Abu Dhabi and Muscat

It's Saturday night and I'm in Muscat, Oman. It's amazing how quickly this trip is moving along. One week from tonight I will have left Oman, passed back through Dubai, then Paris, then Budapest, then back through Paris, and then JFK and back to Burlington - and that's assuming that everything works as it is scheduled to work. Air France is on strike and beginning tomorrow night I have four flights on Air France - two on Monday (Dubai-Paris; Paris-Budpaest) and two on Saturday (Budapest-Paris; Paris-JFK) - so who knows how it will all play itself out.

After my day of meetings at the Dubai campus of Zayed on Wednesday I caught the shuttle to Abu Dhabi around 3:00. There I met up with Kate O'Neill who teaches at the Abu Dhabi campus of Zayed University - Kate is also from South Burlington. She very graciously volunteered to put me up while I was in town. I had never met her husband Scott, or her three sons - Hobie, Berent and Peyton. I ended up sleeping over at her brother Chris's apartment, which was about a five minute walk. They were all fantastic and I had a great time. Kate felt that I'd never get a moment's peace with her boys so she thought I should stay with Chris. Actually, the boys were great and by the time I left Berent and I were sharing tootsie pops, which has all the hallmarks of a life-long friendship. The meeting at the Abu Dhabi campus of Zayed went very well and, considering the accomplishments of Wednesday's meetings at the Dubai campus, give me a lot of hope for the future.

I made it back to Dubai on Friday night. Kate, Chris and Scott were going to Dubai, and stay in a nice hotel, to see the reformed band Queen as a birthday gift for Chris. So, we said our goodbyes to the boys and took off early afternoon. Before we left we had to feed Kate who, like me, apparently is a blood sugar accident waiting to happen (grin). We went to a nice mall and headed to the food court. Kate went to McDonald's while Chris and I headed to Dairy Queen - where I had a double cheeseburger, chili fries and a chocolate milk shake (hardly what most folks in America would associate with Middle Eastern fare, although these restaurants are very common in some parts of the Middle East - we passed by KFC, Burger King, Chili's and Krispy Kreme). When we made it to Dubai there was a mix-up with the room and Chris, in a demonstration of a great talent he has (hidden under the layers of a very nice guy) pushed the people at the front desk until they received a night's stay at a $2500 a night suite on the top floor. The suite was insanely nice - and I told them that I hoped to live long enough to live in a house as nice as the third bathroom in the suite. My flight out wasn't leaving until 10:20 so they asked me to hang around for a couple hours. As part of their largesse they were invited to a complimentary drink/starter/dessert reception starting at 6:00. We showed up, hunkered down with endless waves of food, and then the band showed up - which is how I found myself next to Brian May in the buffet line. Very odd.

I'll have a lot more to say about Kate and Scott and Chris and the boys - as well as Dubai and Abu Dhabi later. I took my leave around 7:00 and caught a taxi to the airport. My flight on Swiss Air left right on time and by a little after 11:00 I had arrived in Muscat, Oman, which was my first time in the country. After swapping dollars for Rials, which is humbling because it's around $3 to a Rial I queued up to get my visa. It was a long line, but it was very painless. Everyplace I've visited I've either not needed a passport or could just pick it up at the airport, with the exception of India where I had to send it off in advance - another of the advantages of being a US citizen.

Joanna Nel, who teaches online for us at Champlain, met me at the airport. I first met Joanna years ago when she was teaching at our campus in Dubai. I encouraged her to think about teaching online and she contacted Champlain and has been doing so ever since. Then a couple years ago I was chairing a panel at a conference in Amman and asked her to put in a proposal, so I saw her again, and met her husband Francois for the first time, this time in Jordan. So now she was nice enough to ask me to stay at their place in Muscat while I was in town. They are originally from near Cape Town in South Africa. In fact, Francois and I watched the South African national team, the Springboks, play tonight on cable - he was very pleased when I disappeared into the back to change into the Springboks t-shirt that I had picked up in Pretoria a couple months back.

