Mme Cyn

Kathmandu

2012-02-05T22:10:00.018+04:00

I am not by nature an envious person. There are enough good things in this life for everybody to get a little bit, so why worry? If somebody else has something divine or does something wonderful, why shouldn’t I be there on the sidelines, cheering? My turn will probably come eventually.

But I do confess that I have a friend, A. , whose travel life I do envy. Her philosophy seems to be “Some people work to buy food; I work to buy plane tickets” and she’s off at every opportunity. Occasionally she travels with friends, but generally she goes on her own and loves every minute of it. She has been to some utterly fantastic places – many of which I'll admit I would not have the courage to travel to alone – and as soon as she’s back from one trip, she’s plotting the next. A. seems to thrive on research and planning, and she looks for that little something extra that makes her trips that much more marvelous -- go to Al Hambra in the summer and you get oranges on the trees; if you wait ‘til November to see St Petersburg, then the ballet will be in town. That sort of thing. I tend to be of the "Jump on the plane and sort it out when you get there" school of travel, myself. But whenever she describes her upcoming travel plans, I practically drool.

So when we found out we were to have an unexpected three day weekend last December, the first thing she did was check the airlines. Later that evening, as we were sitting around having a chatty shisha, A. mused, ”You know we have Thursday off? I’m thinking of going to Kathmandu and doing some Christmas shopping… flights are cheap on Air Arabia…” Oh ho! Kathmandu for a weekend jaunt? Grand! But as a shopping destination? I’d never even thought of that. “Ooh, ooh! Can I come too?” I asked, hoping to be let into the elusive, exclusive “Travel With A. and See the World” club. “Sure, ” she replied. “Bring an empty suitcase.”

Now I have been to Kathmandu before. I went in 1999 with my buddies K & S. We saw the major sights, climbed the steps to the stupa, hung out in the hippy quarter, bicycled to Pashupatinath, saw the sleeping Vishnu, watched some funerals/body burnings on the river, tossed oranges to the monkeys, and had an all around swell time. I’d seen the main sights of Kathmandu, so there was no reason not to treat this as just a little alternative to spending the gift weekend sleeping late and loafing around the house. So I packed a little carry on and stuck it inside an empty suitcase, and off we went. I could not imagine what I would want to buy in Kathmandu ( since the last time I was there I bought a jacket, a scarf, and a charm for my bracelet, but didn’t otherwise go into the shops), but A. could probably use my extra luggage space.

Ha. I filled that suitcase, and totally stuffed my carry on to boot. Cashmere. Carpets. Embroidery. Sweaters. Shawls. Silver. Nepali felt and handcrafts. Singing bowls. Tiger boxes. Tiger slippers. I did all my Christmas shopping and then some. I even found a present for my Dad. What a great way to spend a weekend! We stayed at the superb Ambassador Garden Home Hotel, and I managed to find the Tibetan restaurant I’d visited in 1999 that serves the best potato soup on the planet. (It still does.) A day and a half and a quarter — which is what it amounted to – was the perfect amount of time for a shopping trip, punctuated with good rustic food and drink, followed by shisha and music in the evenings.

And I learned something from travelling with A. (other than the fact that I want to do it again, of course). Even though I can’t travel as often as she does and probably will never dare the more exotic places on my own, The Sort It Out Later school of travel has its limitations. It is worth taking the time and looking at one’s travel possibilities and making the absolute most of what there is on offer. And to stay open to the unexpected. Like a shopping trip to Kathmandu.

Bouncer

2011-11-17T13:23:00.009+04:00

The best laid plans of mice and men are often totally wrecked by cats.

I like cats. I’m allergic to them, but I like them. I grew up with a cat; I also grew up with running eyes and a snotty nose. So when the lovely little calico tabby brought her three tiny kittens to live under our water tank last April, my darling husband (who also likes cats) and I went all awwww-y (as you do), but decided that they needed to stay feral cats. When one kitten disappeared a couple of weeks later ( it was adopted by a loving home and not run over by a Hummer, and please do not disabuse me of my fantasy), we thought they might all move on, but no, they stayed. I put out water for them, but that was it. Feral cats need to learn to hunt. Then just after they were weaned their mother disappeared and they got terribly thin, so I started to feed them. Feline Friends told me to feed them just two or three times a week in different places at different times so they wouldn’t get dependent, and I duly did just that – for about two weeks. Then the piteous mews emanating from their scraggy faces started haunting my dreams, and I gave in and started to feed them every day.

For the first part of the summer, they were just “Teh Kittehs”, and I watched them play outside and that was that. I figured they’d eventually move on, as cats do. But then I started looking for them and worrying about them. And then--- well --- as Mike told Sully in Monsters, Inc: “Once you name them, they OWN you.”

Tux is gun-shy. He will come to be fed and he will actually come into the house if the door is left open, but he will not tolerate being handled or even touched. I can’t even catch him to get him to the vet. The Redheaded Bouncer, on the other hand, is a right little tart and will cozy up to anybody who looks good for a nuzzle or a petting. She always wants attention and desperately wants to be an indoor cat. In the heat of midsummer, I occasionally opened the door for them, and they came straight into the cool. They would park themselves under a stream of air conditioned coolness and revel in the comfort of The Indoors. Eventually, Bouncer figured out that if she asked (yowled at the side door, sat on the kitchen windowsill, met my car in the driveway), she might get lucky and get inside. And she might get really lucky and get a hot dog or other similar feline-approved treat along with a good petting and a chance to sleep on the couch under the AC.

However, these two are just a couple of feral critters living under my water tank and off my largess.

Or so I thought.

This morning, I left for work at 5:30 because I was too tired last night to finish the prep for the six hours of classes I have on Thursdays. I thought I’d get in, finish writing my handout, make the photocopies, have a bowl of oatmeal and a cup of tea, relax and be ready for the 8 a.m. start to my day from hell. Before I left the house, I went outside to feed the cats. Normally they hear the chow bag rustle and come running, but this time: nothing. I heard some yowling and figured it was a turf war with the neighbor’s cat, so I poured out the kibble and got into the car. And as I pulled away from the house, I glanced back and thought I saw a cat on the roof. “Ridiculous,” I thought. I’m hallucinating,” which is something I sometimes do as a byproduct of migraines. So I drove off and then thought – wait: my hallucinations are nearly always sounds or smells, and they are the last symptom before a migraine goes full blown – I don’t have any of the lesser symptoms. But the cat couldn’t GET on the roof. Could she? I turned around.

And when poor Bouncer saw me, she started running frantically along the edge of the roof, yowling, It was that awful, pitiful sound of a cat in trouble, not just her “I want some petting” mewl. I was terrified she was going to jump down to me since she trusts me and frequently jumps up on me in her attempts to get into the house. I ran to the back of the house to go up to the roof.

Let me say here that I do not like vertical ladders. I fell off one on board a ship when I was a little kid, and though a nice sailor (or maybe it was my Dad) caught me, it has kind of lurked in the back of my mind ever since. Nevertheless, Bouncer needed me, so up I went. Let me say here that when I say “don’t like” I actually mean “petrified of”, and I got part way up and my hands locked into claws. Back down I went. The neighbors didn’t answer their door (it wasn’t yet 6:00) but I found a gardener, and managed to communicate to him that I needed help. Poor man. I gave him a canvas bag to put the cat in, and up he went. He couldn’t catch her. I made it halfway up the ladder again with some food, but she wasn’t buying it. After a while, he came back down, catless. I gave him some money which he tried to refuse, and then called my boss, who lives down the road. He said he wasn’t fit to climb around roofs, but he listed the guys who also live nearby. Fortunately, I had Rob’s phone number, and I called him. It was nearly six thirty. “Hi it’s Cynthia, I’m sorry if I woke you but I need a knight in shining armor.” “What for?” “ThecatisstuckontheroofandIcan’tgetherdowncanyouandJudycomeoverandhelpus?” “Judy’s on her way to work, but I’ll come.” Relief. But I knew this was a two man job, so I headed back up the ladder. By this time, Bouncer had figured out I was close by and was sticking her head over the parapet, yowling. The neighbor stuck her own head out the window – apparently Bouncer had awakened them this morning – and said her husband was in the shower, but he might be able to help later. Too late. I was already back on the ladder.

Once I actually got in sight of the top I realized that If I could even manage to get onto the roof, I would never be able to get back down. The step over the parapet was way too high, and I’d never ever manage it backwards. When Rob arrived, Bouncer was looking down at me in panic, I was clinging to the rusty old ladder with one hand and dialing the phone to call my husband (in an earlier time zone, btw) for moral support with the other. Oh, and having a complete, hysterical meltdown. Which is something I do about once a decade.

Rob was going to have to get her on his own. I got back down ( and did indeed fall off the last rung of that accursed ladder) and he went up. (Young, strong, fit guys are really useful at times like these.) As he reached the top, who comes racing around the corner but Bouncer?

I made poor Rob look around and figure out how she got on and then off the roof. The tree next to the house has wispy branches at the top – surely too fine to take the weight of a cat – but apparently there was one a little thicker than the others that was resting in one of the crenellations in the wall. The little madam had climbed the tree, waltzed over on the branch, and then chickened out about coming down. I think she figured that when I was so close and did not save her she was on her own, so she went back down the way she came up.

So there I was: exhausted, tearstained, embarrassed to be seen in such a state by a colleague, nearly late for a class that I wasn’t totally prepared to teach…and the damned cat – who’d eaten an hour and a half of my morning and dragged at least three people out of bed – had managed to save her own sorry self. Did I throttle her, as she so richly deserved? Did I. I picked her up, took her into the cool house, petted her, fussed over her, gave her some water, then reluctantly turfed her out only because I had to get to class.

I am so totally owned.

filmjolkbrod

2011-04-09T22:49:00.006+04:00

Last summer I was in Sweden with M, hanging out in a college town called Lund and taking a couple of shorter trips to Copenhagen and Stockholm. We didn't have a mad touring week planned --we mostly wanted to slouch around and enjoy the long, sunny summer days. So it seems that what we did mostly was eat and drink. Always a good vacation plan in my book.

The friend who had lent us her apartment had highly recommended lunch in a popular restaurant in town. It took us three tries to find it open, which we finally did on our last day. It was a great little bistro -- jam packed -- that included a salad and bread bar with the meal. One of the breads I picked up was dark and spicy smelling. When I tasted it, I knew I'd found something extraordinary. The waiter couldn't tell me what was it was, but said it was 'everyday' (I assume he meant nothing special) and came from the bakery next door. We finished lunch and rushed over; they were closed. We went back the next morning, and they gave me the Swedish name (filmjolkbrod), and called it 'sour bread', but didn't have enough English to tell me what was in it. I bought two loaves and brought them home.

We knew it had something anise-y in it and probably molasses, but that's as much as we could figure out from tasting it. I couldn't even tell for sure whether it was a yeast bread or a soda bread: it wasn't yeasty, but it wasn't dense like a soda bread, either. I did a Google search on the Swedish name and came up with nothing, so I figured it just wasn't meant to be anything but a pleasant holiday memory.

Now, I am in the habit of buying cookbooks everywhere I go, and in Stockholm we had visited an open air museum that was kind of like their version of Williamsburg -- a sort of 19th century re-enactment town, with glass blowers, furniture makers, etc. In their museum gift shop, I picked up a couple of books: one was cookies (of course) and the other was basically a family recipe book of desserts, pastries, etc. Rather amateurish, rather homespun-looking, but full of traditional recipes presented with family anecdotes. My kind of book.

I tend to read my cookbooks like novels, and a couple of weeks after I got home, I picked up the family recipe book and started reading it. And there on page 28 was a picture of a homely little loaf called "Soured milk bread". I read the recipe, and sure enough -- molasses, aniseed, fennel, rye flour (of course!) -- it had to be something like. I made it, tasted it, and was brought right back to the bistro in Lund.

And best of all, it is just about the easiest loaf of bread I have ever made. I frequently make it when we have weekend guests; I can throw it together before anyone else is up, and by the time the rest of breakfast is ready and the coffee is brewed, it's out of the oven. It's a big loaf and will last for days (if it doesn't get eaten before lunch on the first day). It makes excellent toast and also freezes well. It's super in a ham and cheese sandwich or with cream cheese and jam, or just with butter. And since just about everyone I have made this for wants the recipe, I figured it was time to type it up.

The original recipe calls for "3 tsp ground aniseed and fennel" and it is unclear to me whether they meant 3 tsp mixed or 3 tsp each. I like the spice to stand up and be noticed, so I use about 2 tablespoons of each. Play with it yourself. The only other caveat is the pan: I happen to have a 2 liter loaf pan, which is what is called for in the recipe. If you use smaller pans, you’ll have to keep checking for doneness, and I have no idea how long smaller loaves would take. In my pan, 1 hour is perfect. I apologize for the American measurements; I use the stir/scoop/swipe method for measuring flour, and mix it all in my standing mixer.

Swedish Soured Milk Bread
(from In Grandma’s Arbor, by K & M Jonsson)

In a bowl, combine the dry ingredients:
1 ¼ cups rye flour
2 cups all purpose flour
1 ½ teaspoon (tsp) salt
1 to 2 tablespoons ground aniseed
1 to 2 tablespoons fennel seed
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder

In the mixer, mix the wet ingredients:
½ cup molasses
1 ¼ cup buttermilk (soured milk or plain yoghurt will do)
2/3 cup milk

Mix the dry ingredients into the liquid until well combined (don’t over work it); the dough will be sticky. Spread the dough in a greased 2 liter loaf pan, smoothing it out evenly (a greased spoon helps). Place in the middle of a COLD oven, set the temperature for 200 C (400 F) and bake for one hour. Cool in the pan until it comes out easily. Wrap any leftovers in aluminum foil.

Patisserie

2011-03-14T00:41:00.027+04:00

Those of you who know me well know I love to bake. OK, I don’t do it very often in Dubai (have you seen my impractical kitchen? Or my waistline?), but there’s nothing more relaxing than getting out the butter and sugar and whipping something up. And is there anything like the smell of vanilla to lighten a gloomy day?

In Dubai, we do have something in the way of a cooking school: L’Atelier des Chefs at the Meridien has general classes with a slightly French bias, and Chef Gregory gives the occasional pastry class. They’re good fun, but if you are sharing a class with others there’s only so much hands-on you get to do… plus he has prepped everything in advance, so you don’t actually feel as if you’ve done it all yourself. For some things the pre-prep is necessary—the macaron class was only two hours, and it takes longer than that start-to-finish to make three different kinds of macaron. So we made fillings, for example, but some of the fillings we actually ate had been made beforehand. So although I enjoy Gregory’s classes, I’ve done pretty much all of his pastry classes, and it was time for The Big Time.

So I had been searching and searching for a class I could do – about a week long—on my spring vacation. I had planned to do it in Italy, Vienna or maybe Budapest, since they all have excellent pastry traditions; France I shied away from since I speak about six words of French and none of them intelligibly.

Internet searches got me nowhere. Everything was either touring/wine tasting with a casual class thrown in, or going to full-fledged professional pastry school – way, way above my skill, budget and timeframe. Le Cordon Bleu may be very nice, but not at all what I wanted—or indeed, could handle. Scary chefs in toques barking at me in French? I don’t think so.

I was going to settle for a pizza course in Rome or maybe a gelato course in Sorrento when, two days before I HAD to make a decision, the website where I’d found these courses (GoLearnTo) sent me an email saying there was a new pastry course in Bordeaux. It didn’t sound too, too scary-chefs-in-toques – they said I could be taught in English and I really, really wanted to do pastry, so I contacted them. Back and forth over email, then a phone call – they couldn’t take me right after the wedding in Barcelona, but would 9th-13th work? Sure--why not? I figured I could hang out in Paris for a few days. Sign me up.

And that’s how I found myself at a country inn in France, up to my elbows in patisserie.

