My first trip to India was planned months in advance. In addition to the work trip I wanted to make sure I saw someplace new. Not that India wasn’t new but honestly there are many other places I want to see first. My belief is that I shouldn’t fly that far around the world and not have something personal to show for it. I envision being 80 years old talking to my grandchildren about where I’ve been and not wanting to make a lame excuse that I was too busy or too scared to spend a day seeing something more significant than the inside of a hotel or office building. I am very lucky that Dan supports me in this because he is the one that bears the brunt of my being gone longer than necessary. I could have gone to Paris but I have been there before (I am not sure you can go there too many times but bear with me I am trying to be adventurous). I decided on Dubai. I had hope along the way that a few work colleagues would be able to join me but in the end I went by myself - something that seems well and good on paper but is scary as hell in the execution. The day before I left Megan broke down crying about how much she will miss me. I like to tell myself I am providing a good example of independence, self sufficiency and adventure and this may be true but these times also make me feel like a complete asshole.
Preparing for a trip like this is a monumental task. First thinking about the household needs while I’m gone; shopping, pre-making food, arranging babysitters and dog walkers, refilling toilet paper holders; the list is endless. Packing enough without over packing is an art and the amount of time putting my spreadsheet of outfits together makes me feel like a deviant. It seems that I have more food and medication than clothing on this trip. I have a whole pack work gave me in case I get sick, plus all my remedies - Advil, Emergencee, sleeping pills, uppers, downers, probiotics, vitamins, snack food, sea salt, you name it I have it. And honestly I wish I brought more.
For this trip I flew Emirates which was nice; they give you a mattress to put on your flat bed seat which makes a big difference; between that the and the sleeping pill I am out for a good 6 hours - a personal best for sleeping on a plane. When I get to Dubai I am amused to find the customs officers dressed in traditional arab headresses. Of course this is their country and I am not sure why I find this amusing except to say that traveling in places like this just assaults your senses in every way. I was advised to take a pink cab to the hotel. This is basically a fleet of cabs driven by women. Some say these aren’t safe because they wear berkas that cover most of their faces; one guy told me not to take them because “you can’t see shit when you wear a berka”. But at the time, being paranoid and ignorant I reasoned that getting in a car accident was better than getting raped (I have made no secret of the fact that I am a drama queen).
My hotel room is gigantic with 2 bathrooms, a kitchen with a washing machine and a giant living room. For the first time I can remember I capped off a 30 hour trip with going to the gym. It was a great way to press the reset button but I got into a little squabble with the guy on the treadmill next to me who was talking - no screaming on the phone in arabic. I finally asked him to stop but quickly remembered I was in a gym alone with a large arabic man and maybe I should just keep my mouth shut.
I usually go to the Pats home playoff games so I was very sad to find out that a trip that was planned months ago overlapped with 2 games. I made elaborate preparations to watch the Baltimore game in Dubai - called the hotel to see if they would have the broadcast and considered buying Sling Box until my friend offered to let me sign into his. I went in search of dinner at 10 pm but in Dubai most restaurants and many hotels cannot serve liquor. In fact locals have to have a license to buy alcohol and the quantity you buy is dependent on your income. It would seem the poorer you are the more alcohol you would need but whatever.
Anyway after 30 hours of flying I wanted a drink and some football. I found a sports bar close to the hotel but I had to walk through a little dark mini desert to get there; not a long walk but pretty frightening. The hotel kept telling me that Dubai is very safe; that they put people in jail and throw away the key for even minor offenses like stealing pocketbooks. So I adventure out and end up sitting next to a Russian guy who ran the Aldo store in the worlds biggest mall. He proceeded to tell me how bad Americans are and how nice Putin is. I just laugh and agree with him and slowly try to get away from him by befriending a woman from Atlanta and her German boyfriend. It doesn’t seem safe to argue with a Russian kid who seems to be missing his faculties in a foreign country. After watching the first half of the Patriots game with a crowd of people watching me watch the Patriots game I decided to go back to the hotel to watch the second half where I signed into sling box, fell dead asleep and missed the huge 3rd and 4th qtr, waking up in a panic to find out what happened.
