Creative expression

For the purpose of meditating on our trip (which ended more than a week ago. Impossible), Denis assigned a creative component to our final projects. That pretty much means “whatever you want”: a photo album, a journal. Anything.

It’s been a while since I felt motivated enough to write entire songs, but those five weeks worked some magic, I guess. So I’ve decided to piece together a five- or six-song EP, touching proportionately on each of the countries we visited. You can listen to a rough demo of the first track here.

Wrapping up soon

We landed safely in Boston yesterday afternoon. A bit ahead of schedule, actually, after more than 20 hours of travel and a late-night layover in Riyadh just a day after Barack touched down on the same tarmac.

I need a couple of days to mull things over before churning out my last post. Not my last post ever – I’ll continue using this space, probably. Just my last post concerning this particular trip. To bring things full circle, I guess it’s inevitable this experience has altered the outcome of my future experiences, and I’ll never actually stop writing or reflecting on our month abroad, in some way or another. But for the intents and purposes of this blog, I’ll do my best to wrap up. So check back.

And thanks again for your constant support and readership. It made this space, and my efforts to articulate our daily lessons, much more meaningful.

Then you win

On the wall at Al Jazeera.

Tomorrowland

If Qatar were a guy, instead of an emirate slightly smaller than Connecticut, he would be a bachelor who watched a ton of sci-fi movies then hit the lotto for jackpot. And if Doha were a district in Walt Disney World, instead of the emirate’s capital city, it would be Tomorrowland. In the heart of the city, the buildings are tall and – like everything else – impeccably shiny. And just off the edge of the island, a combination of futuristic architecture and neutral desert tones makes for a decent life-size replica of Tatouin.

Qatar is nothing like the first two Middle Eastern countries we visited; it’s part of the elite gulf fraternity.

With the discovery of vast natural gas and oil reserves in the mid-20th century, Qatar transformed from a sandy appendage off Saudi Arabia to a bastion of highly-concentrated wealth and prestige. Now, it boasts the second highest GDP in the world. Last year, while the majority of the international community was reeling from the recession, Qatar reported another budget surplus.

In practical terms, that means Qataris generally lead plush lives without the friction of financial stress that’s hijacked everyone else, everywhere. So much so, there’s no guarantee you’ll meet a single indigenous Qatari while walking down the street. Instead, immigrants fill shops, restaurants, hotels, airlines and cabs to serve a population of plutocratic gulfies in crisply pressed gellabiyas.

Walking down the street, I get the impression that Doha can’t keep pace with its fortune. Almost the entire city is under construction, and finished buildings predict an aesthetic that, when completed, might betray the city planner’s unhinged obsession with Philip K. Dick.

Despite a gorgeous skyline, friendly people and five-star everything, Doha has something else in common with Disney World (sorry! Talk about unhinged obsessions): It’s a little like the landscapes that line the streets in MGM. From a distance, they seem three-dimensional and lively, but up close, they’re cardboard cutouts staggered to create an optical illusion of depth. Sure, everything here looks just as grand up close as it does from a distance, but on the ground, the city lacks the sort of things – like cafes, character and sidewalks – that drew us into Cairo and Damascus.

I’m not necessarily complaining. Every time I walk through the hotel’s front doors, it’s like I’m boarding a spaceship. In one of the elevators, the entire back wall is a Miro painting coated in resin or something. We have kitchenettes, a complimentary water and fruit supply that’s replenished every morning, panoramic bedroom windows that overlook the city and a hot tub and a sauna. I guess, in general, the trappings of life in Qatar match the trappings of life in the West, if you were doing pretty well for yourself. So it’s comfortable and cushy.

But it’s gratuitous. And I wonder if the gulf states feel any sense of responsibility for their inland siblings, hamstrung by poverty. Not necessarily the governments, but the people. If not, they should. For one thing, the ratio of people to money is totally disproportionate. And the socioeconomic contrast between Doha and Damascus, or, more pointedly, Doha and Cairo, is unreal. One glimpse out the window is proof enough: The cars zipping down the street were produced in the past couple of years, not at least five decades ago.

Which is just one minor detail in a much greater division: In some ways, time has forgotten Cairo and Damascus, while Doha is racing toward the future faster than its carpenters can lay down the titanium bricks.

Hot hot heat

You know when you’re in the car in the summer and you roll up the windows to put the air on, and all the vents are positioned to blast in your direction, but everything needs a minute to actually cool down, so when the air gusts out, it feels like someone is blow drying your face on turbo?

That’s a lot like walking down the street in Doha.

Last night, Christina actually walked out of the sauna and said, “It was great – it was cooler than being outside.” Probably not an exaggeration.

Checking in

Sorry for the radio silence! We touched down in Doha Monday night, but the wealthiest city we’ve visited – with the most pervasively Western tendencies – is also the hardest place to track down semi-reliable Internet at a reasonable price.

Posts to come soon.

In the meantime, I’ve got two new bylines on the main page: here and here.

Numbers

Some perspective, for you and for me.

Since May 2, we have:

– taken four flights on two different airlines
– acquired two new visas
– eaten (or politely disposed of) multiple transit versions of breakfast, lunch and dinner
– slept in five hotels and at least six different rooms
– spent too many hours to count in vans and buses, like this weekend, when we stayed in two major Syrian cities in two days

All those numbers change tomorrow, when we fly to Qatar around 5 p.m. And after four days on the gulf coast, we fly to Boston.

Whoa.

Look up

I like power lines.

Taken from the skinny alley outside our Aleppo hotel, which used to be a house.

Outfitted for Aleppo

Lookin’ tough at Umayyad Mosque in a culturally appropriate get-up.

Minarets

At the Umayyad (or Great) Mosque in Aleppo.