Le Gargantua is absolutely charming. It’s an 1850’s stone built farmhouse about an hour out of Bordeaux, and chef Marlene and her English husband Marc restored it and built an inn/cooking school out of the barns. They live in the house with their two delightful little girls, a cat on the prowl for tidbits, and the quietest dog I’ve ever met. The rooms are all exposed stone and wooden beams, and very comfortable. The inn’s restaurant is en famille, which means we ate whatever menu was being prepared and everyone sat together – apparently typical at country inns , but a challenge for me, since my French is those six words and my fellow diners (except for the Spanish teacher) didn’t speak English. (Though one evening, they spoke to me in French and I answered in a mix of Italian and English, so we did all right.) However, Marc and/or Marlene generally joined us for dessert at least and they kept conversation going and translated where necessary. Marc did most of the day-to-day cooking, and I would say it’s a brave Englishman who will cook in France, but his food was superb! Parsnips? Cauliflower? Pate? Goat cheese? Quiche? ME?? But the pureed vegetable soup I got for lunch one day was absolutely delicious, as was the cauliflower and potato soup we had for a starter one night. I even gladly ate the goat cheese and honey salad, and asked for the recipe. (My Goat will love this). I would hold up any of the meals I had here against anything produced by the scary-chefs-in-toques in Paris. Pork with prunes, Toulouse sausage and endive, onion tart, daube en croute, duck l’orange with potatoes and broccoli (!), and on and on… French country food is lovely.

And the pastry? Ooh la la! Marlene called me before the class to ask if there was anything I particularly wanted to work on. I’m not a rank beginner, but I’ve always felt hopeless with a pastry bag and nothing I make is ever ‘pretty’, although it tastes good. So, of course, she designed my classes around pastry bags (Religieuse au chocolat and Paris-Brest) and doing things that were pretty (mille feuille, white & dark chocolate mousse cake, etc). And – quelle horreur!—she told me that the results of my class would be served in the restaurant that night. Nothing like knowing you are going to have scary French people eat your French desserts to make you pay very close attention to what you’re doing!

And I did pay attention. And took copious notes. Not that anything was actually that difficult in the end. So far from the scary-chefs-in-toques I was dreading, cooking with Marlene was like cooking with a good friend who knows lots more than you do and is willing to share all the secrets. Is the mousse for the bavarois aux fraises a little bland? Easy to fix: put a scoop in another bowl, add a flavoring, mix it in well, and then fold that back into the main mousse. Egg whites won’t whip up enough? A bit of lemon juice does the trick. She showed me all those things that books never tell you which can only be learned by experience. And did I get experience!

In four days of cooking, I made eight complete recipes. The first day we had a tasting from a professional bakery, so I would know what the finished products should look and taste like, followed by my first cooking session (pate choux), but the other days had two sessions each (though we ditched Tarte Tatin so I could go shopping for supplies to take back to Dubai). I came to cook, and we cooked! And I learned so much. The choices Marlene made when designing my course gave me a broad range of techniques to work on. Although I had had some experience of most of the techniques, Marlene could tell me how and why something worked (or wouldn’t work) and let me in on those little secrets that make such a difference. And doing all the fiddly bits of putting it all together is what really made it shine. I did the work (she mostly supervised and measured, and demonstrated new techniques before handing it back over to me), so I could look at the lovely results and think “I did that…and I know how it all works now so I can do it again.”

And as you can see by the pictures, I think it was a roaring a success! I got honest to goodness compliments all round, and some of the inn’s customers actually had seconds on dessert. Maybe I couldn't understand all the words, but I could see the smiles. I had a super time, and am leaving with a lot more confidence in my cooking than I started with. Now if I practice up on these skills, maybe next year I can get Marlene to teach me sugar skills. From cream puffs to Croquemboche with cracked caramel... Mmmmmm...

Communication

2011-03-10T02:22:00.006+04:00

Being a language teacher, I should be good at foreign languages, one would think. I’ve lived nearly half my life in non-English speaking countries and have visited countless more – surely I’d pick up languages easily, right?

Wrong. I’m hopeless. But, being a language teacher, I generally manage to communicate pretty well, even if I have little or no common language with my interlocutor. As long as everyone is willing to try, I usually do all right.

So I’ve been in France for the past few days, and struggling along with bits of the language, but even when I thought I was doing all right with the words, the communication hasn’t always been there. For example, when the hotel clerk told me that getting to Montparnasse was “Tres easy. A few minutes by metro,” it was logical for me to think ‘a few minutes’ was 10 or 15, wasn’t it? When I got there 40 minutes later and 10 minutes after my train had left, I looked around at the vast number of confusing directional signs and managed to follow one that seemed to point to the information window. “Bon Jour, Madame” says I “Parlez vous Anglais?” “Un peu,” quoth she. Oh good. So I started speaking, then realized a few seconds later that I was not actually communicating anything to her. So I tried again. I pointed to my reservation time, made a sad face, and shrugged a Gallic “what to do?” shrug at her. She understood, and fixed me up with the next train to Bordeaux. “Merci.”

From Bordeaux, I had to catch the 16:14 to Tonneins, an hour down the line. This meant another ticket. Following signs similar to the ones that had worked for me at Montparnasse, I dragged my suitcase up a flight of stairs and found another clerk in another window. “Bon Jour, Madame. Parlez vous Anglais?” “Un peu”. Uh-huh. Here we go again. This one spoke enough English to tell me it was not her desk. I must go “Left, and how you say? Under?” “Downstairs?” “Oui, don der stairs for billet.” “Merci.”

So I dragged the suitcase back down the flight of stairs I had just dragged it up and looked for “billet”. Found an arrow. Went that way. Dead end. Went back. Saw another sign: “Information. Billet” in the other direction. Followed that. And found a machine. In French.

OK, I thought, I can do this. It’s logical. Ticket machines all work the same way. And indeed it did. Until I got to the payment part. Fifteen euro. Fine. Out comes my trusty Visa card, in it goes and I’m told to take it out again. OK. Then a violent stream of French words flashes across the screen and I’m told I have one minute (I think). For what? I quickly enter my PIN. Nothing. It bounces me back to the entry screen. No ticket. Did it charge my card? I wait for the telephone bleep from HSBC. Nothing. I try again. Same story. I try it in a different direction. Nope. I try my gold MC, and then my US Visa. Nothing. Great. Bloody machine won’t take my foreign credit cards. Merci.

Cash? Ha! Coins only. Who carries 15 euro around in change? I could not face dragging that suitcase back up the stairs to try to find some change, so I left the building and walked up the ramp and saw a little luncheonette across the street. Great. Maybe he’ll have change. “Bon jour, Monsieur. Parlez vous Anglais?” “Un peu.” Super. “I’m trying to buy a ticket in that machine but…” No communication here, either. So I get out my wallet and change purse, point to the station and myself and say “ I want to buy une billet, but…” “No, no. No billet” “Oui, oui – non! Ummmm….” Embarrassed giggle. Deep breath. On with the pantomime. I start pointing at the station: “Une billet pour moi. Machine pour billet. Oui. Euro fifteen -- quinze – But…” and I pulled out my charge cards “Etats Unis Visa – non! Etats unis MC –Non!” And I tugged my hair and made that frustrated growling sound you do. He laughed. I pulled out a ten and a five. “Euro quinze –non!” And then held up and shook my change purse “Euro quinze -- Oui!” And then spilled my measly three and a half euro in change onto his counter. “Euro trois.” Sad face, plus Gallic shrug; then breaking into English: “It only takes coins and I don’t have enough. Can you change this?” and I held up the bills with a bit more of that very useful sad face. He (and by now his buddies who had gathered around) grinned broadly at the lunatic, but took my bills and came back with a handful of coins. “Merci!! Merci monsieur, tres gentile – you are very kind.” And my suitcase and I trotted back to the station. I waved. “Merci!”

I poured my change into that foul, xenophobic ticket machine (and did an air punch, since I knew they were watching), grabbed my precious ticket, and proceeded to drag my bag back up the stairs to look for the train. I went past the first desk I’d asked at and learned yet again that language does not always mean communication, and “Un peu Anglais” should never be trusted. Because had I turned RIGHT out of the office instead of left, I would have eventually run smack into the main part of the station, with a lovely escalator to take me and my bag downstairs to a ticket plaza, complete with real people selling tickets from booths, two of which had British flags displayed in their windows – which is French for “I speak more English than just un peu.”

Mercy.

Baguenauder

2011-03-08T16:30:00.003+04:00

There seems to be a new thing in thievery in Paris these days. I was walking in the Place du Concorde and not once but TWICE someone pretended to have picked up something valuable from the street and insist that I had dropped it. One was (I think) an earring and the other was a gold ring. I didn’t stop for the first person (I was on the phone) but the second managed to engage me long enough for me to see she earnestly felt that the ring she'd “found” should be mine. She seemed surprised that I didn’t claim it. For the few seconds we were talking, I was looking for her accomplice and wondering why I looked like an easy mark – my bag was across my chest and underneath my coat, and I was resting one hand through the upper loop of it. Perhaps it was my big, breezy coat that looked easy to search through? There was nothing in my pockets anyway. And I did not see anyone near us, either, so I’m not quite sure what her game was. Perhaps the trick was to hope a greedy person took the bait and then loudly complain to the police that she’d been robbed, maybe ‘proving’ the ring was hers by an inscription in it? I have no idea what it was all about.

Still, my amble through the pricey district of Paris was amusing. I kept looking in the windows of the jewelry stores and designer boutiques on the Champs Elysee and thinking “the price of that watch would fund my entire Japanese bath in the Cyprus house” or “I could have hand-made kitchen cabinets for the cost of that rather ugly ring” or “Who would spend that kind of money on a trendy coat that will last a season when the same amount could put in an entire orange grove that will last years?” I somehow seem to have acquired distinctly middle-aged values somewhere along the way.

Even so, there is no place like Paris for sheer indulgence. In my perambulations about town, I have been making a minor study of patisseries and Salons de Thè in preparation for the course I’m about to embark on tomorrow. I have decided that I could never tire of eating macarons or brioche, though the very pretty chocolate desserts are frankly too rich for me. Pastry cream, praline and fruit seem to be much more the thing. And of course I’ve had both brioche and croissant everyday for breakfast this week. Delightful. But in peering through café windows around town, I was amazed to see how many seemed to offer tarte tatin and crème brulee as the only sweets on the menu. And the desserts and pastries some displayed next to their several-thousand-dollar barista machines weren’t even tempting to look at through the windows. I can’t understand how so many in a city renowned for its desserts can have such world-weary offerings. Paul, which is a café chain (!) had some lovely things, and tea at Dalloyau was indeed splendid. But elsewhere? Disappointingly mediocre.

I am interested to see what the Chef has planned for me this week. I left the content of the course up to her, though I did mention that mille feuilles would be nice to be able to make. I just want some time in the kitchen with someone who really knows how it all works and can give me a good foundation to go on and create on my own. Pastry is so very delicious to work with, and though I’m not supposed to eat it, I can always give it away. My colleagues will be very glad of a Cake Fairy in the staff room, I have no doubt. Meanwhile, the Musee d’Orsay and the tea rooms of the Left Bank await my last day in Paris. À bientôt.

Upupa epops

2008-05-12T18:28:00.008+04:00

My dear, indulgent husband agreed to let the new gardener put a lawn in over the dust bowl that was the backyard of the Crumbling Villa. It’s thriving, and I love it. We had originally intended to have a desert garden -- cacti and aloes and various plants that need little water -- but between the last gardener watering the cacti to death and the neighborhood cats deciding the sand box was a perfect, well, sand box, we decided to go a bit more conventional. Or rather, I decided, and he didn’t object. Well, not until he saw the first water bill.

Our new gardener a bit of a madman. He’s Afghani, I think, and speaks about six words of English; however, he has a brother who speaks a bit more, and we manage to communicate more or less. His jaw dropped at the sight of his new charge. I think he expected we “English” to have a veritable forest in the back garden, and was shocked by the desolation of the dust bowl. Indeed, our few scrubby aloes weren’t terribly impressive.

The first thing he wanted to do was carpet the yard with camel dung (or whatever the foul smelling stuff they use here is) and put down sod. We let him. Who was I to argue (and how?)? Besides, without the sand box, the nasty neighborhood cats might find another toilet-cum-bordello to hang out in. Bonus. Once the lawn was in, the gardener decided we needed flowers along the borders. He ignored the spiky plants that were already there and merrily stuck in purple and white petunias. Very cheery for a month, but then they started frying in the sun and smelled worse than the cats or the camel dung. He moved on to some brightly colored, rather ugly zinnia-type-things that grow way too high and attract bees and gnats. At least most of the cats stay away.

But the bit I love is the grass. I know it’s silly to want to grow grass in the desert. I know I should be concerned about the atrocious wastefulness of keeping a garden green during the 45C+ heat of the summer in the middle of a desert. I also know that the Crumbling Villa came with two trees that are perfect for hanging a hammock between, so I’ve got my grass. It’s marvelous to run my toes through. Even the Grumpy One joins me under the trees when the evening is cool enough, so he doesn’t dare complain (much). And the cats don’t like it nearly as much as the sand, so most have moved on to other, drier gardens. Bonus.

Friday morning I was making breakfast (which I do from time to time) and went to the sink to wash up a couple of dishes (which I do somewhat less frequently). I looked out of the kitchen window to enjoy the newly mown lawn and saw this lovely fellow strutting up and down and flexing his wings, looking for all the world like he owned the place. I was wildly excited to think that something so rare and exotic had been drawn to my precious lawn, and nearly burned the sausages gawping at him.

I made the Goat get his camera and take photos of it so I could ask the Natural History Society people whether they’d ever seen such a magnificent bird, only to find when I proudly showed them the pictures that my rare, exotic treasure is as common as muck, at least around here. So common, in fact, that Upupa epops, or the hoopoe (as he is called) was the bird that the Queen of Sheba (which is right next door) sent to chat with King Solomon in the Koran,according to my students. Kind of the messenger pigeon of his day, I suppose.

Still it would be nice if this little hoopoe moved in. Perhaps he will if we can keep the last of the neighborhood cats out of the yard. I wonder what the Pashtu is for "Go ahead and turn the hose on the cats if you want to"?

Mayfair

2008-03-25T20:37:00.002+04:00

Mme Cyn has never been much of a drinker. I rarely drink and don’t care for drunkenness, which, I confess, can make socializing difficult in this town. Everybody seems to drink to excess around here, and I get odd looks when I spend an evening in a bar drinking nothing but softies. Never mind zero tolerance for drunk driving and having to get up to teach in the morning. Everybody boozes around here. But I digress.

At college parties, I was usually the one who kept the car keys and made sure everyone else got home and safely poured into bed. In spite of growing up among the vino imbibing Italians, I rarely even drink wine with dinner (unless it’s champagne of course—Veuve Cliquot is my secret vice), preferring water or (I can see you wince) diet Pepsi. However, in spite of what may appear to some as my generally appalling taste in beverages, I firmly maintain that one of the great joys in this life is a good cocktail.

Neither of my parents ever did much in the way of cocktail drinking, even in the cocktail-swilling, samba dancing 1960s, but I do remember being offered cocktails by my father on special occasions at the age of seven or eight. Of course, my cocktail at that age was a Shirley Temple (grenadine and ginger ale with a cherry and slice of lemon) or a Roy Rogers (the same, but with Coke). As far as I was concerned, they were real cocktails – fizzy, sweet, and served icy cold in a Manhattan glass. I graduated to sloe gin fizzes (sloe gin and 7Up) at about twelve, when it was deemed I should learn how to hold liquor (we were amongst the vino imbibing Italians at that time), but they were still pretty mild. Even so, they were special. I have been known to order the occasional ST even now, when I’m the designated driver, though I generally have to explain to the bartenders how it’s made.