It is evident that whoever designed this city had been to Disneyland. If I had to describe it I would say its a combination of Vegas, Disney and Miami; amazing architecture, neon lights and the “city on the ocean vibe”. Everywhere you go you see gigantic parks like the Atlantis, an enormous outdoor jungle, an indoor ski area, etc. People watching in Dubai rivals Vegas. There are so many nationalities here that English is the only common one so everyone speaks it with varying degrees of proficiency.
The work week here is Sunday to Thursday because Friday is a holy day. On Sunday I met up with a friend of a friend who is living here with his wife who is an EXPAT. He took me to lunch at the Dubai Mall which is the biggest mall in the world. The malls here are beyond enormous and overwhelming and they have everything you can possibly think of; cinemas, ice rinks, aquariums, fountains, indoor ski areas and every store imaginable. One of the things I found so curious was all the women in burkas shopping for Louis Vuitton bags and Ferragamo shoes. If you’re wearing a giant black sheet every day I am not quite sure why you need Ferragamo shoes. As if confirming the ignorance of the average American I can also say that I don’t give a shit why.
The largest mall is at the base of the worlds tallest building the Burj Khalifa and has a famous outdoor fountain where we sat in the hot sun for an amazing lebanese lunch. (I have to say I feel this building is cheating since the top is a gigantic spiral with nothing in it). At random points in the day they play what sounds like super loud songs or chants over loudspeakers all over the city. It lasts for 10 minutes or so and my friend tells me they are prayers. I was so thankful to be driven around; they drive on the same side of the road as us but the highways are 8 lanes and up and the traffic patterns very strange; you have to drive around in endless circles to get to a place you can see right across the road. Gas is very cheap and everyone is super rich so mostly you see Lamborghinis, Bentleys, Mercedes and all kinds of other premium cars large and small. Everything here is under construction. There are cranes larger than skyscrapers all over and the city seems to be either all concrete and sand with some glass mixed in.
We drove all over the city - driving by the Burj Al Arab on the water, the worlds only 7 star hotel (of course Dubai tourism is always making up distinctions for themselves). I had looked into staying at this famous hotel but quickly ruled it out when I found that one night is 7,000 US dollars. I also looked into going into the hotel just to see it but you have to have dinner reservations which I considered making a few months ago but never did. We drove out to the waters edge to the palace of Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan who is more officially referred to as His Highness Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan (LMAO). His palace goes on for miles on the water then there’s a section that also goes on for miles for the palaces of his wives. We stopped at the beach then drove over to the Palms where all of the rich people laundering money in Dubai live. I capped off my visit with a dinner by myself on the beach section called Jumeirah.
Overall I like Dubai and I am glad I saw it but I don’t have much of a desire to return. Everything is so contrived and devoid of personality or history - like some fictional city you read about in the Hunger Games. I could have stayed longer to go to the beach but I can think of much better places to go for that. I happily begin the trek to Bangalore via the Dubai airport. This would be my last glimpse of society as I know it for a few weeks.
In Bangalore I had a driver because you can’t drive yourself and my work will not allow a random cab for safety reasons. So my driver picked me up and I head to the city which is an hour plus away. Everyone knows driving in India is insane but no words could do the experience justice. They drive on the opposite side of the road, lanes are not observed and cars weave in and out all over the place beeping their horns every 2 minutes. There are mopeds, bikes, rickshaws and people walking along the highway going the wrong way. I don’t know if there’s a speed limit but there are people going 10, 40 and 70 miles an hour all on the same road. It all seems like some kind of meticulously choreographed routine; miraculously working despite the extreme chaos. People pile onto mopeds with little kids slumped over the steering wheel, large parcels on board and some driving barefoot. I saw rickshaws with more people in them than you can count.You can practically smell the breath of the drivers next to you. You will be on what seems to be a highway but it has speed bumps at random spots. Pure insanity.
