Which One Is Slower?

For some reason I really like this picture, although I am in it – and I hate pictures of myself. However, I really seem to be enjoying myself. One of the tours you could take is out to Prison Island, which was never actually a prison, but instead a quarantine stop for ships coming into Stone Town in Zanzibar. Now it is mainly known as a sanctuary for giant tortoises. There are dozens of them, several of them over a hundred years old. My guide wanted me to actually ride the tortoise, but I explained that I probably weighed more than the tortoise and that it might be a bad idea. Several of them were much larger than this one. The bigger ones would groan mightily when they stood up, take four steps, and then just collapse. Oh, and they stunk to high heaven, mainly because they live off of a diet of rotten cabbage - and you haven’t really lived until you’ve experienced a giant tortoise breaking wind. My brother Eric thinks the guy on the right has a more sleek design.

Swimming with Dolphins

There are times, especially overseas it seems, when it really hits you where you are at a particular moment - and how you can't believe that you're there at that moment. I remember walking through the siq at Petra for the first time with my good friend Faith and she kept saying, "I can't believe that I'm here. I can't believe that I'm here." And I knew exactly what she meant. I've been lucky, really lucky, to have had more than a few of those moments; although, to be fair, it's also a product of a lot of hard work and a lot of smart decisions - and also the courage/idiocy of saying, quite often, "sure, why the hell not, I can go there." As great as the Zanzibar trip was, the truly transcendent moment was swimming with dolphins out in the open ocean. It may have meant so much to me simply because it's not normally something that I would do. As a historian I am much more likely to gravitate to museums or ruins. On this trip I made a concerted effort to do other things, and this led me to the dolphins. It was one of the choices for outside activities at the aptly named Dolphin Bay Resort where I stayed (more on that later). According to the schedule the dolphin tour was a half-day event, although it was also very inexpensive. My thinking was that I would hop on a big boat and that we'd spend two hours tracking down the dolphins - and nothing could be further from the truth, happily.

The boat was tiny and we stumbled across a group of dolphins in around ten minutes. The guide told me to put on my snorkel and fins - and was in the midst of explaining that there were good and bad dolphins - when he suddenly yelled, "Into the water." That was all the preparation, but I figured that he knew what he was talking about, so I dropped off the side. A few seconds later a dozen or so dolphins, including babies, swam right beneath me. And then they were gone. I popped up, the guide told me to climb back into the boat (which required me taking off my fins), and off we went chansing the dolphins. I put back on the fins, just in time to follow his directions to jump back into the water. This was repeated four times, and every time the dolphins swam right next to me, seemingly oblivious to the large clumsy oaf right above them. The last time four of them came so close to me that I reached out my hand and came within six inches of touching the dorsal fin of the nearest one.

After that the guide took advantage of the fact that the tide was in to drop me off at the beach of the resort, and I rushed in to change before he came back to pick me up to go check out colobus monkeys. The entire event took maybe an hour, and since I was rushing on to do something else it almost seemed unreal. Of course, it's also something that I came back to in my mind again and again for the rest of the week. I don't know if I can truly do it justice even now. Maybe I need even more distance from it to truly put it into words. All I know is that it has clearly and firmly moved into my top ten all-time favorite moments.

Asante Sana Zanzibar

I guess if you're going to celebrate your 500th posting then this is about as good a topic as you could imagine. Yesterday I made my way back from a week in Zanzibar, Tanzania. The trip back was exhausting, especially considering that it began with me throwing up for the first time in almost twenty-five years. The natural supposition would be that I picked up some dreaded African bug, but instead it was my utter idiocy of taking Doxycyline (my anti-malarial medicine) and Panadol (the Middle Eastern version of Advil) on an empty stomach. Doh! After clearing my stomach I launched an eighteen hour trip that took me from Zanzibar to Dar es Salaam to Nairobi to Doha to Abu Dhabi, which was not as romantic as it sounds; the high point was sitting in a coffeeshop in the Dar es Salaam airport, counting the cockroaches on the wall and wondering why all the Chinese guys were pounding beers at 9:00 in the morning (probably to prepare them for all the wine they had on the plane). I'm opening up with the exhausting part of the journey to explain why I'm just too tired (and busy getting back to work) to go into details on the time spent in Zanzibar. It was magical; truthfully, I can't think of a better way to describe it. My great friend Trish has always waxed poetic about Zanzibar and identified it as her favorite place on the planet, and she, as usual, didn't steer me wrong. Doubtless this blog will be dominated by Zanzibar for the near future. I swam with dolphins in the open ocean. I mean really, come on. As my good friend Sarah Cohen loves to opine, "Do you know who has your life? Nobody has your life!"

Tejada? Bloomquist? Hinske? Lannan? Walla?

