The surprise of the last 24 hours was how easy it was. International travel has become a formulated and highly standardized process. The only screw-up in the whole adventure (if something this easy and smooth, and wrapped in commerce, can still be called an adventure) was the Yale minibus, which was twenty minutes late, putting me at an early first round disadvantage as I missed the Grand Central bound train I had planned on.

But, really, who cares, not you reading this surely. I floated through GCT to the 7, to the E to the lovely AIRTRAIN, and right to terminal 4, where the Air Emiretes flight, a plane sunbathing as if a giant beached whale washed up from the Atlantic in Queens.

The flight was great, horribly cheep white wine from Brazil kept me just below irritated, and besides the oft crying and laughing outputs of the incredibly high level of procreation that couples from the UAE engage in, the flight was 11 hours of media bliss. I raced about half way through DF Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, raced only because I was looking for some deeper meaning, some character who may actually interact with another character in a mutually dependent and complicated manner, but human-human interactions and the dynamic stories that arise from conflict are not Wallace's thing. Wallace is all playing at being his insular, clever (but ultimately detached from others, detached from the type of narrative agency that propels characters to actually take action or move) heroes; Barth, and Nabokov. And he is good at their game, very good, good enough to make his work worth reading if you love the subterfuge of text play, and postmodern questionable narrator, meta-truths and the like. But, here I am complaining about the lack of struggle and connection between characters and I spend all this time without mentioning anything but my inner experience of reading.

I also watched Children of Men and Shooter and 3 episodes of Scrubs. Emirettes provides every economy seat with a great little video screen and thousands of options. Honestly, the sound and picture quality are so bad that you can't really watch anything beyond comedy tv.

Sitting to my immediate right was an Emory graduate, and native of Lima, Peru, who grew up in Singapore and now had moved to Dubai to fly for Emirettes. We discussed the impoverished conditions of the Dubai underclass, the lack of substantial state criticism, and the condition of health care in Dubai. Things are generally as one would suspect. We also talked a lot about planes (777-300, 330-600, 340-300, and of course the 380), and aircraft engines (Rolls-Royce, GE, vs Pratt and Whitney).

Dubai, from the experience of the airport, was clean, about 69 degrees f, and very much like a 3 story mall. albeit duty-free. I imagine, and understand from the 14 hours of advertisements that I have absorbed today, that Dubai, outside the airport is about the same.

Touching down in Dar was like getting to Ireland, the airport was surrounded by thick green grass blowing in the wind. The sky was grey, relatively cool and it would rain before the day was out.

I was met at the airport by the best taxi driver in Dar and the hotel Safari is a dump, but a clean and quite one.

more to come...