What a Bad Picture

I just stumbled across this picture from a million years ago.  It was snapped on my first trip to Dubai in the UAE, so it must have been around 2003.  I was travelling with a Champlain College team visiting our branch campus and we were dragged to one of those tourist desert trips complete with jeep rides (which I don't love but can handle) and the requisite belly dancers, usually Russian prostitutes (as my friends can tell you, I have a complete aversion to belly dancing and this is inevitably when I drift away into the desert).  This is my old friend Peter Straub.  We were dragooned into putting on the "traditional" garb, which is doubtless why we look so uncomfortable.  It's something that first-time visitors to any region are pushed into doing as a means of showing empathy and understanding for a new culture, but that somehow ends up having the exact opposite effect.  As a person who has grown to love the Arabic world for some reason I find that this picture makes my skin crawl (although, truthfully, I'm not certain exactly why).  However, as a historian, I felt the need to include it anyway.  I'm also amazed at how elephantine I was in this picture, which was me at my heaviest (shortly before I started going to the gym every day - not that it ever seems to do any good).  Annoyingly, Peter looks exactly the same, and I just continue to age dramatically.

As Steve Wehmeyer always opines, I am one of those "desert-loving English," although I don't love this picture.  We both look tangibly uncomfortable, not because of the Arab connection but because we were being pressed to "play Arab."