After a 12 hour flight from JFK I arrived at Dubai…I must say that this may have been the first time I never really wanted the flight to end…business class is nice.
Look carefully beyond the plane and you can see the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world.
My gate to Delhi
Now, off for Delhi!
It is truly amazing to see something timeless. You may be able to change the era, the language, and the subjects discussed, but it still looks and acts the same. What I witnessed this evening was, for all real purposes, the same experience tens…hundreds of thousands…if not millions of people have experienced since the first humans exchanged something of value.
Syncretism…due to commercial or academic trade.
To tell the story,
As I boarded my plane to Dubai I was (UNBELIEVABLY!) fortunate to get bumped up to business class. Let me tell you, my own little compartment with a TV and a bed is pretty sweet for a 12 hour flight. After watching a movie and having a hell of a dinner, I went to the back of the plane to find this:
There I met the following:
1. A man, born in Egypt, lived in Canada for 20 years and now lived in North Carolina, working for an international energy company. He was on his way to Dubai for work.
2. A man, born in Iceland, grew up in Malawi (Africa), lived in Dubai for 8 years and now lives in NYC working for a green energy company building geothermal systems for municipalities around the world. He’s on his way to China by way of Dubai.
3. A man from New Jersey (there’s always one) who is on his way to India to work with his clothing company’s tech division in Hyderabad.
4. Many others I didn’t get a chance to talk to…people from Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Arabia, Australia…all over! Its really quite amazing.
This world is so small, and I think it always was…what makes it feel so big, is that it is really full.
Is it weird that I hope my flight won’t end…man, Emirates’ first class is amazing!
Reminds me of the stories I heard about flying across the US in the sixties.
My home for the next 12 hours. This thing is huge!
Funny looking plane, I think it’s retaining water.
Tuesday…4am…at the Burlington International airport. Not the busiest place to say the least, quite lonely in fact. It’s waiting on that local Skinny Pancake to open up for a cup of coffee.
How about a nice morning shot of the plane?
Bags are checked all the way through to New Delhi, which is a relief. Seems like when I last few to Africa from JFK that I had to go through security again and recheck my bag. I really don’t want to lug hockey equipment around JFK…
Hard to believe, but this Tuesday I will be taking relatively short trip to India to join my brother for a pond hockey tournament in India’s Ladakhi city of Leh.
Here’s a short introductory clip:
Yes, it has been almost a year since my last post. Much has happened since that great trip across Russia, Mongolia and China…I completed an awesome research sabbatical, was election to local public office and a enjoyed a great family trip to Nicaragua (well, my family and 20 students from MMU!). That trip across Asia last year feels a bit like a dream…not very poetic, but not sure how to describe such an adventure. Seven days on a train through Siberia and Mongolia…the Gobi Desert…Red Square and St. Basil’s…Moscow…Tiananmen Square…Beijing…the Wall, not sure how to stop. The beauty of wild open land mixed with unbelievable pollution. Root vegetable farmers in the shadows of dilapidated and abandoned Soviet era factories. Block after block of Soviet era housing dormitories, half always seeming abandoned. The crowds…or better yet, hoards of Chinese tourists around Beijing’s “historical” sites, most of which felt more like a Disney re-creations than actual places of historic or cultural significance.
The contrast between Moscow and Beijing was utterly fascinating, while both ancient, huge and with immense wealth, but Beijing felt like a facade, as if it 
was quickly putting on a show before it lost its momentum or lost some level of prestige. Beijing felt like it was making up for its own insecurities as if it had to show off in order to avoid seeing its true self…full on sense of inadequacy. Moscow, on the other hand, just was. Take it or leave it, Moscow doesn’t really care what you think, for the town knows exactly who it is and feels comfortable. There is nothing you can do to Moscow that has not already been done, it knows itself and is fine and has nothing to prove. For this, I love it.
Where to next? Nicaragua again? Kyrgyzstan? Back to Siberia? We’ll see!
In the meantime, tons of Education work to be done.
The border experience into China was quite pleasant, as is evident from the music being pumped into the near deserted train platform. It is at this border station that they take all the wheels off the train and replace them with a different “gauge” (width). I guess the Russians feared invasions from the east (Japan…the U.S.) as well as from the west (French, Germans, U.S.) so they built their entire railway system to be incompatible with the rest of the world…to make invasions logistically more difficult.
We were here for hours…a few travelers were able to sneak out of the station and make it to a restaurant (one guy ate a fried chicken head!), but they locked the door by the time we got into the station. So we had to enjoy this fine music. On a positive note, I sold an old leather jacket to a store owner for 400 yuan…about $60!
Some pics from villages and towns west and north of Beijing.
Donkey carts vs. fancy Buicks and BMW’s
Drying corn stalks vs. financial banking
One thing in common…the air is so thick with smog, you can barely see a hundred meters in any direction. Your throat burns by the end of the day.
Here is a video from the Mongolian town of Choyr, with a population around 10,000. This video is from a small park in town that pays tribute to VVT Ertvuntz, Mongolia’s first cosmonaut.
I became a bit upset with a Belgian guy (who lived in Sweden) after our stopover in Choyr. After not taking kindly to my U.S. Nationality (which I found abnormally close-minded for a European), he thought it was funny to make a joke comparing Ertvuntz to Laika. If you do not remember, Laika was the Dog the Russians sent in to space (and never to return) back in the late 50’s. He kept making this ‘joke,’ in which he seemed to be saying Mongolians were regressive, backward dogs.
I didn’t laugh.
Speak, Memory 
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