As I finish washing my face, I see out of the corner of my eye someone standing right by me. About one foot away from me. Or at least that's what it feels like. As I turn around, a paper towel is right in front of my hands. I see the paper towel dispenser on the wall, and I learned to take care of myself pretty early in my life so I'd sort of rather pick up the paper towel myself. But this nice man is standing between me and the paper towel dispenser. And he's got a paper towel right in front of my hands. There is no way to say no without feeling terribly rude, or mean, or a combination of rude, mean and un-understanding.
There is something to understand in this situation. ...
Continue reading "A Secret Union"
This room has fluorescent lights, white and blue tiles on the walls. This room doesn't have a whole lot of light. If I had to guess I'd say I am in a hospital waiting room somewhere in Queens, New York. I can't find the glamour. There is something odd about this room. When we finally board in our Boeing 777 I am still trying to figure out what's odd about that situation. I go to the bathroom and only then I realize that there is a PA system playing music across the plane. Some innocuous music coming out of a movie about the future. I can't recall ever hearing any music when boarding a plane. But maybe I was just not paying attention. And why am I paying attention now?
The flight from Cairo to Dubai is about three hours. Emirates is supposed to become the biggest airline in the world at some point in the near future. This plane is quite fancy. The food is quite fancy... we even get to see the plane take off on the screens across the plane. They placed a camera in the front of the plane. So you see those lights on the runway passing faster, faster, faster and finally... the stars. No one in this plane seems very surprised by this. I am so surprised, I take out the video camera and I start shooting the TV monitor. The flight attendants, who had been wearing some sort of traditional hats while we were boarding the place, now don't have any hats. And they don't look very Middle Eastern to me. They look more like... Scandinavian models. The luxury of this plane, the food, the staff... none of that fits with us, the people on the plane... regular people... Workers, visitors with not too much money, a pair of surprised public radio producers. No one seems very excited in this plane. Is this what the future will look like? A calm, somehow melancholic, un-surprised, luxurious, apathetic, melting pot? Either I am missing something big here, or the future has no soul.
-- Miguel Macias
I will have to learn how to ski one day. Just to know if I could have lied when the woman at the ski Dubai counter asked me if I knew how to ski. I said, "no, can I take a class and learn?"... "you have to take four classes"... "I don't have time for four classes"... "then you can just go into the snow park". That didn't sound like a lot of fun. But I did it anyway... I have a tendency to only work when I travel for work. So sometimes I just have to force myself to do something else.
The snow park is basically a crazy place. But it doesn't feel that crazy when you are there. I have not been in a theme park but I suppose the feeling is fairly similar. The guy in charge of the toboggan didn't object to me riding it 5 times so I could get different video shots. After one hour, it became boring. Probably like any other theme park. I visited the bathroom and noticed that this very serious Asian young waiter was washing his hands. He was the waiter that helped us a couple of days ago when we had dinner at the mall. Back then, he was extremely smiley, extremely nice, in a way that made me feel it could not be fake. He was too nice to be faking it. But now at the bathroom he looks like a different person. It is not that he is not smiling (who smiles in the bathroom?) it is that he looks like he is thinking, like he is worried, like he is in the middle of a process... he looks like a musician before entering the stage, or an athlete before starting a competition. Focused, that's what it is.
Continue reading "The Cultures of the Future"