I have a day's worth of meetings tomorrow at Sultan Qaboos University but today was wide open. So, Joanna played tour guide and we went downtown to old Muscat. It was a great day, but more on that later.

Dubai

OK, I've made it back to Dubai. I'm sitting in my friend Yunsun "Sun" Chung-shin's office at Zayed University in between meetings, feeding off of the university's wifi. The trip down from Amman was uneventful, other than I'm utterly spoiled. Emirates Airlines is such a great airline - so much better than that dreadful flight I had over the Atlantic on Delta. The food last night was fantastic and the seats were confortable and every seat had it's own individual screen with a library of films to watch - sort of like British Airways, except with more comfortable seats. I watched an independent film I'd never seen before called My Blueberry Nights - I'm a sucker for independent films, but this was mindly entertaining at best. It starred Norah Jones (don't know how many movies she has done - she was OK, although the high point was her cover of Neil Young's "Harvest Moon" - didn't see that coming), Jude Law, Rachael Weitz and Natalie Portman. In the row next to me there was a woman, in very traditional Arabic garb, who had three seats to herself - and she was watching three different programs. I don't know what was more surprising - that John Carpenter's Big Trouble in Little China was in the film library, or that someone had actually chosen it to watch.

I stayed at a hotel called the Jumeira Rotana last night - although I didn't get in until around 10:30 p.m. and the driver from Zayed came at around 7:30 to pick me up. It wasn't much of a stay for a sizeable amount of money. If you factor in the cost of the room, the room tax, the ride in from the airport, and the breakfast, I'm sure it was around $200 for nine hours at the hotel - and I didn't even get to take advantage of the pool or exercise facility. However, that's practically slumming it in Dubai. It was the least expensive, logically convenient hotel that Zayed could find. And this is why I'm spending the rest of this trip and my time in Muscat, Oman sleeping on the couch in professors' houses (grin). On my two previous trips Zayed picked up the tab and I was staying at places that were normally around $300 a night (although I don't know what deal the school got). I wonder what Sudhir paid for that place he used to put us up in near to our old campus in Dubai - the one with all the Russian prostitutes in the bar?

Now I'm back visiting Zayed, trying to convince them to embed more GMs in their curriculum. They are a nice size for us, about 2000 students - 1000 here in Dubai and a 1000 in Abu Dhabi, where I'll be tomorrow. Again, a fascinating place - a sleek, ultra modern campus with great technological infrastructure - and all the students, it's an all-women's school, wearing head to toe traditonal black abayas. Still, they're very interested in the connecting to the rest of the world. I talked to the students in Sun's class today and they're great kids - very enthusiastic and friendly.

Security at the University of Jordan

The concept of just leisurely strolling onto a university campus is a very American concept - or at least a very American and European concept (which is ironic since we're the ones known for school shootings). In the Middle East and some parts of Africa (Morocco and Kenya yes, South Africa no) there is always a lot of security around campuses, and they don't even like you snapping pictures of the place. There are several gates leading into UJ and I normally enter using the big gate across the street from the fast food restaurants down the road from ACOR - there's a tunnel there under the street. I've been coming onto the campus of UJ for years now, often several days in a row on each trip - and the response is almost always different. Sometimes the professor or administrator I'm visiting will meet me at the gate and we just breeze through. Other times I'm by myself and the guards just wave at me and I stroll through. Sometimes they ask to see my passport or who I am scheduled to see (in a very clumsy conversation limited by very few words in common). Yesterday I was actually sent over to the security building, which was a first, where I had to sit down and say who I was visiting - she was an assistant professor who they had never heard of and they couldn't quite figure out who to call - until I thought of the magic word, Majdoubeh. He is a dean and very well known - as soon as I said the magic words they threw their hands in the air and said Majdoubeh, as if it were a ceremonial greeting or Hamdil'allah ("thanks be to god"). I felt like Ali Baba - the cave opened and in I went (although with a written pass, which was the first time I'd ever received one). Now, the day before I had been on campus for meetings all day and ended up leaving something in a room by mistake, which I didn't remember until I had made it all the way back to ACOR, and it was night. So, I turned around and walked all the way back figuring that I'd have issues at the gate, but the guards just smiled at me and waved me in.