I’m told Bangalore is a safe place to be relative to other India cities but my hotel security is very tight. Every time the car drops me off they search the car, checking the trunk and hood and an old decrepit lab sniffs the whole thing up and down. It mirrors airport security with the mandatory scanning of all your bags each time you enter the hotel. This seems aggravating at first but does serve to make you feel very secure. My hotel is a highlight of the trip. The service is amazing. All the waiters and bartenders are men and there are 4 of them for every customer. The minute you enter the hotel there are women walking around with drinks - juice, champagne, whatever you want. They all memorize my name. At the hotel gym the second you finish a bottle of water they bring you another one and they offer to wipe the sweat off your brow. At one point the gym attendant was spotting a few guys lifting weights and helping to stretch them out. I am there for so long they start to learn my needs and bring me things I want without my asking. Being in the hotel you could be anywhere; there are a lot of Americans, Brits and Germans as well as arabs and Indians from all states. Its the only remotely easy thing in this visit.
Food was a major issue for me. Most people have the same issues but the diet here is opposite of the way I eat. The water can’t be trusted which means I can’t eat salads or anything that has been washed and not cooked. I brush my teeth with bottled water and nervously breathe from my nose while showering so I won’t get water in my mouth. I am not sure if the water is bad or just bad for people who aren’t used to it but I guess it doesn’t matter. There are many options for food but I don’t recognize many of them since I don’t even eat Indian food at home and everything is covered in mystery sauce. I eat the same thing practically every day at home and in order to not starve I break my rule of no bread for lack of anything safe to eat. Of all the differences between home and here I find this the hardest to deal with. I subsist on Quest bars and almonds that I brought with me.
My first week here I was by myself and tried to take advantage and recover from jet lag. I fell asleep early but woke up at 3:30 every morning, taking a few cat naps until I finally got up in frustration to go to the gym. This pattern repeats itself for a solid week. I survive on adrenaline; my body has no idea what the hell is going on. I find myself asking what the fuck time is it every half an hour for 24 hours a day; its 9.5 hours ahead and its the half hour that really throws me off. Its hard to stay in touch with anyone because I only have wifi when most of the world I know is asleep. I end up Face-timing the kids at 6 am when they in bed and I’m rushing to get ready for work. Getting up at 3 or 4 every morning works out well for me to watch the AFC championship. My WIFI signal fails me and I end up going to the lobby for coffee and meeting an Israeli expat who is watching the game via the NFL pass. We sit in the lobby having breakfast and watching the PATS. By the time its over I am late for work, spending 12 hours blissfully unaware of deflate- gate.
The traffic is so bad that it takes an hour to get to and from work each way and I spend 2 hours a day staring listlessly out the window at all the sights while my driver weaves in and out of traffic like a car chase scene from the Bourne Identity.
The purpose of the trip is to meet my new group in my new job - I have already met over 80 new people and this is a continuation. This job is new in every way; new industry (HR) new division, new role and new focus. I am WAY off the ranch of my comfort zone - a place I continually force myself to be but question myself when I get there. I get bored, force myself to make changes then spend months questioning it until gradually it becomes my normal. I was in my last job for 7 years which is a personal record; I was established with a significant amount of freedom including working from home and making my own schedule. I probably should have made a change 3 years earlier but I tried to stem the intellectual boredom by fiercely embracing every ridiculous hobby you can think of: making everything from scratch including brownies, gluten free bread and granola bars, marathon running, blogging, photoshopping, halloween craft making - you name it. In the end I needed a challenge at work. I find it very annoying that I can’t just accept a good job that allows me freedom to be the best mother/wife/self actualized person I can be. I just can’t pay attention to anything when I’m bored; succumbing to chronic procrastination and laziness in all things. Its unfortunate that I force myself to make changes yet I don’t handle them well and I exist in a perpetual state of self doubt for months while my husband and good friends talk me off the ledge, convincing me that I need to give it time. Add to this the newness of going to 3rd world countries and I am orbiting in a new galaxy that I struggle to put into words. My life’s achievement may be to be comfortable not being comfortable.
