Another year wasted, and other randomness

  Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Happy Birthday to ME.  It's my birthday today. 

How old are you turning? you ask.  To which I reply:  Too old; too old to have such an empty life.

Needless to say, no celebrations.

That aside, some interesting things have happened to me over the past several days.  I got a new roomate, for one thing.  The only thing that sucks about this is that my old roomate took her mini fridge, leaving me nothing to eat; more accurately, the dorm manager took her old fridge and didn't tell me where it was and apparently left it unplugged for the week, if the advanced state of decomposition of my repatriated food is any clue.

My new roomate is from Pakistan, and she is generally very nice and very wealthy, which means she buys me a lot of free stuff.  I'm not sure how long this can last, but it's nice for now.

Her family may cause me grief, however...  Her father gave me a lecture when I first met him about Americans, and Muslims; he made me promise not to corrupt her (nice association; thank you my fellow peer Americans!!).  At another point, we all went shopping for new stuff (no, I don't know why I went along); her family was happily chatting away in Urdu and her father suddenly switched to English and started going on about how Muslims will keep losing battles, but will ultimately win the War.  I didn't need to hear that, because I'm not fighting.  It would have been very uncomfortable, if I hadn't been half asleep at the time.

To be honest, I suspect he was testing me out--he kept making controversial statements about how Americans reacted to 9/11 (but not all Americans are bitter at Muslims about this!), and he kept goading me by saying he thought the American ways were perhaps good for the world.  I just said, Maybe.  I guess there are some things, like technology and egalitarianism, which are good ideas.  But it's just sad that my roomate thinks we all live lives like in "Friends", and thinks the ideal of beauty is to be ultra thin (she is, by the way, NOT fat, and rail-thin is NOT beautiful).  Americanization seems to come at the expense of so many diverse customs, and seems to be eradicating quite a lot of good.  I should have just said: No, it's embarrassing.

Nifty fountain in Abu Dhabi mall.

Also, because I'm sure you're dying to know, I went back to Abu Dhabi the other day; it wasn't nearly as bad as last time.  I took a friend with me, and we went to the mall.  Actually, we went to the TWO malls, and bought a lot of stuff and talked about life in a coffee shop, which was really very nice, but we nearly missed the last bus back to Dubai!

The only thing was, we still didn't make it to the Bedouin Villiage, which sounds like a fun day trip.  Ah well.  Next time, friends.  Next time.