Moving On

It's already my last day in Amman, even though it seems like I just arrived yesterday. It was another fruitful trip and I'm slowly making progress with the University of Jordan. Huge universities like UJ have tremendous potential for my program, but they also take a lot longer to turn as compared to small schools like Champlain or Al Akhawayn - it's like trying to turn a huge pleasure cruiser on the ocean as compared to a small car on dry land. We're running GMs in several literature classes and are moving closer to potentially embedding the GMs in a new course entitled Intro to Cross-Cultural Interactions (which would be a great fit - as I always say, you shouldn't hammer the GMs into a course just to say you've done it - if it fits and benefits the course, then they should go there - we'll be running GMs in a couple of the Cross-Cultural courses as an experiment). My friends Inas, Laza, Sane and Deema were once again remarkably supportive. I received a lovely gift from Inas.

ACOR was quarky, as usual. There are several students here from West Point who are spending the semester studying Arabic across the street at UJ. Great kids. I haven't been called sir so often since I taught in India. The faculty members are artists and visiting Fulbright scholars and folks doing more serious research - and then me promoting the GMs. On an earlier trip my friends Bob, Rob, Char and Ann took to calling me the RA of ACOR, and as a veteran I guess that's a good designation. Last night I gave my usual tour of local ice cream and schwarma establishments last night (and the schwarma was wonderful, per usual, and the guy who runs the stand was very excited to see me again - and why not, much as with Homer and the hot dog salesman who followed him to the funeral, I'm putting his kids through college). I talked to Barbara, who is the director here at ACOR, and asked her if I now held the world record for most stays at ACOR (six), but she says I'm not even close, which is a testament to the place. Barbara is also heading out the door today to go to the US for a presentation at a conference on ACOR. The assistant director, Chris Tuttle, will also be taking off for the US in a week or so to defend his disseration - and then make a trip up to his home state of Vermont (we might catch lunch in Burlington when he's in town). If the name Tuttle in Vermont sounds familiar then it should, he is Fred's son. A very small world.

Today at 2:00 the driver comes to take me to the Amman airport to catch my 4:30 flight to Dubai. Then a night in a hotel in Dubai, and Wednesday I have meetings at the Dubai campus of Zayed University. At the end of the day I catch the bus to Abu Dhabi where I'll be bunking at Zayed Professor Kate O'Neill's place (Kate went to South Burlington high school - again, a very small world). On Thursday I have meetings at the Abu Dhabi campus of Zayed University, then back to Kate's place. Then on Friday I'm catching a ride back into Dubai with Kate and her husband, who are going to town for some event and are staying at a downtown hotel, so I'm bumming a ride with them, and then trying to sneak onto the hotel shuttle back to the airport for a late night flight to Muscat, Oman (where I'll be sleeping on the couch of Champlain online professor Johanna Nel). See, it is a luxurious, exciting life - staying at $30 a night establishments in Amman and sleeping on the couch of friends in Abu Dhabi and Muscat.

Reflections on Things at Hand: Indian Sacred Caves

Don't know why my mind is full of India images tonight - maybe I feel like I'm cheating on India by spending so much time in the Middle East. Plus, as I was working up a presentation today I went through hundreds of pictures from the summer of 2004 that I spent teaching at Champlain's campus in Mumbai. That was before I started this blog, and, for that matter, before I started writing in my regular travel journal - so maybe I should make an effort to get some of this down before it all fades away. It really was the most amazing educational experience of my life, and India remains my favorite place in the whole world. I could fill up dozens of blog posting with my remembrances of India.