The people at the office are great hosts; they bend over backwards making sure my stay is comfortable and I have everything I need. They are very sincere and wonderful people. But the combination of everything being new is overwhelming and it seems to require that I get an extra 3 hours of sleep a night while I am barely getting half of what I get at home. I am feeling torn every hour between being homesick and excited. I go from being hyper with excitement to beyond exhaustion within a 5 minute span.
On Friday my boss and other co workers get here which as it turns out is just in time because I am starting to feel completely insane for having decided to come here by myself. On Saturday we set out on a temple tour. I had hoped we would go to Taj Mahal but its thousands of miles away. Our guide was a local co-worker who took us to only local places no sane American traveler would go to; they were not typical touristy destinations. Along the way he explained the history of India and some of the religious customs; patiently putting up with our incessant questions the whole way. I practically forced my boss who is a man to sit in the front seat. I am not even the type to ride a Disneyland swirly tea cup ride never mind to sit in the front of an Indian driving odyssey without blindfolds.
We stopped for lunch along the way and saw many emaciated dogs hanging around. This is an epidemic in India and its one of the worst things for me to see. The dogs run all over the place in and out of traffic like they own the city. There is an initiative going on to neuter the dogs but they are still everywhere. I ended up feeding a little hungry boy my lunch then I torture myself the whole way to the temple wondering if I over fed him and made him sick.
Our first stop was Halebidu Temple which was about a 2 hour drive from Bangalore crossing everything from highways to small side roads littered with hoards of goats, cows and donkeys. Along the way I finally stopped taking pictures of cows because they have now become routine for me; cows in the median strip, cows tied up outside shacks, COWS. The temple is an operational Buddha temple with a village at the base. On our way we were accosted by locals selling souvenirs. Thankfully the local I was with took charge of the negotiation, haggling for a Ganesha statue that we bought for $20. After we erie away the local said the woman told him it had tarn her 5 days to make it. This made me feel really bad. These statues are everywhere and we learned that Ganesha is a hindu god with an elephant head and gives you peace and tranquility when the trunk is down and wisdom when its up. My co worker explained that Ganesha has an elephant head because his father cut his head off, not realizing it was his son. When the mother told him to fix it the father (who was a god) replaced the boys head with the head of an elephant which was the closest living thing. I take no responsibility for the veracity of these statements I am merely document what I remember for posterity and to explain to the kids why I bought them so many elephant statues.
To climb the temple we had to buy socks and walk with no shoes up the the temple via very steep, uneven stairs covered in sand. Huffing and puffing up the stairs someone in front of us lost their lunch and I had to negotiate around it to get up the stairs; challenging every fiber of my sensibilities. When you get to the top there are people praying and meditating and we got blessed and marked with a bindi in return for a donation. At the base of the temple they sell coconuts which they hash open with a machete, give you the juice to drink then cut up the inside of the coconut. We couldn’t eat it because its unsafe given that you don’t know if or what the machete has been washed in and the only way to drink the coconut is with a straw of equally suspect cleanliness.
We trekked to the Chennakesava Temple which is an operational Hindu temple built in 1117 AD. We saw amazing architecture with plenty of locals in traditional sarees and Indian garb. This also required us to take our shoes off and re-outfit ourselves with filthy socks. To me this only enhanced the adventure and was worth the discomfort for the amusement of my straight laced boss and his despair over the whole process. We had a local tour guide who took us into the pitch black back of the temple where there were Hindu statues lined up. He led the way through with a small pocket light while I verged on the brink of a panic attack. Had I not been with a local I would have surely had heart failure.