Last night (morning in Cincinnati) the Irrational League was able to complete it's 16th annual draft. Amazingly, the online part of the draft worked brilliantly, with only an initial problem at the beginning at their end. It was wonderful to get together, even virtually, with everyone again. Sadly, my beloved Atlanta Crackers are truly dreadful, and I can state that without a doubt this is the worst team I've ever finished with on draft day. Normally after the draft we'd be headed to the nearest Skyline Chili parlor and I could begin reconstructing my team with various and sundry trades with Gary Beatrice, but couldn't quite pull it off this year. After last year's unsuccessful attempt to win it all I was stuck with too many returning bad contracts, too few good contracts and a Gogol-esque Dead Salary (so I started the draft with $19 less than I should have had - and I already strapped for cash), which meant that I was doomed before it started. As you can see from the picture I came with my Cincinnati Reds t-shirt and my Savannah Sand Gnats hat, but there is only so much that even these lucky tokens can do. The Crackers are officially playing for 2013. Still, it was worth the pain to talk to my friends again. We're already planning a Reds game for when I get back in July.

Rain

Unbelievably, we actually had rain this week - on two different days!! It's the first time, at least in Abu Dhabi, since I arrived in early September that it's rained. I've heard stories about our students at ZU bursting out of the building to play in the rain, and, truthfully, if I would have had the opportunity I would definitely have done the same thing.

Irrational League

There are certain times of year when it is ridiculous to try and get me to concentrate (and they seem to be expanding every year). One of them is late March, because I am focusing on the upcoming fantasy baseball league draft for the Irrational League. Our league, which had humble origins years ago as a crazy spark of an idea at a Subway shop up next to the University of Cincinnati when I was up visiting from Atlanta, is getting ready to launch it's sixteenth year. Gary Beatrice, Glenn Rice (who comes and goes in the league) and I were having lunch when I proposed that it might be cool to put together a fantasy baseball league, and I think we drafted two days later. There were only four of us so we restricted the pool of players to the NL West (the old National League West) because we didn't want to have too much talent available and because Cincinnati was in that division.

The membership has shifted over the years, but it has always been a great group of folks. We've had a steady core, pictured below, for several years now - from top to bottom: David Kelley (Springfield Isotopes), Jack Schultz (Indy Griffiths), Gary Beatrice (Boston Bums), Daryl Evans (Kentucky Cubs), Bob Sawma (Red Dogs), Kelly Hamad (Killers) and Mike Bergman Bombers). A lot of folks mock the fantasy leagues, and, like most things, some people do take it to an illogical extreme, but I've always enjoyed our league immensely. It's allowed me to keep connected to some great friends, and get reconnected to people like Jack, who was my best friend in high school. Plus, it's forced me to know a lot more about baseball, especially the minor leagues, than I ever thought possible.

One of these days I should put together a blog posting centered around my favorite Irrational league moments, but no time for that today. The draft itself is always my Christmas and I look forward to it way too much, especially if it includes a trip into Cincinnati. The draft itself takes around six hours, and then we normally retire to a local Skyline Chili parlor to break our fast and to begin sand-bagging and trading. Sadly, I'm trapped in Abu Dhabi this year so we're going to try and carry on the draft online (insh'allah). Fortunately, or unfortunately, I have no chance at all to win this year so I'm not too worried about the technology. Normally by this time I would be awash in preparation and have pages and pages of notes, but I haven't even thought about it yet. The Atlanta Crackers went all in last year in a mad attempt to win their sixth title and ended up finishing second, which I consider last, so the cupboard is bare, which means I can just focus all of my attention of destroying other team's dreams. Go Crackers!!

That Room in the Back

One of the things that Americans always fail to understand about the Islamic world is how generally tolerant it is - and certainly over the centuries Islam has been much more tolerant than Christianity. You see it in all sorts of ways, both big and small. I was reminded of one of the small ones yesterday when I went shopping at Spinney's, which is the little grocery store close to my apartment. In many grocery stores that are frequented by western ex-pats you will find the non-Muslim room in the back of the store, where items that Muslims are forbidden to eat are stored. So, for instance, if you wanted to buy hot dogs or sausages you'd go to that room. Here's an odd little picture that I snapped yesterday. In the background you can see the hot dogs, but in the upper left you can spot an unexpected item: Pop-Tarts. I'm not certain what makes Pop-Tarts haram, although it must be something in the ingredients. So, you can still get hot dogs or sausages - or Pop-Tarts - you just pick them up, and then like a teen-age boy who has snuck into the store to buy a copy of Playboy you bring your guilty purchase up to the front. Actually, there is no reason for skulking because, as I said at the beginning, the mood is much more tolerant and easy-going than is popularly perceived. Oh, and I had forgotten what a guilty pleasure, in more ways than one, Pop-Tarts are.