As far as I’m concerned, cocktails fall into two categories: Aperitifs and Restoratives. Viewed as a first course at dinner, I like my cocktails dry; that hard shot of really top quality alcohol whets the appetite, and ought to be drunk very quickly. After work or instead of dinner, I like my cocktails sweet. Sweet, cold and sipped slowly. The purists would say I’m unsophisticated; I say bollocks to them. Sunset in the hammock with a sweet cocktail is the perfect way to restore a bad temper after a long day yelling at the binat. I am determined to do it more often.

So I recently went to the new Raffles Hotel Dubai with a friend in search of a Singapore Sling. We found one. She was not impressed, and thought the sling in the Singapore Raffles was better. Not having been there I couldn’t compare, but I found it a bit dry for my taste. I think anything pink containing cherry Heering ought to be sweet, and have always thought of Singapore slings as sweet by definition. However, if Raffles Hotel doesn’t know how to get it right, then no one does. I found instead something they’ve invented called a “Dubai Sling” Sounded awfully gimmicky, but I thought it was worth a shot anyway. As far as I can tell, instead of a cherry fruit theme, it’s based on syrup of figs. Surprisingly good. I will have to go back, get the ingredients off the menu, and try to concoct it in my kitchen.

My current cocktail of choice is the Mayfair. I found it in a cocktail book put out by the Savoy Hotel in London, and I must say that, sweet or dry, it does not disappoint. So, in my campaign to get people away from boring old G&Ts or the trendy Caipirinha and into something a bit more interesting… herewith, the Mayfair, as made at the American Bar, Savoy Hotel, London:

2 parts London gin
1 part apricot brandy
1 part orange juice
dash of clove syrup.

Or, my own sweet version:

1 part Bombay Sapphire or Plymouth gin
1 part apricot brandy
2 parts orange juice
1 coffee-spoon of clove syrup

Either way, shake it vigorously with ice and strain. Share it with your husband only if he’s had a worse day than you have.

Tagged!

2008-02-21T18:50:00.005+04:00

I’ve been tagged by the Goat. So here’s the game:

1. Pick up the nearest book of at least 123 pages.

The Floating Brothel by Siân Rees The extraordinary true story of an 18th century ship and its cargo of female convicts.

2. Open the book to page 123 and quote the fifth sentence.
“With nothing in the way of detergent, the dirt was boiled and then beaten out of the linen.”

3. Post the next three sentences.
“Stripped to the minimum required by decency, the women did the washing. The top deck trembled as rows of them, up and down the waist of the ship, thwacked its timbers with shirts, shifts, sheets, hammocks, trews, and a vast pile of sanitary napkins. Rivulets of filthy water trickled down the sides.”

I must add that this is a fascinating history of one of the first shiploads of female convicts (1789) sent out to Sydney Harbor to help populate the new colony. Rees gives individual stories of these women--from their crimes and trials, to their prison sentences, to their transportation -- and the ship's voyage from Portsmouth to Rio to Cape Town to Australia. Meticulously researched and unputdownable.

4. Tag five people.

KSA Woodchuck
Little Yellow Duck
TM
TGL
Koos
(Non-bloggers can respond here!)

Parochial

2008-02-18T01:04:00.009+04:00

You hear all this talk about “globalization” and the world being “a smaller place.” Everything is international this and global that. First air travel shrank the globe, and now the internet has made distances between people and places virtually nonexistent. Yes, with the internet, you have information at your fingertips 24/7. You can get instant weather, news, or opinions from all over the world, in a myriad of languages. Best of all, in cyberspace you can buy all of those things from all of those places that perhaps you only dreamed of visiting in the real world. And all through the miracle that is the internet.

Yeah, right. Unless the company you want to buy from is in America and you live somewhere else.

I am an American abroad, but an American nonetheless, with an American bank account, an American credit card, and even an American mailing address. So why is it that, for most of the US sites I want to shop from, my billing address being in the Middle East is a huge problem?

In the past week, I have made or tried to make on-line orders from four different companies. The only one that never has a problem with me is Amazon.com, which always merrily takes my money and sends me my goods no matter where I want them sent or which international credit card I use. Amazon wlll sell to anybody.

So what about the rest of the websites I try to buy from? Oh. Well. Sometimes I get websites where the billing and shipping addresses must be the same (I guess there’s no buying a surprise present for someone else from those sites). Sometimes I’m forced to provide a fake zip/postal code, because Americans simply cannot fathom a country that doesn’t use zip codes. (I wonder what would happen if I told them we don’t have street addresses either?) And sometimes I run into a truly hopeless situation where I want something that has to be paid for through Pay Pal, which apparently doesn’t recognize any place outside Canada or the US. On-line ordering from abroad is a messy, mixed bag.

But I digress. As I said, this week I did a lot of on-line shopping. It was a maddening experience. OK, in the end I got what I wanted, so why am I so steamed? Just let me tell you a story…

I wanted to buy a hundred bucks worth of sugar-free chocolates from a major US chocolatier -- with a US credit card, delivered to a US address. Not the biggest order they ever got, but not chump change, either. Their on-line form only allowed US or Canadian billing addresses.

I keep running into that or, even better, a website that has a button for “international orders” that isn’t really. Case in point: I tried to order some lingerie on line two days ago. Nothing scandalous – silk slips, as a matter of fact –and the website listed an option for international addresses. Good. I duly chose my goods, filled in my shipping and billing addresses, and hit “international”. I was given a drop down pick list. Which included Canada, Bermuda, Japan, Germany and not much else. This is international?

Again I digress. I phoned the chocolate company, since person-to-person usually gets results (it did with my slips). This time, however, I get this guy on the line. I briefly explain my problem. He laboriously takes my order and shipping address, and then we get to the billing address:

“Oh, I can’t put that country on the form.”

“Yes, I know that,” I reply politely. “As I said, that’s why I didn’t just order on line.”

And instead spent seventeen minutes on long-distance to put in an order by phone, I mentally added.

“Your billing address has to go on the form.”

“Surely you can type in any country you like there in the office?”

“No, it has to go on the form. It’s not a choice.”

“It’s an American card and a US shipping address – it’s just that I live in the Persian Gulf and that’s where my bank statement goes. Surely you only need the billing address so you can call my bank and they can tell you I'm legit? They've known me since I was twelve.”

“Well, it’s not on my form.”

“Please let me speak to your supervisor.”

So I go back on hold and eventually get the supervisor, who says:

“I’m sorry, ma’am, but I can’t take your order if I can’t fill in your billing address. We could take down your order and hold it until we get a check —in US dollars, of course.”

Now, it’s hard enough that I live in a place where I cannot just go down to the mall and pick up what I want (in spite of this place being a so-called shopper’s paradise), and that I have to pay a premium to get what I want express-delivered because I cannot trust the local postal service, but really – I can’t place an order for goods because I get my bank statements in Dubai instead of in West Podunk, USA? Still, I was desperate for decent sugar free chocolates.

I had to ask my Mommy in North Carolina to pay for them.

The US purports to be the world leader in information processing. So when will companies located there finally get it into their tiny minds that there is a whole world out there eager to buy their products? We are not big, bad, scary, un-American entities – we’re customers. Or would be, if the American on-line companies weren’t so damned parochial.

Gardener

2008-01-17T09:50:00.000+04:00

Dubai has been under several inches of water the last few days. Feet, in some places. Oh, it happens just about every year, and it really isn’t all that much rain, but when the Powers That Be do not see fit to dredge the sand out of the road drainage system during the dry season (or a least keep the curbside drainage covers rotated so that sand doesn’t blow into and fill them all year), everything gets soaked and flooded when it rains. And it's not just the roads. A new shopping mall has had a roof collapse, and I’ve been told that a fairly new building of my acquaintance again has foul water seeping through the ceilings and running down the inside of the walls… I seem to recall the same problems with leaks in that roof last year around this time. Poor planning, materials and construction, anyone? So we’ve had two days of swimming pools all over town. And not pleasant ones, either. Apparently in the Greens Community, ground-floor dwellers are up to their ankles in backed-up sewage in their own living rooms. Of course, that’s not the city’s problem. According to the local rag, the Greens is private property and therefore a private problem. And people keep asking me why I don’t buy property in this country.

My own little patch of Dubai has been impassable in anything but a 4x4 until this morning. I had to take a friend to the hospital for surgery at the crack of dawn Tuesday and did manage to get her there, but just. It took forever to traverse the roads home during the rush hour, of course, since people here seem to be totally incapable of dealing with rain on the roads (oh,wait – aren’t most of the drivers in this town from the Indian subcontinent? Do they stay at home during monsoons? And don’t tell me it never rains in England (US/EU/AU/CN/NZ/SA) either). By the time I finally did get home, Mirdif was completely awash and my little sports car had to retire from service. It only got into the driveway via the not-yet-swamped sidewalk. Good thing it's a broad sidewalk.

So loads of people have not been at work, including the man who takes care of my garden, whom I have been trying to get rid of for some time. Fair enough him not being here this week – my garden has been six inches under water, and the succulents have begun to rot in the damp. Not much for him to do this week, since what he mainly does is water the bougainvillea and rake the dust.

No, we’re cutting him loose because manages to kill plants with some regularity. He is also uninterested in washing the cars (for which I'm happy to pay extra), feels that the brick path “is not garden” and therefore does not need to be swept or tidied of fallen leaves or pigeon poo, and I think he thinks the rampant weeds look “pretty and green”. I confess I did not really want to have to fire him. He (or rather his brother's firm) had come recommended by a friend. I thought he needed a chance, and I had hoped at first that a few hints and instructions--whenever I could find him to talk to -- would sort him out. Of course, conversations that go:

"Why have you left that plant to grow out of the middle of that aloe vera?"
"Oh very good plant, madam! Smells nice!"
"Ah, yes. It's basil. Then shouldn’t you dig it up and move it out of the cactuses? And surely it will die in the direct sunlight."
"No,no. Nice plant."

should have given even me a clue that this was not the gardener for us. Still, I hated to put the man out of a job. But the Goat (who has less tolerance (or is less of a wuss) than I) finally got totally fed up found another man who would do what we wanted done, so that was that. Since I’m the one likely to be here when the gardener comes for his ten minutes a day, the job of getting rid of him fell to me. And I’ve been dreading it. I hate confrontation, and always want to give people the benefit of the doubt and as much help and time as they need to straighten themselves out. Somehow "it just isn't working out" doesn't seem a good enough reason to fire someone. I know, I know. Others in my place might rant and scream and hurl abuse, so "I'm sorry, but" is mild. Still.

I was wondering just how I was going to put it when and if I ever managed to catch him in person, when I heard a sneeze in the back garden around 8:30 this morning. Ah! The gardener! I went out to do the deed and pay him out the month, trying to think of a kind and gentle way of letting him go as I waded through the last of the puddles.

The man was actually watering the cactuses. Firing him was surprisingly easy.

Grève

2007-11-17T22:32:00.001+04:00

I finally get to Paris, and they've gone on strike. Wretched French. Were it just me I wouldn't mind so much, but I have an Aged Parent with me, and she's not a great walker. We had thought to do Paris mainly by Metro and taxi, but with the strike, the Metro isn't running and empty taxis are nowhere to be found. We took a three mile trip from the Eiffel Tower (which was splendid) to our hotel at Gard du Nord (which was chosen for its convenience to public transportation!!) and not only did it cost us 50 euro and nearly two hours, but we ended up walking the last four blocks to boot.

We also thought of taking the hop on/hop off tour bus to get us to the sights and so gave that a whirl. Great idea in theory, lousy in practice. The "30 minutes max" buses took a good hour or more sometimes because they were caught in the same gridlock as the taxis and commuters.

Plus, the museums are closing early or are partly closed because of the strike. I went back to the Louvre specifically to do the second floor (I had done the first one the day before) and only after I bought my ticket did I discover that the second floor was closed because of the strike. No staff. The Musee d'Orsay closed two hours early so staff could get home... so I saw practically nothing, because it was late afternoon by the time we got there. I am Cross and Annoyed of course, but what can one do? C'est la vie.

I will say this, though -- the Aged Parent is a very good sport. She's got her stout boots and her cane and she's giving it her best shot. And doing all right, I might add. Slow, but steady. And the stick is a great help to us both -- I got an off-duty taxi driver to take us up by waving it at him and pleading pathetically in bad French and hand gestures. Hey, if you've got it, use it. C'est la guerre.

The trip is not a total bust, though. When we do get a taxi they take the round-about ways that are most likely to avoid the worst of the traffic, so we get a great tour of Paris' streets. We've also ducked into some fine places and sat on some swell benches in odd places so that Mother can have a rest. The Parisians are amazingly, unexpectedly, nice. My bad French is taken in good part, and they are happy to speak slowly to me in a cross of French and English ... yes, I feel like a half-wit, but I'm managing to get around all right. I can even crack jokes with the cabbies. The evening I sent mother home and stayed to see the Louvre again, I walked the two or so miles back and had a splendid jog through town -- I felt perfectly safe and rather enjoyed it. And of course with transport being as it is, I've been treated to the spectacle of grandmas on bicycles and businessmen in suits and roller blades... where else could you see such a sight? C'est la grève.

So I'm going to try to extend my stay by a few days. They say the strke will be over on Tuesday, so if I hang out a few more days I may get to see some of the more outlying parts of the city. Wish me luck -- can't get hold of the airline, since the office is closed until Monday. Probably, like everything else, due to the strike.

Sir Richard Branson Owes Me

2007-08-21T15:33:00.000+04:00

The Goat and I flew into Dulles Airport from Dubai last Thursday night for our wedding weekend. After giving up hope that I would ever marry (being solidly middle aged), 26 of our dearest friends and family came from all over (London, Calgary, North Carolina, California, Connecticut, Florida, Michigan, Boston) to enjoy a social, sightseeing weekend in Washington DC and a lovely wedding. The weekend was brilliant, and everyone had a marvelous time. Except the bride.

Nerves? No. He's the man for me, and my mother had done a beautiful job planning the weekend, with my sister in law and an old family friend bending over backwards to help her make sure that everything was perfect. And it was. People who had nothing in common except the two of us came together and became instant friends. The Morrison House was beautiful, and the food and drink superb. Even the Goat's young nephews were angelic and fun to be with, jetlagged and overwhelmed as they were. Perfect. Except that we arrived on Thursday, got married on Sunday, and it is now Tuesday and no one has any idea where our luggage is.

I spent my wedding weekend frantically trying to get some truth, and my bags, out of Virgin Atlantic Airline instead of tending to my guests. At least I had had the foresight to pack my dress and jewellery and his dinner jacket in our carry-ons, but cabin bag size and content limitations are such that, other than the computer and camera, nothing else would fit. So I haunted the airport (because the airline's phone number left us on hold indefinitely) while the poor Goat and my 72 year old father entertained everyone. Saturday afternoon I was told that a message had come from London that our bags were on the flight that would arrive at 2055, so I relaxed a bit and finally got to spend some quality time with my guests at a huge pre-wedding BBQ my brother and his wife were throwing at their house. I even started to enjoy myself. After all, even though three flights had come from Heathrow between mine and this one, my luggage was still going to be there in time for the wedding and I could still give everyone the gifts I'd brought them from my overseas travels -- you know, the Persian rug I'd bought for my brother's wedding present (missed that event last year), the Indonesian batik for my sister in law, the Thai and Chinese silks I'd bought for various people on the Big Trip, the t-shits and tschotkes I'd picked up for the kids in my travels. These would be there along with everything else, and we would not have to get married in Alexandria's finest hotel barefoot in four-day old shorts and whiffy t-shirts. More fool me.

When I arrived at the airport Saturday night to get my bags (I was not trusting to having them delivered), I was told that they were NOT on the flight after all, and then had to spend the morning of my wedding day (and several hundred dollars) chasing around the shops buying shirt studs, shoes, underwear, a full face of makeup (no liquids in carry on!). place cards, etc etc instead of spending the morning of my wedding day having a massage and mani/pedicure with my girlfriends.