If I thought I stuck out like a sore thumb in China that was nothing. At one point a man started video taping me - presumably having never seen a pasty white girl. My friends were perturbed by this but I thought it was a riot given that I had been rubbernecking like only an idiotic American can do at everything and everyone I have seen here that is outside my frame of reference. In short, I deserved it. It is a little weird to think that maybe there’s a video of me on the inter-web being shared in a small village in India. At several places we were swarmed by the cutest little school girls who wanted to have their picture taken with us, screaming “photo!”, “photo!”. We took pictures and they insisted on looking at them on the camera screen, screaming in delight.
I spent Sunday alone; I was glad to have the day to myself but it is an utterly foreign feeling for me in the last 20 years to be alone without a single obligation. The driver will take me anywhere I want but its not safe to do a lot of things but shop and I am not a shopper. I read, worked out, and just relaxed. While here I am having deja vu to my 20s when I travelled a lot alone - doing whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. It feels liberating and just plain wrong all at the same time. At one point I felt panicked and homesick and thought I might like a good cry, then went to the sunny pool to make myself better. Problem solved.
By my second week I had settled in a bit and was sleeping better but the work schedule was grueling, meetings every half an hour until 7 pm then work dinners, meeting and chatting with hundreds of new colleagues. I struggle remembering names and keeping up with the small talk. I am normally very good at this but it seems to go on endlessly and I feel my adrenaline draining and my head aching with sensory and information overload. The closer I get to coming home the harder I find it to concentrate.
We finally leave on a Friday night at 1 am. In addition to my driver I have to be accompanied by a security detail because its the middle of the night and I am a woman. I had to wait almost an hour in the customs line and the security line is the biggest cluster-fuck, with separate lines for men and women and 90 security guards checking and rechecking the same things. I am told the Bangalore airport is much better than it used to be but I am not a fan. After a 4 hour flight we land in Dubai which was intensely crowded with just about every race and religion you can imagine. As we enter the Dubai airport I have an immediate feeling of relief knowing that I can eat anything I want and even the very air seems better. There is no shortage of shopping in and things to do in this airport but its wildly chaotic - there are no protocols for walking observed; people walk all over in ever direction running into you, blocking traffic. It’s exhausting just to get to your gate.
In an odd twist of fate I was waiting in line in Dubai for my flight and the guy in front of me looked oddly familiar. It took me a few minutes then I realized he worked for me 10+ years ago but then I couldn't remember his name. All of a sudden it dawned on me that I fired him or laid him off and then he starts looking back at me - every time I see his head slightly move I look back so he can't see my face because of all things after an all night flight from Bangalore the worst thing that could possibly happen would be small talk with a person you once fired? As luck would have it this is the longest line to get on a plane you have ever witnessed and I go to extreme lengths to avoid eye contact with him. I still don't really remember if I fired him or laid him off but I do remember his lack of common sense and the fact that he was really pissed when I did it. Freud would say that I blocked this out? Trauma based amnesia? I don't remember shit anymore anyway so probably just plain forgot.
Once we left Dubai I had a 14 hour flight to Boston. But business class its surprisingly easy to deal with; sleeping, watching movies and drinking anything you want - all for free. Its such a strange feeling to be on a flight, watch 3 movies and look at the time and realize you still have 9 hours of flying left.
When I land in Boston the relief is palpable - just to be amongst the familiar. Ever single thing I see seems like something to be grateful for. Being able to go to the store without an escort, not having to divide by 60 to determine the price of things, Starbucks, salad, brushing your teeth with tap water, my phone works, roads make sense and they aren’t littered with garbage. Even the traffic on the mass pike seems like a welcome change.
Having gone to India once I think it will be much less taxing to go again. I have to go in March and I am already plotting out how to bring a full cooler of food with me. Until then I am going to enjoy a few weeks at home before the next adventure.