That said, let me, quickly, say a few words about the trip I made to Aurangabad shortly before I left India. I had been planning to make a weekend trip for a while and finally figured out where I wanted to go (my father and I made a wild trip down to Vellore and then up to Agra, but that's another posting). From Mumbai you can take a sleeper bus - sort of like in Harry Potter - up to Aurangabad, to the northeast. I saw several things that weekend, but what amazed me were the sacred caves of Ellora and Ajanta - I saw Ellora on Saturday and Ajanta on Sunday. Both are natural cave formations that were added on over the centuries - there were efforts to dig deeper into the side of the cliff and also innumerable statues were carved. Ellora is a combination of Hindu, Buddhist and Jain statues, carved depending upon what religion was popular with what leader at the time. Ajanta is all Buddhist, and also has paintings, which Ellora does not feature. I have a bizarre story about the most famous cave painting at Ajanta, but I've save that for later. The carving at Ellora which, to this day, I can't quite believe I saw - it ranks up there with the pyramids and the Taj Mahal and Petra and Notre Dame in the category of most amazing things I've ever seen - is what is sometimes referred to as cave 16, or the Kailasa temple. It is one massive temple, but it is even more astonishing that at first glance. It is carved out of one piece of stone - and is twice as big as the Parthenon. It is believed the 7000 craftsmen worked for a century and a half carving it out of the cliff. They just started at the top of the cliff and began to work their way down. It is almost beyond comprehension.

Saturday in Amman

It's Saturday night and back safely enscounced at ACOR. I had to get up early this morning to finish one of the two presentations I had to give this morning over at the University of Jordan (and after yesterday's long flight it was a challenge). The first one was about Global Modules and, not surprisingly, I was able to adapt that one fairly quickly. The second presentation was my own take on intercultural awareness, which was an interesting topic (although I'm sure not an interesting presentation). Both presentations, along with several others, were part of a small conference that UJ put together for their Intercultural Communication class. I had spent several hours working on the second presentation - mainly going back through thousands of old pictures from foreign travel and seeing what they sparked. In the end it was a series of pictures along with corresponding observations on what it means when cultures meet/clash/meld - the philosophers will be happy to know that I started with a picture I took from inside a cave at Petra and ended with a drawing of Plato's allegory of the cave. They both went well and it was a lot of fun. The kids from UJ, like their own international colleagues, really do want to communicate with the US. I'd love to have the people who routinely bad mouth the Middle East just spend some time with these wonderful students.

After the meeting I went out to Sane Yagi's house for lunch. Yagi is a UJ professor who is a big supporter of the GMs. He had a really nice house in a new suburb of Amman - and, like seemingly every building in Amman, it is made of white stone. He assures me it is very nice because he went in with all of his brothers on the construction of it (and because, before coming to UJ, he worked overseas for years). The house has five levels, with Yagi and his family living on the first floor, and four other brothers having their own level. We had a huge lunch - I accused Yagi and his wife of being closet Indians in their mad desire to stuff me - and I spent a long time talking to Yagi, his wife, and his two sons, both of whom are great young men. The younger son had just finished a midterm exam and UJ, while the other son is in e-commerce and was getting ready to take off in a couple hours for a conference in Las Vegas - typically, he handed his mother a long list of things he needed for the trip at the last moment (he had studied in Australia and New Zealand and had a wonderful mixed Arabic-Australian-Kiwi accent). His wife taught chemistry at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman for years. In addition I met Yagi's father, who also lives with them. We talked about politics and students and the peculiarites of the Arabic and English languages. All in all, a lovely day.

So, I'm now back at ACOR listening to Neil Young sing about a "Bad Fog of Loneliness." ACOR is a nice place to stay, but the only two TVs are downstairs, so the rooms are a bit quiet at night. Still, they have quite a collection of burnt CDs so maybe I'll go pick one out for a viewing on the laptop. But first, time to raid the kitchen for leftovers.

Back in Amman

OK, I've made it back to Amman, safe and sound. I'm staying at the American Center of Oriental Research (ACOR) again, although it looks pretty deserted at the moment. The flight was fairly uneventful, although the bulkhead seat I connived to score didn't have nearly the legroom that I was hoping for. Not much time at the moment because I have to get two presentations ready for tomorrow.