Sir Richard Branson and his bloody airline have a lot to answer for.

Pigeons

2007-08-07T11:17:00.001+04:00

We’ve moved house and have been doing all of the usual domestic things one does when one moves in – putting up shelves, getting rid of the duplicate toasters, microwaves, sets of dishes, etc., buying curtains to keep out the curious glances of the neighborhood– but we’ve had to deal with an additional problem that I don’t believe most people in suburbia usually have to deal with. We’ve got pigeons. Everywhere.

Now I love birds on the whole. I used to have a couple of small parrots, and gave them the run of the living room. David Attenborough’s Life of Birds is one of my all-time favorite series. Songbirds in a bird bath out in the yard or on a feeder in a tree are pleasant to look at and listen to. But a whole flock of pigeons roosting on the roof and nesting in the ventilation/light well outside the bathroom window? No thank you.

For one thing, the incessant cooing wakes you up. For another, the stench is incredible.

I never could tolerate smells very well. I’ve got a sensitive nose. Perfumes make me sneeze, old cooking smells make me retch. If I’ve been in a smoky room, I have to wash my hair as soon as I get home. You know the type. Hyper-nosed. Well, let me tell you… the smell of three or four pigeons raising their families right under the bathroom extractor fan is indescribably awful. There is no other stench quite like it. When I go up in the evening when the air-con has been off all day, I’m assaulted by the malodorous mephitis half way up the stairs.

The poor Goat, being the man of the house, got elected (by me) to deal with the pigeon population, a fact I admit he accepted with good humor (OK, so he knew that if he didn’t volunteer, I would a) never shut up about it and b) call in an expensive exterminator. The way to a Goat’s To Do list is through his checkbook.). Being a planner, the Goat checked out the situation a couple of days ago and found that the little hut on the roof over the light well provides perfect protection from the middle eastern sun, attracting the birds to the shade. The ledges on the bathroom and laundry room windows of our villa and the next made perfect nesting spots. The chicken wire that was supposed to seal the entrance but which, of course, had never been maintained has rusted and rotted away, leaving pigeon-sized access holes. After considering a bit, he determined that the birds had to be chased out of the well and the well closed but not sealed, as we need the air circulation. New chicken wire. There was nothing to be done about the remnants of the pigeon condominium; in the fullness of time, it would dry up and stop smelling up the house. That’s the theory, anyway.

So yesterday, he snapped on his Marigolds and sorted them out. The entire roof was covered in birds – dead and alive – and the droppings up there are an inch thick. Ignoring the rest of the roof for the moment, he tackled the well. No amount of shooing was going to budge those birds, so he picked up some rotten eggs and threw them down at the little terrors. Once they’d all skeddaddled, he quickly sealed up the entrance with fresh, strong chicken wire. Ventilation yes; birds no. The now homeless birds glared at him, no doubt plotting revenge, but we’re bigger than they are, and we pay the rent. Round One to the Goat.

That still left the ‘external’ bird problem – the ones living on the roof (The dead ones I’ll let the gardener sweep up next month). Never satisfied, I wanted them gone, too. Before we moved in I had noticed droppings here and there on the bricks around the house – unpleasant but not too awful. I now know the previous tenant must have cleaned up just before we arrived, because if I don’t shovel out the steps and back porch every couple of days, we’d soon be knee-deep in pigeon poo.

Unfortunately, the pigeons have no desire to leave. The villa has a flat roof with a sort of a turret with a crenellated edge. The spaces between the crenellations are just pigeon-sized, and the birds take full advantage of the comfy quarters. They seem to like to sit nose in and tail out, because the walls down one side of the house are covered in grey and white streaks. And as for the high window on that side – let’s just say that unless something is done, I’m not going to need curtains there to keep out the nosy neighbors. Actually, I don’t think anything can be done. In his roof explorations, the Goat discovered that there is no access whatsoever to the turret from the main roof. Who designs these houses? Round Two to the pigeons.

So now those damn birds just sit there and laugh at us, knowing full well we can’t chase them out. I can almost hear them lording it over me as they continue to ‘decorate’ my house. Maybe I’ll round up a couple of the Mirdif alley cats and toss them on to the turret. That’d ruffle their feathers.

Harry

2007-07-15T14:10:00.000+04:00

All my adult life I have loved children’s fiction, possibly because when I was a child I leaned more toward adult books. My mother, whose nose was never out of a book during my entire childhood, had a library which was always open to me: I remember staying home from school at about age ten to finish reading Jane Eyre; Rebecca had me up all weekend at the same age, cowering under the blankets. My parents’ books were right in front of me, so I read them. My mother never censored what I read (though she didn’t explain anything if it was too sophisticated – I missed all the real fun of James Bond the first time around!), so I read any and every thing that came along. For the most part I liked big thick novels and histories, and kid’s books couldn’t compete. I had read and loved the Anne of Green Gables books and Alice of course, but the books my friends were reading, like Nancy Drew and other lightweight girls’ serials, left me cold. Kids are weird.

So I really came to kid lit like I came to most of the stuff I read – I fell into it. I think it all started in high school or college with The Phantom Tollbooth, which I had picked up off a friend’s bathroom counter. I think her little sister had been reading it. At any rate, I now read anything for children that sounds good... Beatrix Potter, Dr Seuss, Roald Dahl, Cornelia Funke, Diana Wynne Jones, Eoin Colfer, Phillip Pullman, C.S. Lewis, JRR Tolkien… I read it all.

I first heard of Harry Potter shortly after the first book was published. I was on the test-writing team for our English department, and Jane, the testing supervisor, had a recording of a BBC talk show we intended to use as a text in the exam. In it a group was discussing this new book that had all the kids – even boys — reading. It was basically a school story (ooh! like Stalky & Co!) about a boy wizard (Matilda!) and his friends fighting evil. Simple, classic themes. Bubble gum for the brain. Sounded good to me.

And it was. Yes, the characters are often stereotypes, the language can be a bit contrived, and Harry needs a good slap every now and then, but they’ve all been a great day’s read (well, perhaps not Book VI). And here I am, years later, like so many sad anoraks, eagerly awaiting the final installment of the story. So I’ve decided that since all the childless adults in my circle have been sitting over our Starbucks speculating as to the outcome of the saga, I’d put it on the line and publish my predictions for The End of the Story. You can laugh at me next weekend (and probably will) when I prove disastrously wrong, but here goes. You people with real lives can stop reading now.

The Deaths: JK Rowling has stated that two of the main characters will die. At least. Voldemort buys it for sure, but the question is, how and by whom does he get his? In some ways it makes perfect sense for Harry and Voldemort to kill each other in one big bang, but JKR has already shown us what happens when two brother-wands duel; Voldemort isn’t stupid enough to fall into that trap again anyway. Besides, we’re all expecting that. On the other hand, if JKR really doesn’t want to write any sequels, killing off Harry is a sure way to go. Although ‘justice’ would dictate that Harry gets to kill Voldemort, the world is not just, and JKR’s last couple of books have clearly demonstrated that she’s not for the rosy-sunshiney plot lines. Voldemort has to either die or go back into that half-death he’s just come out of because having him win in the end would be just too, too bleak. If he goes, the other Death Eaters will stick around. JKR wouldn’t get rid of all the evil in the world – that would be too sweet. Of course, Voldemort could live and his entire support group get wiped out instead. One way or the other, the Evil has to be dealt a death blow at the end of Book VII.

I would wager that Voldemort will waste Draco Malfoy – cavalierly, with a flick of the wand — but I don’t think Lucius would kill Voldemort over Draco. He might try and then get himself avada kedavra’d, but I don’t think he has such father-feeling. We shall see. Narcissa isn’t a major enough character to kill Voldemort but she would try and she would fail. If my Dumbledore theory is correct (see next section), it’ll be Snape who kills He Who Must Not Be Named.

One of the Three has got to go. If Harry lives, it will be either Hermione or Ron who goes; one will die defending the other. If JKR is ever considering a sequel, she really can’t kill Hermione, who is the most interesting of the three main characters. So it’ll be Ron if it's either. Hagrid could well fall in the crossfire, as could Prof. McGonagle – both will be out there in the front ranks at the last battle. Same with any of the Order of the Phoenix, really. (I’ll cry if she kills off Molly or McGonagle, though.) I think Neville could be instrumental in bringing down Voldemort: he’s my number two pick for final executioner. Harry can’t live while Voldemort does, but the prophecy doesn’t directly say Harry has to kill him himself. Neville will come out of this a hero, but he may have to go down fighting. Ginny, however, won’t die —she’s already been nearly killed off. So has her dad., so there's no fun killing either of them now. So looking at the scoreboard: Voldemort is a yes and so is Draco (on a hunch) and (possibly) one of his parents. Ron or Hermione are possibilities, but not both -- and neither if Harry dies. Neville’s death is a strong possibility, but it will be heroic if it happens. The professors could easily die in the last battle, since the goodies and baddies are so nearly matched magically. Which brings us back to Harry. I confess I wouldn’t miss him, but it seems too pat to have him vaporized in a final duel with Voldemort. He will live, but be destroyed — either in spirit or in mind, like the Longbottoms. He will not come out unscathed, but death? Hmm.

Dumbledore: Sorry, JKR, but I do not buy the idea that Dumbledore was taken in by Severus Snape. Albus Dumbledore was the premier wizard of his day, and he trusted Snape implicitly. It’s nothing to do with justice: I have faith in Dumbledore’s brains. There is a reason he died, even if he never told us what. Snape killing Dumbledore – even if he was obliged to protect Draco through the Unbreakable Vow — just sits wrong. Unless, of course, Dumbledore sacrificed himself for the greater good of getting rid of Voldemort once and for all. By killing Dumbledore, Snape "proves" his loyalty to HWMNBN and so solidifies his own position within the Death Eaters; he can then get at Voldemort from the inside. And that’s where my money is. Snape is able to kill Voldemort because Dumbledore sacrificed himself. It was pre-ordained. Which would have been so like him (I love Albus).

Though how Snape is going to keep the Order from zapping him before he gets to HWMNBN is beyond me. They won’t believe it was a set up. Perhaps Harry finally resolves his relationship with Snape and helps him escape the wrath of the Order? Until Snape killed Dumbledore, I had always thought that he and Harry would call a truce eventually. Snape is too intelligent to hold a grudge against Harry just because he's a snotty kid who had an arrogant father. Not that Snape could be 'redeemed' or made in any way likeable, but I think the "Obsessively Hate Harry" thing has been part of the bigger plan all along. Maybe they kill Voldemort together, and Snape dies in the fight saving Harry. That way Harry lives, Dumbledore's trust is justified, and Snape isn't around anymore so we're not obliged to like him now. Now there's a twist.

Horcruxes: These are interesting. There are seven holding the sundered soul of Voldemort, but where and what they are is beyond me. I’m flummoxed, I confess. We know about the diary, the ring, and the false locket Horcrux that Dumbledore and Harry found in the cave. I think the person who took the real locket Horcrux was Sirius’s little brother Regulus Black, and the locket is among the trash that was cleared out and is now in Kreecher’s nest in the back of the kitchen. I wonder if Regulus is really dead, or if he will show up in Book VII. I’d like that. He could be a major force in Book VII, and if Harry is going to have a happy ending, it should come through Sirius' brother. It has been suggested to me that Harry’s scar or Harry himself might be a Horcrux ( I told you we talk about this over coffee… sad, innit?) but I don’t think so. I think Voldemort would have hidden all seven pieces long before going on his Order-killing rampage. And killing Harry would be a dicey proposition, just in case Harry’s bit was the only piece of soul left. What if he couldn't recapture the piece? So there are four Horcruxes out there. They all will be something symbolic to Voldemort, and they all have to be absolutely secure. Hmmm. Nagini the snake is probably one of them -- it would make sense for one to be a living creature, because the scene where it gets killed and Voldemort watches that bit of his soul float away would be such fun to write. I think Bellatrix LeStrange must have one, since she’s such a delightfully evil character that she needs a bigger part in Book VII. But otherwise –I think at least one is hiding in plain sight, so to speak, and at least one is at Hogwarts. The Horcruxes, clearly, will be a major part of the plot of the Book VII.

So there are my predictions. At 3:01 a.m. this Friday night, I’ll be at the Potter Party at the Mall of the Emirates, buying my copy. I’ve got Saturday off and I’ve arranged not to have any papers to grade, so I shall see how far wrong I am. As will the rest of the world. If indeed I am. So laugh at me all you like, but please – while you’re ridiculing my predictions, please don’t put any spoilers on my comments! I hate to know the ending of a book before I’ve read it myself.

Kitchen

2007-07-05T16:05:00.000+04:00

The Goat and I have decided that it is about time we got married. We had been kind of thinking about it for a while and even talking about it a bit now and then, but the catalyst was, I think, a combination of my abandoning him for a long dive trip (absence making the heart grow fonder and all that) and the sudden exodus of a large portion of my university’s population, leaving several villas halfway between his office and mine empty and in need of tenants. Funny how those necessary nudges in life often come from the oddest places.

We were given our choice of three villas. We were nearly seduced by the practically brand new one with a swimming pool next door, but when the previous tenant told me the rental contract was up in January I dismissed it instantly, knowing full well that the landlord would want to jack up the rent astronomically. The other villa also had a pool, but while we were looking it over a plane headed toward the runway got so close we could have lassoed it from the garden, so we opted out of that one too. That left Villa 46a. It’s spacious (good), run down (bad) and out of the flight path altogether (excellent).

Apart from the fact that it had had a family of about ten living in it for the past nine years – and a landlord who did absolutely no maintenance – Villa 46a wasn’t bad. Filthy and down-at-heels, with crumbling, cracked plaster, chipped and warped doors, scribbled walls, a dust bowl garden, subsiding foundations and pigeons living in the light well, it’s nevertheless a house with possibilities.

Except for the kitchen. Someone, probably as a result of a bad acid trip, had decided to cover the entire place – floors, walls, cupboards – in white tile. Now, I’m very fond of white tile on floors where it belongs, but this looks like an operating room at a cheap hospital. The tile I can deal with. But the rest? The Goat and I fumigated the place last weekend just in case (there were no critters, thank goodness). The upper cabinets are too narrow to put dinner plates in (Ikea will sell us new ones), and the damp has rotted away the ugly brown cabinet doors below (now ripped out and chucked). The cleaning crew and I between us managed to scrape all the stickers off the walls and the overflowed caulking from the leaking windows. However, the pièce de horreur is the oven, which is a built-in mess that hasn’t worked in months. No question but that it needed to come out and be replaced by the Goat’s own very nice cooker.

There are great benefits in marrying an engineer. He sized up the problem, came up with a plan, and got that manky stove out without too much grief. Then, braving the 9+ years of accumulated grease on the white tiles behind the oven, he measured the opening. Eighty-nine centimeters. 89 cm? What kind of a moron leaves an 89 cm gap in a counter? Like most ranges, the Goat’s well-beloved Aga is 90 cm wide. After swearing for a few minutes, he decided we should go shopping for something that would fit. After all, it was likely that the ranges sold as 90 cm were actually not that big, even though his was (yes, he had thought to measure it in advance– aren’t engineers great?). There was a chance we'd get lucky if we looked.

We looked at what felt like a million stoves and discovered that, indeed, the standard 90 cm stoves are not necessarily that wide. But none were as narrow as 89 cm, either. We considered the one 85 cm stove we found, but it wasn't ‘full safety’, so we didn’t buy it (Even though it may deserve it, we don’t want to blow up the house). And then he got the idea that if we chiseled off the tiles, we could gain that extra centimeter and his existing cooker would fit. Brilliant.

It is a very good thing that he went to do this without me. I would have stopped him. I saw him several hours after he’d started the job, fingers bound in band aids. From the look of the damage done by the slipped chisel and the amount of blood on the floor, he should have had stitches. Being male, however, he pooh-poohed that idea. Had I known it was going to be so difficult, I’d have suggested we just leave the gaping hole in the counter and cook over an open fire in the backyard.

