaven during take off and landing. Sunrise on the screen in front of me was cool too.
The plane has outlets that I can plug my computer into. So I watched one movie on the airplane system and one on my mac and I worked for an hour or two. I've got an hour or so here in Dubai then a five hour flight to Kenya and four hours to Yaounde. Yipes, thats crazy. I'll probably sleep a lot on those flights.
In Dubai its fun to stumble around gawking only to notice other Europeans and Americans with what is obviously the same stupid look on their face. I'm going to go walk around and enjoy the next hour or so in this mall.. um, I mean airport.
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