Bony Pear

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Ice buckets and gin, American sweets and the sun beating down on grey rock and red sand.  The only shade is thrown by dull green date palms.  A tiny Indian maid films her employers eating from the buffet with two cameras and they just eat, indifferent.  In the resort’s pool bar young Arabic men wearing dishdashas drink and hold hands.  The pale 1960’s light slides over pastel pink retaining walls, and outcrops of fake rock surround the chlorinated oasis.  Thatched roofs shade sunken bars. 

There was an Emirati wedding last night.  The men feasted on the lawn and the women danced in the grand ballroom, alone.  They arrived in BMW’s and Range Rovers.  Fifty years ago they rode camels.  They all look bored.

The bed in our room is wide enough that we can lay the wrong way on it and not reach the sides.  Varsity Blues is on television.  They cut any scenes with tits.  Sheik Zayed was born here, in Al Ain.  Quranic verse lines the highway back to Abu Dhabi.

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Abroad. Lets rewind a little to when we were in the desert.

It’s hot in the desert.

It’s soooo hot and super dry. There is a haze that settles over the skyline so you can’t see anything clearly. The water is crazy blue. When the wind blows there is dust that rises and settles on everything. There are date trees everywhere. I ate a bunch off the ground. They were sweet and awesome and better then any I have bought at home. I don’t know why we don’t have date trees everywhere like here. And everybody wears black, well manly every lady. It seems insane to me, every day I do my best to cover my rack, shoulders and my knees out of respect for the culture here (I don’t want to be a shit tourist, well I  try not to be), and I manage most days but this heat kills you. It was 39 degrees on our first day. One day we went to the grand mosque in Adu Dhabi and all the women have to wear an ibiya to enter, which is a long black dress and head scarf, so they lend you one at the entrance. It was like at school when you didn’t wear your uniform, instead some tarty skirt, you were sent to the uniform shop to don some old weathered long school skirt, to cover you up and make you modest. Make you respectable, except this time the clothes I was given were clean and new looking and covered me from tip to toe. As soon as I put them on I broke out in the most insane sweat and I wasn’t even in the sun.  The mosque was ok.