He finished the chiseling yesterday while the crew cleaned and I took apart cupboard doors, and then I helped him put the sealant over the now-exposed concrete (OK, he sealed; I cleaned up the mess). And lo and behold – the gap is now 90.3 cm.

We go shopping for the new upper cupboards and cupboard doors tonight. We think the standard doors will fit. God help us if they don't.

Sugar

2007-05-05T22:42:00.000+04:00

Mme Cyn has been doing rather well on her quest to become more Venus de Milo than Venus of Willendorf, but she does not find it easy. One of the things she has taken strictly off her list is sugar, and yet she suffers from a terrible sweet tooth. However, she has a rather small frock she wants to get into, so she has persevered.

Now, I have been very faithful – doing the exercises, swimming (nearly) everyday, hanging up the small frock on the closet door, and being extremely careful about whatever I put into my mouth. But still I need the occasional treat (as one does), and was delighted to find that my local supermarket carried Unikal’s Royal Treat Sugar-Free ice cream bar with chocolate and almonds. “How delightful!” I thought, and picked one up. Right on the front panel, next to the picture of a luscious, almond-studded, chocolate-coated ice cream bar was "Sugar Free" in big red letters. In smaller letters below the picture were the words “low fat” and “no added sugar”. Ah, not quite sugar free then. Fair enough – ice cream cannot be totally sugar free anyway, since milk and cream contain lactose. But as I am permitted a small amount of lactose in my diet and I’d certainly deserved a little something nice, I thought nothing of it.

So standing in line to check out, I happily unwrapped said bar, chuckling gleefully that I was about to have my first bite of ice cream in a terribly long time (Yes, I know it's rude to eat in the checkout line, but surely I couldn't just let it melt?). I bit into it. Not bad. Rather nice. It wasn’t quite as almond-studded as I’d been led to believe, but that was all right. A little false advertising can be forgiven. And then I started to read the ingredients list on the bottom of the packet. A big fat lie cannot be forgiven.

For down in the middle of the list of ingredients in this “sugar free” treat were the two little words fructose and glucose. High school chemistry was quite some time ago, but I can remember that these are monosaccharides, i.e. simple sugars. This was in addition to the naturally occurring lactose, of course, as neither chocolate nor almonds contain sugars, and if they did, they are merely trace amounts and would not have been listed separately. Sounds like added sugar to me.

Oh, wait. Perhaps what the manufacturers had meant to say was that there was no sucrose added; sucrose being the chemical name for sugar.

Sucrose per se was indeed absent from the list. However, as anyone who did high school chemistry and did all right in it can tell you, sucrose is a disaccharide, made up of – wait for it – fructose and glucose. So what, then, does “sugar free” mean to these people? That they will add sugar at no extra cost?

Unikal in Sharjah is going to get a terse little letter from a very cross and annoyed Mme Cyn. I was all set to enjoy a lovely choc ice and instead had to feed it to the Goat.

Jiggettyjig

2007-04-24T15:15:00.000+04:00

Home again, home again. After 49 days of pure, indulgent vacation (some of it luxurious, some of it less so), I'm back at school. Everyone is remarking on how rested and relaxed I look, which well I should as I've just had my summer break. However, I've got first-term-of-the-year energy in a last-term-of-the-year environment. I'm surrounded by grumpy, burnt-out stress puppies, so we'll see how long the beachbum glow lasts.

The odd thing about taking a vacation in the 'wrong' term is that the university goes on without you. It's amazing what I've missed in ten short weeks. Changes in the cafeteria, the departmental paperwork, the recordkeeping procedures... "When did that happen?" has been on my lips a lot the past few days.

There has been one rather unusual, truly unexpected change. The university now has a ... (wait for it)... nail salon! Manicures, pedicures, massage and reflexology on tap, right above the cafeteria. My first response was righteous indignation: "How ridiculous and sexist! These women are supposed to be studying, not playing Barbie!" And then I thought a moment. The girls who spend their time in the library will still be there. The ones who spend their time gossiping in the cafeteria might as well do their gossiping while they're getting their nails done, and then at least something useful gets accomplished. Besides, it also means that I can get a pedicure every week without having to fight through traffic to get to a salon.

And this could be the answer to the last-term grumps. Maybe those burnt-out stress puppies I work with should go and get their feet massaged. It always works for me.

Detour

2007-04-10T18:26:00.000+04:00

Day 46 After six weeks and sixty two dives, I found myself getting on a plane again: not for another dive resort, but for Hong Kong. Don’t get me wrong – there’s lots more of the Philippines I want to dive, but I’ll save it for another time. Sometimes a girl just wants to shop, and I figured since it was so close (and cheap!) and I hadn’t been since HK since it went Chinese again, I might as well make a quick hop over to the New Territories.

It is so great to be in a proper city again! I can’t remember the last time I was in a truly cosmopolitan city. Dubai pretends, but it just doesn’t cut it. In Hong Kong, everyone bustles, everyone’s busy, everyone’s on the street. It has a huge, busy business district and vast shopping areas where you can find just about anything you want (not an underwater flash for a Sony T-series, but then nobody dives here). There are museums, parks, sights and a highly efficient public transportation system – Dubai, take note: Hong Kong was also run by the British at one point in time and look where it is now!

My first day was spent in Ocean Park, which is an aquarium/amusement park in the Causeway Bay area. I had intended to stay only for the morning, but was having such a good time I spent the day. Ocean Park’s “Atoll Reef” aquarium is stunning. I’ve seen many of the fish while diving, of course, but not so many all at once. I debated going to the dolphin and sea lion show as I don’t really approve of them, but went anyway. It was well-done, too. I wrapped up the day with a cable car ride to the lower section of the park and then a hot air balloon ride (OK, it was tethered, but still) to finish off. Then off to Sogo Hong Kong.

The Japanese department store chain, Sogo, has (IMHO) the best department stores on the planet, and the Hong Kong Branch did not disappoint. Who wouldn't love a department store with sixteen floors! Of course, HK Sogo is one department store among many… Dubai, which claims to be a shopping mecca, doesn’t even have a decent department store (Harvey Nichols isn't bad, but it's tiny). Hong Kong has dozens. Again, Dubai, take note! HK days two and three were spent walking the length of Nathan Road and environs and trawling the shops, "depaatos" and holes-in-the-wall, plus a couple of markets for good measure. Suffice it to say that my Christmas shopping is done and I am going to have to pay horrendous excess baggage on the airlines.

Tomorrow, it’s off to the museums and maybe a temple. And then home.

Piscine

2007-04-06T10:45:00.000+04:00

Day 42. Here are some fish. Yes, fish. None of those almond-and-triangle shaped things you drew when you were a kid. These are serious fish.

This is a frogfish. They’re angler fish and tend to stay more or less in one place, though we did see one swimming. (If this link works, then here’s a video. Otherwise, you’ll have to come by my office and I’ll bore you in person).

This fellow is a flying gunard, found in the sand in Sulawesi. They usually hide in holes in the sand, but not only did this one come out, but he very nicely displayed for me. I had to chase him a bit, so I’m lucky to have gotten this picture at all.

The lionfish is lovely, but very poisonous. Those feathery spines carry a nasty toxin which can (and does) kill. I keep well clear of them (Neil took this picture in Bunaken), along with their species-mates, the stonefish. This white one was very deep, so the color is a bit funky. Both of these are part of the scorpion fish group, and here’s a pink leaf scorpion fish found in Sulawesi, again, taken by Neil, who has more guts than I have.

On the non-poisonous front are these little fire dart gobies, and the lovely Banggai cardinalfish, which Erika fell madly in love with in Sulawesi.
They’d look great on Martini Rock back home, but I don’t think we can import live fish. Not that Bunaken would miss them – they were everywhere.

Finally on the fish front is this jawfish. I feel lucky to have spotted this one, since they usually hang out in a hole in the sand with their mouths open and they’re easy to miss. I managed to coax this one out of his hole and get him to open wide. Isn’t he lovely?

So many fish, so little time.

Kindness

2007-04-04T12:35:00.000+04:00

Day 33. Unlike Blanche DuBois, I have never depended upon the kindness of strangers. I like to be as independent as possible, and tend to rely on wit, research, common sense and phrase books to do most things while I’m traveling. I’m usually pretty successful, and my travels don’t generally throw me anything I can’t cope with. Even so, I am ever so grateful when the kindness of strangers shows up.

I had a day to spend in Jakarta, having arrived from Manado at ten in the morning for a one a.m. flight to Manila. Me being me and Indonesia being famous for batik, I dumped my luggage at the airport and went shopping. I’d read about a huge shopping district called Blok M in central Jakarta, so that’s where I headed. The first unexpected bit of kindness I received was from a man standing next to the airport info desk. I had stopped by to check whether I would likely find what I wanted at Blok M (research!) and approximately how long and how much it would cost me to get there so I could make sure I had enough rupiyahs (common sense). As I was asking my questions, this old guy who was just standing around told me about a bus I could take directly to the shopping district that would cost one tenth the price of a cab. Thank you very much sir, and that’s what I did.

Having duly arrived, I hit the nearest shopping mall. I worked all five floors but couldn’t find what I wanted anywhere, so I stopped in a craft shop and asked the ladies sitting there eating lunch. They spoke very little English and I didn’t have a phrase book (I hadn’t even realized that I had the day in Jakarta, and so hadn’t prepared), but we managed to communicate well enough (wit!) for them to point me in the direction of a totally different department store across the street, through the street market (where the quality was not reliable, or at least I think that’s what they meant) and over the way.

I found the place, and it had exactly what I wanted. Two floors of Indonesian arts and crafts. So, being sensible, I asked about shipping items home before I went mad and bought out the shop, and was assured there was a place in the basement that would wrap and ship my items home. So I shopped.

The shipping issue was important for two reasons: one, I’d been paying overweight baggage charges throughout SE Asia and I still had a way to go, and two, I wanted to buy a couple of awkwardly shaped and rather delicate items that would be difficult to keep safe in a bag with all my heavy-duty dive gear.

I found the shipping counter in the basement as promised, but was told it would not be open for business for another couple of weeks. So much for research. The gentleman at the not-yet-finished shipping desk did suggest the central post office, and then realized I couldn’t get there before it closed. He pointed me in the direction of the travel agent when I asked if the airport had a post office or a UPS, but she didn’t think it did. At least I think that’s what she said. I was kicking myself for not having a phrase book. So much for independence.

A young Korean man had been watching my growing distress and stepped in. He suggested DHL in central Jakarta, and asked the travel agent to call and see if they were open. As she dialed, the young man and I got to chatting, and I learned that he was in the herbal shampoo business and was currently a student in Tokyo learning Japanese to increase his market possibilities there. He had popped into Jakarta to visit his office there, and would be going back to Japan shortly. We talked about Dubai and he mentioned he was planning to go there too, whereupon I gave him my email address and told him I had no shampoo contacts, but I could certainly buy him a drink when he came to town. By this time, we had an answer – DHL was open (hurray!) and I thanked the young man, thinking I’d find a cab and go. Nonsense. He insisted on coming with me. Possibly because he wanted to see how it played out, but probably because he realized that it would be hopeless for me to try to get anything done without a word of Indonesian. I refused to put him out; he insisted. I was silently relieved.

Long story short: DHL wanted to charge me the ‘up to 25 kg’ rate to send my 5 pounds of batik and souvenirs (they charge by the box size, not weight) and that was nearly $300 US. Utterly ridiculous. He argued, he cajoled, he talked to the head office on the phone – no dice. I took my package back and he looked crestfallen that he couldn’t manage to get it shipped for me.

Well, Mr. Oh Byoung Chul, it doesn’t matter a bit. I am ever so grateful for all of your help and, as it happens, I managed to make a sturdy enough container for the delicate thing and put it in my luggage with the dive gear. It has made it to the Philippines undamaged, so with luck, it will make it home. And I will look for an email from you telling me when you’ll be in Dubai. We’ll take you to dinner, and I will look for contacts in the health and beauty field for you. I make no promises, but it’s the very least I can do to repay the kindness of a stranger.

Shower

2007-04-01T10:47:00.000+04:00

Day 32. Erika and I just paid $120 for a hot shower, and it was worth every nickel.

We’d just finished ten days in Bunaken and Lembeh Strait, diving the beautiful, crystal clear waters of North Sulawesi. Two Fish Divers in Bunaken was basic, but quite pleasant. The food was simple but tasty, our dive guide was excellent, the people running the resort and the other divers were interesting and genial. There was no hot water or air con, but the room was comfortable enough and it had a fan and electronic mozzie killer, and I’d recommend them to anyone wanting to dive the area. The diving is absolutely spectacular. That’s where we stayed for most of the trip, and then for the last two days we went on to the famous muck diving in Lembeh.

I thought Two Fish Bunaken was basic. Let’s just say that if I had gone to the Lembeh resort first, I would probably have stepped on a plane and gone back to Thailand. Not only was the water in the bathroom tepid, it was so rusty as to be unusable. It was so humid my mosquito coils wouldn’t burn; there were ants in my bed and dogs (with their fleas) everywhere, so I ended up covered in bites. The diving was superb, the guide very good, and Erika has a good sense of humor (thank God), but by the time we were scheduled to leave I wasn’t the least bit sorry. I will certainly go back to Lembeh, but next time I think I’ll go to the upscale resort on the other side of the strait. They looked like they had plumbing.

Because our flight to Jakarta was at six in the morning Wednesday, we went back to Manado on Tuesday afternoon and stayed the night. We were scheduled to stay in the Celebes Hotel, where we had stayed the very first night in Manado. It was your basic cheap tourist hotel, which hadn’t bothered us at all on Day 24. But after two days in Creepy Crawly Cold-water Central… I grabbed the Lembeh resort’s ancient copy of the Lonely Planet, looked at Erika and said,

“I wonder whether Manado has…”
“A five star hotel?” she finished.

According to the book, the Novotel was nearly completed (it was an old LP), and indeed we found that not onlyhad it been built, it had already changed hands and was now The Ritzy Hotel, right across from the Manado Mega Mall. We checked in, ordered extra towels, and took very long, very hot showers, reveling in the luxury that only the Ritzy Hotel could provide (at least in Manado). Then we went to the mall, bought shoes, ate pizza and had hour-long $3 pedicures. Erika got her hair cut and her toenails painted electric blue. Ah, civilization.

Intermezzo

2007-03-27T15:47:00.000+04:00

Day 24 Don’t think that I’ve spent the entire month with wet hair and wrinkly fingers. We have occasionally left the water to do other things:

Wetsuits OK, so I was still thinking about the water on our first day in Phuket, when I went into HotWaves and ordered a couple of custom-made wetsuits. The biggest downside of diving is the neoprene we need to cover ourselves in unless we are diving in very warm water. The choice is either stuff yourself into a rubber suit or freeze. Since I’m not an off-the-peg shape I have never been happy with my wetsuits, so I decided to have a couple made. One full-length, 5mm suit for diving in Oman in winter, complete with zippers at the ankles and wrists, and another, thinner, sleeveless shorty, which should be more comfortable than the one I have now. I’ll try it out tomorrow. Sorry, no pictures… no one looks good in a wetsuit, and Mme Cyn perhaps worse than many. Fortunately, the fish don’t care.

Car We rented a car on our ‘off-gassing’ days* and went around Phuket island. The Goat had wanted to rent motorcycles, but we didn’t have any proper shoes (and I’m a sissy anyway), so we opted for a jeep. The jeeps were all out, so we settled for a tiny little Toyota Yaris, the sort of car that would get eaten by 4x4s in Dubai. Even so, it had a little back up warning beep like a Mac truck. This grumped the Goat no end. Oh, that and the fact that every time he went for the turn signal, he hit the windshield wipers. Every time. I’m so glad he’s not the type of guy who minds when you laugh at him.

Wat Chalong, where we stayed, has a rather famous Buddhist temple, or wat, so we had a look. The Thai wats are very ornate compared with the Japanese temples, and this was no exception. One thing they do that the Japanese don’t is set off fireworks. Next to the temple, there’s a big brick oven. You buy firecrackers from the monks and throw them in the oven, and they explode with a series of bangs. I’m not sure why. In Japan you clap your hands in the temple to get the attention of the gods, and maybe since the Thais are rowdier, more joyous types, this has the same effect.

Wildlife The Goat, having never ridden on an elephant, decided it was time to rectify the situation. I have done so, and I know better. However, since he was so set on it, I took my Dramamine and we went. He was up for the hour long ride, but I rather put my foot down at 20 minutes. I think he was glad of it, too. He could happily have ridden all day, but it must have been wearing on his nerves to have me cling to him and squeak every time the animal took a step. Now, intellectually I knew it was perfectly safe, but perched 15 feet up in a wobbly houdah with your toes curled into an elephant’s neck is no place for a middle aged sissy like me to be.

There was a little café bar at the elephant place where a couple of gibbons were hanging around. Charlie and Lanaia were part of the furniture and quite friendly. Later on, however, we visited the Gibbon Rehabilitation Project in Kata. Young gibbons are popular pets here, and the locals often take them to the beaches for tourists to ooh and ahh over and have their photos taken. Unfortunately, the tamest ape turns aggressive once it matures, and these animals are then abandoned or abused. The GRP reintroduces them into the wild in the national park, where they are supposedly safe from poachers. It doesn’t always work that way, but they try.

We also visited a butterfly garden, where various common and rare species are bred and preserved. The Goat was fascinated in particular by an Atlas moth, which one of the breeders handed to him. Impressive, but it’s still a bug.

Aquarium Phuket has a marine biology research center and aquarium. We got there late in the day, but they said we could stay past closing and we had the place almost to ourselves. This was great, since the highlight was a tunnel through a very large tank that housed leopard sharks, eagle rays, black tip reef sharks, and any number of large shoaling fish. With nobody else there, they turned off the people-moving sidewalk and we got to stay as long as we liked. It was excellent. I just wished we’d managed to see these creatures while we were diving. Maybe next time.

By the way -- for those of you who wish the full details and lots of pix, I refer you to the Grumpy Goat's blog, in particular the "Thai Dive" and "Thai Dry" entries, where he's done a much better job documenting our adventures. Of course, he's got time. He's only back at work... I'm still diving!

(NB for you non-divers, you have to take a break from diving now and then to let the nitrogen escape your body tissues, or you feel awful. Smart people don’t dive 24 hours before flying either, so that’s an off-gas day too.)

Sealegs

2007-03-17T23:14:00.000+04:00

Day 16. I am a menace on a boat. For the sake of those around me, I should never be allowed on one. I frequently have to crawl aboard and skootch around on my backside to position myself, since one good pitch sends me flying into whoever is there –generally clutching whatever I can grab hold of to steady myself, which is lethal if you and your target are both fully kitted-out scuba divers. When I come up after a dive, it is generally safer for everyone if I take off my gear in the water and hand it up, since I will invariably overbalance and fall back onto my back into the sea if I have to climb a ladder with fifty pounds of kit on my back. I think the boat boys secretly cringe when they see me coming, since they know at least one of them is going to be assigned to keeping me from doing any damage. At least I tip well.

Oh, and on top of having the sea legs of a giraffe on roller skates, I get horrendously seasick.

I come by that honestly, at least. My father, who spent twenty five years in the Navy, once told me that every time he was deployed he was green as a toad for the first three days. I used to wonder how anyone who spent so much time seasick ever managed to stay in a profession that required ocean voyages. Little did I know that the one sport I would take up would put me in the same boat. So to speak.

I’ve always been motion sick. I was that ‘lucky’ kid who got to sit in the front (unheard of!) because otherwise I would puke all over the back seat. In grad school, a group of us went to Hershey Park, where they went on the monster roller coasters and I merely watched the four year olds enjoying the Merry Go Round and had to woof into the trash can next to the bench. I could go on, but you get my point.

So why take up scuba, which was guaranteed to make me queasy? Why indeed. My instructor nearly had to carry me from the boat the first ten or so dives I did with him. My club thought I was insane. I ‘fed the fish’ every time I went diving, and mastered the fine art of puking into a regulator. And trust me – retching underwater when you have to keep your teeth clamped around your only air source while knowing if you let go of it you will drown is a fine art.

Lately, though, the seasickness thing is mostly at bay. I guess lots of practice and Dramamine settles your stomach over time. However, there are still things that will set me off. One is being over-tired. Another is fumes or strong smells, such as the diesel fuel they use in the boats.

So here I am, in Thailand, on a very expensive section of my trip, where I have to be on a boat for three solid days. Normally I avoid live-aboards, but some of the best diving in the world can only be reached by a long journey out from the mainland, and the only sensible and sometimes possible thing to do is to live on a boat for several days: eating, sleeping and diving. Or in my case, trying not to toss my cookies. Between not having slept the night before and the smell of very spicy Thai cooking coming from the galley… well, let’s just say I dived one out of three on the first day.

Syngnathidae

2007-03-16T14:34:00.000+04:00

The seahorse is a wondrous beast. The male incubates the eggs in a pouch, leaving the female time to relax before producing the next batch of eggs. Wonderfully efficient way of raising a family, don't you think? Seahorse as feminist icon.

This little fellow is a harlequin ghost pipefish. Very hard to see, let alone photo graph. Wish I had. This was taken by a guy named Mike in Puerto Galera. I wasn't on this dive, but he shared his photos.

Which is a good thing, because he prevented me from getting close enough to this blond seahorse to get a good picture. The rather 'blue' one here is mine, taken from quite far away. I had to blow up and crop the image or you would never have seen the wee beastie. The clear, close one at the bottom is Mike's. See the difference? Of course, his was also taken with a spiffy external underwater flash. Santa, are you listening?

Legs

2007-03-06T09:33:00.000+04:00

Day 8. Finally. After having spent the past 150 dives searching, ever conscious that they are highly camouflaged and probably lurking nearby, I have finally, finally seen an octopus.

My buddies have seen two already on this trip, both on dives that I was scheduled to do and then didn’t (one because I had a headache, the other because I wasn’t comfortable with the dive guide). Heike came back with pictures of a tiny little one, and then Marion snapped the fist-sized blue-ringed one this afternoon. Mine was spotted on a night dive that I nearly didn’t do because it was pouring with rain, the sea was choppy, and all but one other diver had cancelled. However, the other guy is going back to the UK tomorrow and he’d never done a night dive, so it was on. I went mostly because I had said I would go.

Was I glad I did. At first we saw a whole lot of nothing. We went in over the sand and there wasn’t much to see. I was thinking “Ick – I could be back in the bar instead of here swimming through jellyfish.” But then we hit the reef.

I think I am, in essence, a muck diver. Give me a little piece of reef on a night dive and I’ll stay in about 10 m square for the whole dive, peering under everything and watching the fish sleep. And I saw some great stuff once we hit the reef: two frogfish, a scorpionfish, a free-swimming starfish, and a rather rare decorator crab (wearing hot pink sponge), along with the usual assorted lionfish, cleaner wrasse, marching urchins and various crustaceans. However, our guide, Ruben, was a bit of a torpedo, so we did a lot of swimming and casual looking instead of staying put. I decided to assert myself a bit and stopped on a piece of reef that had a magnificent black and white cowrie clinging to it when Ruben started frantically flailing around with his light several meters away. When you dive at night and someone violently swings his light at you, you go to him as quickly as you can. You never know whether he is in trouble, and the usual bogeys of diving are increased when it’s dark. So I took off like lightning and caught up with him, ready to assist in saving him from some disaster. Then he redirected the light to a red blob in some coral. I looked and looked again, but couldn’t figure out what it was I was supposed to see, and was a bit miffed that I’d chased over there to find there was no big emergency. And then the blob unfolded a tentacle and started sliding toward the sand. A hungry octopus, looking for a meal.

Its head and curled body were about the size of a dinner plate, and it seemed to move mostly by unfolding itself a leg or two at a time, inching its way across the sand first to one coral head and then the next. As it curled in one leg it unwound another, moving very slowly, wasting no motion. Definitely stealth design. It was clearly not intimidated by us, since it didn’t bother to change colors as we hovered over it. It stayed a mottled red, so it was brilliantly lit up against the sand. I could see it pulsate, like some Hollywood alien. After about six minutes my buddy was clearly bored, so we carried on with the dive. Given the choice, I’d have stayed there until my tank was dry.

What a magnificent creature. We’ll dive the same site tomorrow night, and maybe this time I won’t leave my camera on the boat. Sigh.

Day 11. Update. Octopus #2, big and black and beautiful on the Boulders in Puerto Galera. This time I had my camera, but he just looked like a big black leather bag on film. Oh well.

(Photo: Marion’s blue-ringed octopus. The tentacles are the bunched up blue and green circles and, if you look at about “8:00” from the tip of the pointer, you’ll see its eye. See what I mean by camouflage?)

Exam

2007-03-03T08:07:00.000+04:00

Day 7. You’d think that teachers would make excellent students. After all, they understand the difficulties of running a class and the responsibilities of making sure everyone understands what is being taught, so you’d think they’d be supportive of whoever was trying to teach them. You’d think teachers would have every sympathy with anyone standing up in front of a room, and do whatever they could to put that person at ease. You’d think that teachers would be tolerant of badly written materials and tests and be cooperative with any tasks required in the course of the class.

You’d be wrong.

Teachers make appalling students. We are demanding, impatient, intolerant, and constantly assessing the person disseminating information. We always know a better way to do it, and require that whoever is teaching us be able to answer any question we throw at them clearly, concisely, completely and instantly. We demand that the text be discussed and debated, and take nothing as given unless absolutely clear and logical. We are highly intolerant of badly written exam questions, and query everything.

Or at least I do.

Actually, I’ve been quite well behaved during this course. My fellow students are all scuba instructors, and some of them have gotten a bit shirty from time to time, but for the most part we’ve been attentive and cooperative. Until the exam.

Now I have taken many scuba exams in the course of my studies— the PADI Open Water, Advanced Diver and EAN exams, the BSAC Sports and Dive Leader exams, and the TDI Gas Blending exam—and they are uniformly dreadful. This latest one was the worst. Who cares who took the first pictures of the Andrea Doria? Or what justification a diver might use in removing pieces of a wreck? And whether the ideal team is two “highly skilled” divers or three divers surely depends on the purpose and complexity of the dive, doesn’t it? And how about that question that has one answer in theory but quite a different one when it comes to applying the theory to practice? And then there’s the language used for writing these questions! Grammatical and syntactic errors everywhere – I felt sorry for our German speaker, whose English is text-book perfect, trying to make sense out of some of the bizarrely-worded questions. And to top it all off, the test writers made the classic error of making a number of questions dependent upon previous questions, so that if you make an error anywhere in the chain you’ve blown them all. Throw in the fact that the pass mark is 80%, and you begin to wonder why we put ourselves through these courses.

We all passed, of course. I missed two questions: one piece of trivia which I simply didn’t know and the other which I would have passed in the real world because I know I can’t do simple arithmetic and would have had the formula written on my slate. Even so, poor Sam had a hard forty minutes of it afterwards when we dragged him into the bar and then argued each point with him and with each other.

Well, at least we bought his drinks.

(Pufferfish on Dry Docks, Sabang)

String

2007-03-01T17:58:00.000+04:00

Day 2. Today’s lesson concerned laying line off a spool inside a wreck, tying it off at intervals, and using it as a visual and physical guide for finding the way back out. Or, more appropriately in our case, Playing with String 101.

We did a dry run on land, and Sam talked us through it, demonstrating as he went. All very knowledgeable, all very competent. All very useless. I am strictly a kinesthetic learner when it comes to anything physical. Show me and it’s gone in five minutes. Make me do it and it has a chance of sticking. So I steamrollered poor Sam’s lesson and took the spool in hand. My classmates (who had been politely listening and absorbing until I grabbed the string) quickly followed suit, and we spent several splendid minutes rigging the dive shop in 18 weight nylon line. Once Sam figured we were ready, it was into the boat and out to El Capitan once again, the site of yesterday’s mishegas. BK was there to help out, so Jim & Marion went one way with him, and poor Heike got stuck with me again. Off we went.

When a pair goes into a wreck, one lays the line and the other follows, checking and taking up slack as needed. I led to begin with, and then we switched positions, with the second leader tying her reel onto the first’s. At some point, Sam was to give one of us instructions to give the out of air signal, and we were to swim to the other, do the signal, then air share out to the exit, using the line as guidance. Once out, we were to go back to ‘normal,’ re-enter the wreck and go retrieve our lines and reel them in.

Air sharing is stressful at the best of times. Two people on one small gas supply is a scary thought. And of course we had to do all of this in semi-darkness, in an unfamiliar environment, with a whole lot of rotting metal between us and the clear blue sky and its accompanying air supply. We had to use unfamiliar equipment unfamiliarly configured, and there were stingy sharp things everywhere. Naturally. Oh yeah, and we were supposed to be careful of our finning techniques (learned yesterday) to keep from damaging the wreck or kicking up the silt.

Actually, it went rather well, except that I was about two kilos too light and kept hitting the ceiling.

Day 3: We somehow have graduated to Advanced String 201. We went to a new wreck, the LST, lying in about 32 meters. Lovely wreck, with bunk beds still intact – so convenient for tying string around. I led but we only got part way through, due to my lousy air consumption and general muppetness. (I had re-weighted and hadn’t established neutral buoyancy before entering the wreck, so I spent the first few minutes bouncing around.) However, I did everything right except that I shortened the dive perhaps more than necessary, so it went well. Then the final drill: we went back to the shallow wreck and had to follow Sam’s line out with our eyes closed, then do it again eyes closed and sharing air. Insanity. I managed to snag my dropped reg hose on a piece of wreckage and had to figure it out blind, I ended up on the wrong side of the line and ran smack into a wall, and Heike and I managed to get tangled up just before the exit.

However, I did learn a couple of Valuable Things: 1) get a swivel clip for my primary demand valve just in case I have to drop it so I can secure it to my body instead of wrapping it around bits of wreck 2) fingertips are useful tools in a blind situation , and 3) if your buddy ends up with your legs on either side of her head, the hose tangled around you both, and clearly stuck on something, stop, stay still, and let her figure it out. If she’s in real trouble, she’ll pinch the hell out of your leg, and then you can help. Otherwise, you will just make things worse.

Good lessons.

(1.Marion & Jim on a line. 2. Me & Heike air sharing. Photos courtesy BK)

Novice

2007-02-28T05:44:00.000+04:00

Today was the first day of my IANTD Recreational Wreck diving course in Subic Bay. There are six of us here: Sam, our instructor; Brian, who took this course with Sam last year and is just here to dive the WWII wrecks; and the three very experienced divers I’m taking this course with, namely Jim (a BSAC First Class), Marion (OW instructor who works in a scuba shop), and Heike (Adv Inst, who also trains lifeguards and has been diving for 22 years). And then there's me-- a big, sissy wuss with only 137 dives under my belt who is doing this because a) shipwrecks fascinate me, b) I’m sensible enough to know that it’s silly to dive wrecks without training, and c) doing something that petrifies me is supposed to be Good for My Character.

I was hoping for a nice, gentle introduction to wrecks: you know, a little overhead environment stuff, a little bit of line work, maybe some navigation…

Ha.

We started out this morning spending an inordinate amount of time kitting up, which is never a good thing for me. Once I’ve made up my mind to do something new, I need to get to it before I can talk myself out of it again. OK, so the kit up was necessary. We all had to reconfigure a bit: I had to add a weight pocket to my belt and figure out how to stow and use a new kind of light (20 minutes).Heike had to change absolutely everything (two hours). We finally got into a boat at 3:00.

Then Sam told us what we were going to do. “Just practice a few skills. One pair can swim around the wreck with BK while the other does the skills with me, then we switch.” Knowing how I guzzle gas when I’m nervous and out of shape (I haven’t dived since November, after all) I requested Heike and I go first. Just in case.

And THEN Sam enumerated these “few skills”: three different kinds of finning technique, finger crawling with fins up, air sharing, swimming without a regulator for 15 meters and getting your buddy’s octopus, and doing a 20m swim along a line without a mask, then replacing and clearing said mask. What ever happened to a gentle swim in an overhead environment?

I felt like a bloomin’ novice. Most of these skills I had never done before, and sure enough, everything that could have gone wrong seemed to once I finally hit the water. First, my trim wasn’t right and I had buoyancy problems, not helped by the fact that I was so tense I think my lungs were completely full at all times. Then there were the new finning techniques. My fins are simply super for tiny flutter finning but absolutely useless for frog kicks—and it doesn’t help that I have all the coordination of a six year old when in the water. Next we come to the air problems. I went down with about 160 bar to start with, which isn’t great at my breathing rate. My primary air hose was way too short, so when I shared air with Heike I had to cling to her cylinder and try not to kick her when I finned. Thank god she knew what she was doing, since I was hopeless. My spare DV kept free flowing, mostly because I kept putting it down upside down and not realizing that it needed to be turned over (Sam had to bail me out twice). And finally there was the Fear Factor. The first time I did the no-regulator swim I couldn’t see my buddy at all. I got part way there, panicked, and shoved the reg back into my mouth. Fair play to me, though – I turned right around, swam back to the start and did it again. Although when I finally got to Heike, I swear I sucked that reg so hard she dropped thirty bar in ten seconds. Her computer alarm went mad.

I never got as far as that maskless swim drill. When I got down to 37 bar (well below my reserve of 50, for those of you who don’t dive), I signaled Sam that I absolutely had to go up, so he sent me to the surface. Now I’ll have to do the mask thing tomorrow. Oh joy.

Giggle

2007-02-18T11:10:00.000+04:00

Is it just me, or is anyone else amused by the fact that one of the advertising posters in the Trade Centre Road Spinneys shows a luscious pork roast with Arabic writing underneath it?

Candor

2007-02-11T02:08:00.000+04:00

I wrote about my difficulties in planning the Big Trip to force myself into action, and indeed I got my DXB to MNL return flight from good old Do-Nada a few weeks ago. Actually, I probably shouldn't slag them off -- they're no worse than any other travel agent. Living here, you’re kind of stuck paying ridiculous amounts of money to escape. I remember a trip in 2001 when I met my mother in Germany. Her ticket from the States cost about $300 while mine cost $1000. And there’s really no way around it. If we want out of here, we have to pay. But I digress.

Between getting that 'big' ticket and now I've done... well, not exactly nothing, but nothing productive toward getting myself out of here and into the waters of SE Asia. I did arrange the DXB outward trips for the two people who are coming to meet me along the way, and I also asked a lot of advice from the regulars on the Lonely Planet forum board, but otherwise, I hadn't accomplished much.

However, I’ve been having dreams about cats lately (which means I’ve been shirking my responsibilities), so I decided to finally face up to the nightmare of finishing my travel arrangements for the Big Trip. The whole on-line shopping/booking/buying thing I find overwhelming, and in general I would rather talk to a human being than spend hours slogging through the maze that is the Net only to get conflicting and confusing info everywhere I look. So I figured it was high time to pop back down to a travel agent for a chat.

So as I said, I had gotten my DXB to MNL ticket at the usual place, but even I know better than to try to get them to book a long, complicated trip for me. They’d charge me premium prices even if I could get them to actually work out the flights and get back to me on them. So I strolled through my little section of town (Karama) to a shop I had seen that advertises a lot of Asian flights. I thought it looked promising, so I went in.

Not being a complete fool, I eyeballed the staff and then plunked myself down at the desk of a lovely Filipina travel agent, figuring since I was doing most of my trip to and from her fair country, she’d be likely to be a) interested and b) sympathetic to my relative poverty (I am, after all, taking between 12 and 16 separate flights over seven weeks). I asked her to look at Manila-Bangkok-Jakarta-Manila for me (thinking even I could manage to book the smaller, local flights on line -- HA! but that's another thread--) and she punched in some numbers and printed off an itinerary. Then she looked at me thoughtfully and said “You know, these are much too expensive. You would get a better price if you bought them in country. "I can't. I'm meeting people who have tight schedules and I can't waste valuable dive time". "OK, then how about booking them on line?” Net maze again. Ick. “How much for your trip?” I asked, thinking it couldn’t be too bad. After all, flying around Asia is cheap, right?

The figure she gave me made my jaw drop. So I spent today hunting up airlines and fares and making connections all over the place, and she was right: what would have cost me $2043 in her shop has ended up costing me $389. Really.

By being frank with me, she lost out on a nice, fat booking and maybe a pat on the head from the boss. Instead, she let her fish get away by doing me a huge favor. Hardly seems fair. So what does she get for her candor?

First, she gets my gratitude and admiration, for whatever they're worth. It is so surprising and refreshing to find a bit of honesty and real helpfulness here, since this town is famous for crummy customer service. Having done my share of retail myself, I know that if you give a customer what they want, they will be back again and again. So, second, she gets me for life. Any trip I make in and out of the sandlands will in future be made with her. I will not list her details here in case her employer doesn’t share her views on customer service, but I will happily pass them on to anyone who asks, and pin them up on the university bulletin board (teachers take a lot of trips). Finally, I think I’ll take another stroll down the street, this time with a box of chocolates. OK, so it’s not a fat commission. This time.

Planning

2006-11-19T22:32:00.000+04:00

Confession time. Mme Cyn is that rare bird, the female commitment-phobe. If you read the women’s magazines, you’ll find it’s apparently a common enough failing among the male of the species, but females? No. We women are supposed to be driven toward security and commitment. We are the ones who make plans, orchestrate lives, and generally keep society ticking over in an orderly, organized way, sweeping the menfolk along, getting them to agree to do things and then keeping them to it. Women love commitment, right?

In my mind, ‘commitment’ equals ‘trap,’ which should be avoided whenever possible. For example, I like my contract job in part because I know that my contract only lasts for three years at a time and I can leave at the end of that time should I want to. Or another example: I have never bought a house because I can’t commit to any one place on the planet. What if it’s an expensive mistake? What if I hate the climate? Besides, buy a house and you’re committed to making mortgage payments, whether you want to that month or not. Or this: I avoid planning weekends whenever I can. What if I want to do something else that day, or don’t feel particularly well? How can I know on Monday what I want to do on Friday?

Etymologically, to “decide” is to kill off the other options. Decision = commitment= no escape. You see my problem.

You may say “Simple. Change your mind.” Ah, but I can’t do that. My family, bless 'em, warped me. Once you make a commitment, you keep it, they said. Make a decision and then stick to it. The wishy-washy lack character. Do what you say you'll do, because others are relying on you. Parents. Sheesh. Still, it's an admirable way to live your life and raise your children, and you’d think it would have made me a very reliable person. It did – when anyone can actually get me to commit to anything. I avoid, delay, hem, haw, hedge…anything to keep from trapping myself into anything I may later regret having agreed to. Because once assumed, a responsibility cannot be shirked. Oh yeah, my folks did a number on me.

Now I’ve known about this character flaw of mine for many, many years, and I’ve learned to work around it. Why, then, do I bring it up now? Because I’m going to take a seven week diving vacation in high season and I have to plan it. And I can’t.

Not won’t. Can’t. Don’t get me wrong: this is something I want to do. I have suffered and sacrificed for it. I know it may well be my only chance to do anything like this in my entire life. It’s going to cost a bundle and I don’t care. I’ve been looking forward to it. But I cannot go to the travel agent, plunk down my money and buy plane tickets. It's so ... final. I know I want to start in Puerto Galera and include a course in Subic Bay, but that’s as far as I can get. I haven’t even chosen a definite start date yet – the best I can do is “mid-February”. Usually when I take a long trip, I book my flight out, my flight home, and my first hotel, and then I wing it. Once I ended up in Bratislava because I wanted to take a trip down the Danube and that was the only place I could get a ticket for at short notice. And I liked Bratislava. Could even buy a house there. Maybe.

But this time winging it won't work. First, I’m not traveling entirely alone: two different people are joining me for two different phases of the trip, and they need to get time off work. Both of these people have said that where they join me is up to me since they want to do it all and aren’t picky, so it’s not like I can use their desires as a starting point. Second, it’s high season in Indonesia and Malaysia, so if I go to a diving mecca like Sulawesi (or Sipadan, or Palau, or, or, or) I will have to have my room booked well in advance. Third are the internal flights in the PI and the inter-Asia flights to Sulawesi ( or Sipadan, or Palau, or, or, or). I can’t buy them here, but can't make myself do it online either. What if it doesn’t work? Or someone gets my credit card info and steals my identity? This then means waiting until I get to Manila, in which case it will be too late to get hotel rooms anywhere else during high season. And then I’m committed to staying in the Philippines. Trapped again.

Clearly I have to make my decisions and then stick to my plans. Once I’ve bought the tickets and made the reservations, there’s no going back. Commitment. Yuck.

Radio

2006-10-23T20:10:00.000+04:00

I love radio. I've owned a radio as long as I can remember. Throughout my insomniac youth I smuggled my radio under the covers and eventually fell asleep to Casey Kasem or Wolfman Jack or the Ten O’Clock News. In Italy in the days before cable TV and English language anything, we had Armed Forces Radio. We got music, news, and weekend afternoons with novels, old radio serials, and talk shows out of the UK or US. College in Boston was radio heaven. My radio station was WGBH, with All Things Considered, A Prairie Home Companion, Morning Pro-Musica, Car Talk, Songs for Aging Children, and all the BBC radio game shows. Or I tuned into WERS, the hippest college radio station in town with leading edge (it was punk then) music, fantastic jazz and my buddy Carl’s classical show. When I went to DC it was all about National Public Radio and occasional AM talk radio; I spent my morning commute getting up on current events and gossip in the District. In Japan & Korea, radio was my entertainment of necessity. And choice. I didn’t have a television during most of my teens and twenties and didn’t miss it at all. Don’t have one now (though I do have my DVDs) and I don’t care.

I’ve always felt that my morning commute is better for having the radio on. CDs are nice, but rush hour just means radio to me. However, the radio in this town is utter, utter crap.

First, there is virtually no choice. My car radio gets three stations in English (Radio 2, Radio 4 and D. FM I think they’re called), each worse than the next. Most of the music is either trashy pop or bubblegum stuff from the 70s and 80s, much of which never got popular enough to make it across the Pond, and so is alien to me. Second, there is no talk radio at all. There is the occasional ‘interview’ show, but it’s either some amateur pop psycher giving fatuous advice, or a thinly disguised hour-long advert for some real estate scheme. Third, even the “favorite” station here (and therefore I suppose the ‘best’) is appallingly bad. I suffered though Thi Bidda Meex for my first few years here and put up with the silly morning shows and insipid music on my way to work. They’ve got a woman there who has the Ugliest Voice on Radio, and I even put up with her for a while, except that the late morning talk show she hosts/ed got so inane that I couldn’t deal with the awful topics on top of listening to her talk, so I turned her off (Please god she’s only spinning discs now and not interviewing any more – I even can’t bear to turn it on to find out.) Except for the hour of jazz between 9 & 10 pm that I run into every now and then (the DJ is pleasant if a bit vapid, but she has decent taste in music and knows when to shut up), these people wouldn’t get airtime on Community Free Radio back home.

I felt my commute was captive to Thi Bidda Meex until I discovered iPod and podcasts earlier this year. Now I’ve got WGBH, KQED, BBC, Radio Wales, NPR, Jim Lehrer, Washington Week, and all kinds of great things to listen to, provided I keep my iPod charged up. Which it wasn’t this afternoon. So sitting in Sharjah traffic, I decided to give Thi Bidda Meex one last go. I tuned in and caught the Beach Boys singing “Kokomo”, a catchy, 80s tune I hadn’t heard in a while. Promising. I sang along (as you do) until, three refrains before the song was over, the idiot DJ starts in yapping about something or other. He didn’t even bother to fade out the end of the song. How or why he thought what he had to say was more interesting than the Beach Boys listing Carribean islands is beyond me.

I switched it off. I should have known better. The iPod is charging up as we speak.

Sun

2006-10-03T18:24:00.000+04:00

The brand new Zayed University campus on the Al Ain Road is nearing completion, more or less. It's an absolutely massive building in the middle of the desert, with large covered-over "outdoor" areas with water features and plants and cool places to relax. The whole thing --indoors and out--is air-conditioned beyond the freezing point.

Can anyone tell me why then, in a country with abundant sunshine and in an institution that prides itself on being progressive, they did not design the campus to use solar power? It seems to me that they missed a huge opportunity to set an example to the rest of the city, as an institute of higher learning should. And I hear the electric bills are higher than the entire rent on their last campus. Besides, using the plenteous sunshine for cheap energy and selling the precious and soon-to-be-scarce oil to the foreigners who will pay top dollar for it would have made such a lot of economic sense. Surely a little forethought and additional expense in the construction would have paid off handsomely in so many ways for years to come?

Theft

2006-10-02T16:33:00.000+04:00

I am well cheesed off. On a recent diving trip to Sharm, I thought I had lost my DSMB, which I keep tucked up behind my backplate. "OK", I thought when I discovered it was gone as I was packing up my gear, "It could have slipped out, even though it usually only dislodges with a firm tug and my ample derierre should have kept it from falling out into the sea. Fair enough, kit gets dropped." But -- I went diving on Friday and assembled my kit only to discover that, between my last dive in Sharm and the following morning when I picked up my kit from the dive outfit, somebody had nicked the integrated air horn off my inflate hose! These things do not fall off.

I have dived all over the place and have never given much thought to the safety of my possessions. I would have thought that a five star resort's dive center would have been a safe place to leave my kit to dry. The beachfront dive shack in the Philippines has always been fine.

I don't actually think it was a member of staff at the dive center or hotel; they would be mad to play that game, as I'm sure a steady job at the Hyatt garners much more dosh than they'd get fencing stolen goods down in Naama Bay. If it had been one of the boat guys I might understand (not condone, mind you), since they are so very badly paid and rather poorly treated (though I find it ironic that throughout the week, I was one of the few divers who tipped them!). However, it would have been hard for a boat handler to rummage around in the kit boxes of the paying customers looking for nickable stuff without being noticed.

This leaves my fellow divers, and a very bad taste in my mouth. I trust these people with my safety underwater and can't trust them with my stuff above it? How mad is that? Have I just been incredibly naive and incredibly lucky that stuff hasn't gone walkabout before now?

Gagged

2006-09-27T00:59:00.000+04:00

Mme Cyn has not posted in a while, as she is out of sorts. It is one of those "what am I doing in this godforsaken sand pit" months, and as she has nothing nice to say, she has said nothing.

Actually, that is not quite true. I have said plenty behind closed doors, but one of the things that is getting right up my nose lately is that we foreigners have all been, in effect, gagged. And this is item number one on my current "I hate this" list. As a stranger in a strange land, I do not have the right or freedom to speak my mind.

And so I won't. Amazing how effectively living here in the sandlands has taught me to hold my tongue. My grandmother would have been thrilled -- she tried to teach me for years.

Jittervision

2006-09-15T23:12:00.000+04:00

Why is it that every movie that comes out of Hollywood nowadays seems to be shot in glorious wobblecam? Can they not afford tripods in LA? OK, so I understand that in an action flick with lots of fighting, chases, explosions and general chaos they use the hand-held camera to give an edgy sense of immediacy and realism to the action. I noticed it first in a film called Paycheck which hit Dubai a couple of years ago, and that was fine. The technique was fresh and interesting then. Now it’s just tiring. Action scenes that jumped around became the standard in every action film I saw until The Bourne Supremacy came out and took the jitters a step further—not just the fight scenes shook, but half the film was shot in a blur. And then Miami Vice came along a couple of weeks ago and hit an all-time jittervision low. Not only did the cameramen wriggle all over the set, but they kept switching to nasty, grainy video tape that they apparently shot with Dad’s old Sony Camcorder. I mean, what is up with Hollywood these days? Is St Vitus’ Dance suddenly endemic in American dolly grips? I came out of the cinema thoroughly nauseated.

I swore off watching action movies unless I was primed with Stugeron, and so went this evening to see The New World. Pocahontas meets John Smith: a little red vs. white tomahawk action maybe, but essentially a love story and therefore safe from wobblecam, right? Wrong.

The New World seems to want to be an art-house flick. There is very little dialogue and very little background music, but it’s dripping with atmosphere all the same: a lot of silence, lots of crickets and rustling trees; the natives don’t even get subtitled when they’re trying to communicate with the settlers. Very arty, with a drive toward realism – war paint, flies, filth, squalor, etc. Instead of dialogue it has voice-overs that perhaps are meant to represent what the two main characters were thinking but did not have the common language to express. That kind of arty. It’s a serious sort of film about the first settlers to go over the waves and colonize the new world. Except the whole damn film pitched and rolled like they shot it on board the Mayflower. And then they had the nerve to list the Steadicam operator in the credits! Don’t know what he actually did, but I hope they didn’t pay him much.

Tooth

2006-09-14T23:52:00.002+04:00

I go through dentists like other women go through boyfriends. I’ve had them old. I’ve had them young. I’ve had the humorless and the facetious. I’ve had the ones whose signs read “PAINLESS” and were anything but. I’ve had sandal-wearing, sitar-playing ex-hippies who stocked wild arrays of gum-numbing drugs and used them recreationally. I’ve had curmudgeonly grumps whose Gestapo receptionists would usher patients into an antiseptic waiting room and ply them with two-year-old magazines to pass the time until the kid in the chair stopped screaming and she could bark out “next!” and shunt the next poor sap into the Chair of Doom. Once I even found a fabulous dentist who used to do hits off the laughing gas with me after we’d finished up, but I lost him when his horrid wife made him give up an excellent practice to go fix teeth on a kibbutz. Come to think of it, I had twice as many dentists in college than I had dates. And I’m still racking them up.

I inherited my parents’ teeth (gee, thanks), and spent years and thousands trying to avoid the worst of their bridges and implants. Those same parents who gave me my teeth did make sure I had braces (nice and straight) which of course further weakened the enamel of my already genetically crap teeth. Bad genes, bad luck, and a wicked beef jerky habit, and I have a mouthful of amalgam and metalwork.

Brushing, flossing, water picks, electric brushes, rinsing with plaque-killing, germ-stomping mouthwashes: nothing stemmed the inevitable tide of cavities and cracked teeth, so a couple of years ago (after having been through three dentists in this town alone) I just gave up. Decided not to visit a dentist until I absolutely had to. Which was a couple of weeks ago.

I’d been ignoring that tooth on and off since Christmas 2005, figuring if I rode it out the pain would go away. It flared up in Egypt, but as I could still function and I wasn’t about to take a day off diving to go to yet another dentist and writhe in agony in yet another chair, I took pills, doused my mouth in clove oil and dived anyway. It’s amazing how you can justify avoiding something you really don’t want to do.

I came back to town and asked advice from someone who goes to an Indian dentist in Sharjah, who said his dentist was just fine (“and, more importantly, cheap!”) – but he’s a hard bastard with naturally pearly whites and doesn’t have that bad tooth baggage I do, so I wasn’t too sure about his judgment on things dental. I wasn’t going back to the New York NJB I’d seen a couple of years before because a) getting an appointment was nearly impossible and b) I couldn’t afford to subsidize his Jumeirah real estate. The Swedish dentist I’d seen when I first came here was long gone, so she was out, too. Still I hesitated re the woman in Sharjah. Indian dentist? British-trained? I’ve lived in Dubai long enough to be slightly suspect of Indian subcontinent craftsmanship (OK, so I’m judging on building specs and plumbing), and I’ve seen British teeth, after all…

As it happened, I ended up with Dr. B in Karama (Indian and British-trained) simply because he’s in the clinic closest to my apartment and he didn’t have anyone in the chair at the time I staggered in gripping my (by then) massively infected face.

I had broken a filling, cracked two teeth and developed a deep infection throughout my lower jaw. I can’t take penicillin, so he had to put me on erythromycin, (horrid stuff) which took forever to work, but did. Every couple of days he had me in to check the infection and change the dressing. Evening appointments? Not a problem, as he lives above the shop. When I informed him that I might scream my head off and scare the other patients, he smiled and said “If I hurt you, you can scream as loud as you want.” He hasn’t caused a bit of pain yet and has certainly relieved a great deal (and this root canal/crown is half the price of the one I bought from the NJB in Jumeirah, so no pain there either.)

So it looks like I may have finally found a dentist I can commit to. Dr. B. is absolutely fantastic. So far.

Wreck

2006-08-26T02:13:00.000+04:00

When I got to Sharm, the first thing I did was go to the dive center to set up a Thistlegorm dive. The response was that they could only do dives if there were at least six divers interested and so far that week they only had three. Not good. This is a wreck mecca and I was dying to dive it, even though I’m really a big girl’s blouse and petrified of wreck penetration. And anyway, I had bounced around my dive club crowing about the Thistlegorm all last week, and knew that if I didn’t actually dive it, it would cost me a fortune in drinks.

I dived Shark & Jolande reefs (gorgeous) and Gordon & Jackson reefs (stunning) and really enjoyed the local house reef in spite of the damage done to the close-in corals, but in the back of my mind was still the lust for the wreck.

Long story short, on the last possible day of my diving holiday (given pre-flight deco penalties), I got the pleasure of catching a bus at 4 am, paying out 200 of my hard-earned dollars, and watching folks get seasick on the four-hours-out and four-hours-back trip, all for a total of 65 minutes on a WWII wreck rusting away in 30 meters of water at the bottom of the Red Sea.

And it was worth it.

Shoe

2006-08-23T01:33:00.000+04:00

The driver let us off at Khan el Kalili. From M’s description, I was expecting an old market square with a flood of tourists. What we got was a dark alley with a few locals. We were immediately picked up by some young man named Hassan who insisted that he was “not looking for a tip –I am a good Islamic scholar. In Islam, is good to do kindness” who told us Khan el Kalili was right around the corner and he would show us. OK. It was early evening and there were other people around, so following was easier than shaking him.

We turned down a small, dark street lined with poor looking shops and women peeling vegetables in front of their apartment buildings. The little streets were stereotypically Egyptian – full of potholes, mud, and broken bits of rubble and stone. We turned down another street. Then another. And another. This was getting uncomfortable. I could only imagine what was going through M’s rather less travel-savvy head. Suddenly, she stopped and said she’d broken her shoe. Perfect excuse to get rid of Hassan I thought (thank you, M). He of course wanted to take us to a shoe repair shop; I said I’d deal with the immediate problem and then find one, thank you very much and goodbye. He smiled and said he would wait, but I was a bit insistent. He actually left. I thought the whole shoe thing was a ploy on M’s part to get us out of an awkward situation. Unfortunately, it was not.

We were so far into the old souk and the streets were so filthy that giving her my shoes and walking barefoot was not an option, so she hobbled along and I started searching out a shop for flip flops. I found a cramped little stand that sold camel-leather sandals and dug for something that would fit one of us. The shop was owned by a man in his sixties with black teeth and cracked hands, who spoke as much English as I do Arabic. He quickly saw our problem and snatched away M’s broken shoe, giving it to a wizened little man crouched over a workbench who must have been his father.

The shopkeeper fluttered around us making sympathetic noises, trying very hard to make us comfortable on the broken concrete slab he used for a bench. His sandals were hanging on strings all around the little stand, and he took down every one that looked as though it might fit. As we tried on every large-sized sandal in the tiny shop, I watched the old man tackle the broken shoe. He studied it and studied its mate, looking at it from all angles, pulling and poking. Clearly he’d not seen anything quite like it before. Of course I had no faith that he’d be able to do anything with it. The sole was a rubber wedge in two parts with a leather upper. Nothing there to nail anything to. The old shoemaker attacked the upper sole with rubber cement, but I didn’t think it would hold. After a few minutes of patiently waiting for the cement to get tacky, he obviously thought the same. He got up, searched around for a little spirit lamp, and lit it. Meanwhile, M paid a pittance for the only pair of sandals in the shop she could get on to her feet, and we got up to go. After all, her original shoes were a write off, it was going to take us some time to find our way out of the maze of the souk, and we were grumpy and frustrated at the loss of M’s nearly new shoes. The old man signaled us to wait. I suppose because we didn’t know how to refuse, we sat back down. He took the lower sole and melted the inside surface over the spirit lamp. He ran his calloused finger over it to make sure it was molten and then slapped it onto the upper with the edge of the leather strap between the pieces. He pressed the pieces together and grinned. Perfectly sound.

M tried to pay him for coming to her rescue, but he refused, bowed his head and put his hand over his heart, smiling and speaking to us. I imagine he said something like “In Islam, is good to do kindness.”

Cairo

2006-08-15T21:39:00.000+04:00

Since everyone I know who has ever been to Cairo has warned me about how everyone is on the take, I arrived here suspicious of everyone and everything.

The guys who met us were overly solicitous – kept taking our passports, filling out forms for us, going to get our bags – and I of course followed them around, keeping a close eye on things. I am uncomfortable when my possessions are long out of my own hands, especially in an airport with an evil reputation.

We checked into the Nile Hilton and immediately went to see the museum, which was next door. After dinner, we decided to visit Khan el Kalili. M had been before and was anxious to go back, so we piled into a taxi (after asking someone else how much it should cost) and were duly taken toward the souk.

Traffic in Cairo is madness. Every time I go abroad – India, Sri Lanka, Philippines and now Cairo – I understand the traffic chaos in Dubai a little bit better. Our driver whizzed round a roundabout and was stopped midway through by a cop demanding to see his papers. He handed them over, slipped down a side street, triple parked, and left us to our own devices, shouting into the traffic as he went. We looked at each other. He came back disgusted, mumbled about how much he had to pay off the cop and returned his papers to their convenient home above his sun visor. In hushed tones in the back seat (though why we bothered I don’t know, as the bone shaker we were in was deafeningly loud) M felt sorry for him (of course) and indicated we should pay him above the fare; I sniffed a scam and refused, later explaining that it could have been something cooked up with the cop to milk the dumb tourists out of some baksheesh. M didn’t see it, but it seemed plausible to me: cop hangs around until he sees a cab filled with blondes, stops the driver and makes him pay a bribe. The softhearted American ladies see this, bridle at the injustice that the nasty cops are hassling the poor working man and give him an exorbitant tip to make it up to him. The driver then goes back and splits the take with the cop.

Did I mention I was suspicious?

Nose

2006-08-10T00:03:00.000+04:00

I consider myself fairly culturally aware and tolerant, but there are some things that just should go beyond culture and into the world-wide realm of consideration for your fellow human being and his nose.

Why is it that everywhere I fly in the Arab world, someone perfumes himself as soon as he gets on the plane? Occasionally he’ll wait until after the meal or just before disembarking, but it is inevitable nonetheless that someone on that plane will at some point cause my eyes to tear and my nose to drip.

It seems to be predominantly men who are afflicted with this crisis of grooming. Why’s that then? Are they compensating for the fact that their spotless dishdashas invariably become wrinkled during the flight, and they feel a need to impress those who will greet them on the other side in any way they can? Do they fear that the fresh, clean soap they used in the morning may have worn off? Are they jealous of the girlies who can just paint on a bit of lippy and call themselves freshened-up? Or do they believe that the rest of us enjoy spending a flight weeping into our beef and rice entrees or sneezing onto the in-flight entertainment screens on the backs of the seats in front of us?

‘Tis a puzzlement.

Thighs

2006-08-02T18:12:00.000+04:00

One great thing about scuba diving is that everyone sees you in your bathing suit and no one gives a damn. Including you. It’s very liberating.

Crack

2006-07-29T18:33:00.000+04:00

“Walk, don’t run!” was my father’s mantra when we were kids spending summers at the pool. “You’ll fall on the tiles and crack your head open!” Yeah, yeah. Nobody ever knew anybody that ever did, but fathers have to tell you these things. And we had to listen because if we didn’t we’d have been sent home to swelter while those who behaved got to stay and swim. Though we pretended to ignore him at the time, Dad’s mantra did sink in. I do not run near swimming pools, and have even been known to yell at people who do. However, what Dad didn’t warn us about was that it is just as important to make sure that you dry off once you’re out of the pool, before you start walking on those tiles.

So Thursday was my father’s fault.

OK, so no it wasn’t. I went back into the pool Thursday to look for my aunt’s dental implant, which she thought she had knocked out earlier while I was teaching her to snorkel in preparation for our trip to Sharm in August. I hadn’t bothered to bring a towel or flip flops with me since I was just popping out to double check the shallow end. I did my search and came back into the building, carefully wiping my feet on the mat (gotta be safe!) and ignoring the fact that pool water was cascading off my dripping bod. Next thing I knew, I hit the floor: coccyx – shoulder blades – head. Crack. Hard.

The pain was incredible, but I wasn’t going to break down and blubber in the middle of the hallway. I’m a big girl, after all. Once the stars cleared I shouted for help, and the cleaning guy heard me and came running. He was wonderfully concerned and wanted to call an ambulance, but no. No. Big girl. Just fine. He escorted me to my door and wouldn’t leave me until he had confirmed that there was someone in my apartment to take care of me. Lovely man.

In the thirty seconds that passed between me smacking the floor and then getting up off it, I had developed a lump on the back of my head that would have made Wile E. Coyote proud. I did the basic neuro check and my aunt (who had meanwhile found her implant in her pool towel) looked at my pupils. We decided I would probably live, but should get a second opinion. Off to American Hospital, then.

The doctor checked me over and I was feeling pretty stupid. What kind of fool walks on wet tile? Anyway, we chatted a bit – no doubt to make sure I hadn’t addled my brain too much. I discovered that he’s Egyptian and told him about the upcoming trip. “Oh, Sharm is fantastic. You’ll have a wonderful time. Now let’s get you into X-ray.”

Three films and a five minute consultation later, he says to me, “The radiologist and I have been looking at your x-rays and we think you may have fractured your skull.” Uh oh. Fractured? I'm a big girl; I can deal with this. “And so what do we do about that?” sez I, very calmly. “You can come back in a week or so after the swelling has gone down, and we’ll confirm it one way or the other,” he replies. “But… but… I’m diving the Thistlegorm in two weeks!” “Not with a broken head you’re not.”

And that’s when the big girl broke down and wailed like a babby.

As the hospital staff stood there flabbergasted to see a grown woman blubbing over a missed dive trip, it dawned on one of them that there was an alternative. “We could do a cat scan. Do you have insurance?” (Thank you, boss, for not screwing with our med insurance like you wanted to a couple of years ago.) “Yes. What’ll that do?” “We’ll be able to tell right away if you’ve fractured anything, and we can see whether there’s any bleeding on the brain.” (Bleeding? He had intended to send me home not knowing if my brain was bleeding???). So I wiped my nose and followed the technician into the scanner, where I silently lay with my head in a machine, debating whether or not to mention the whiplash I’d just noticed.

When it was over, I gave him Dhs 1745 and he gave me a disk of the scan. I intend to pick the best picture and put it on my office wall to prove that, even though I am dumb enough to walk around dripping wet on tile, I do indeed have a brain.

But no cracks. Thistlegorm, here I come.

2006-07-09T19:14:00.000+04:00

That's it.

I have finally caved in.