The last thing people want to see, especially those living in the UK or eastern US at the moment, is more pictures of snow-bound cars, but that’s exactly what I’m putting here. After spending 6 days in Riyadh and Dubai, where average midday temperatures were in the mid-to-high 20s Celsius, it was disconcerting for me to come back to the scene above in Lauder. I had seen some of the BBC reports emanating from my home town while I was away, and my wife, Jan, had of course kept me up to date with the continuing snowfalls, but it was still a rude awakening for me when I arrived home - certainly something of a contrast with the warm sunshine in Dubai (see below).
Like so many yesterday, I had a bit of a nightmare journey home from Dubai: the flight from Dubai to Amsterdam overnight was uneventful and on time; the problems began when my flight to Edinburgh was cancelled as we were lining up to board the plane (the aircraft was switched to Glasgow instead); KLM assured us we would all be re-booked onto later flights, but a quick call to Amex (Cisco’s travel agent) told me that the two later flights due out of Schiphol to Edinburgh were already fully booked; Amex found me an alternative route by BMI via Heathrow, and so I found myself in London late in the afternoon boarding a flight to Edinburgh; however, after sitting on the tarmac for 40 minutes or so beyond the scheduled take-off time, the captain announced a computer fault which, if it could not be fixed, would necessitate our disembarkation; thoughts of a second cancelled flight in one day were dispelled 20 minutes later when the announcement came that all was well; and so off we went.
I arrived in Edinburgh at 7.15pm and found myself back in Lauder at around 8.30pm after a slow and cautious drive down to the Scottish Borders in the back of a taxi. Even with the snow, it was a welcome sight when I finally arrived home!
I’m back in Oman for a couple of days, staying at the Grand Hyatt in Muscat. I arrived last night from a frozen, grey Scotland to a warm, balmy 25 degrees here in the Gulf. I sometimes feel like I come to places like this for a brief ’shot’ of sunshine to help me get through the long Scottish winter.
It may be a naive outsider’s view but Oman always seems to be a calm and tranquil place compared to some parts of the Gulf. As is the case everywhere I go in this region, the people I meet are all friendly and polite, and exceedingly helpful in any way that they can. But the Omanis add to that by smiling a lot - that makes life so much more pleasant all round, even when I’m here to work!
I have taken quite a few photographs on my travels during 2007, none of them likely to win photographic competitions, but all of them reminders of a year like no other for me, a year in which I crossed the globe a few times (and literally on one trip). I have compiled some of my photos into a slide show and have loaded the result onto YouTube. Great memories for me and some nice music to accompany my nomadic year.
What is the collective noun for satellite dishes? Whatever it might be, there’s a hell of a lot of them on Kuwait’s roofs, as can be seen from this pic grabbed from the meeting room atop the Marriott in the centre of Kuwait City.
Someone has already commented on my Flickr pic: “What an ugly view!” It certainly isn’t pretty, but it does say a lot about the drive for digital communication across this world of ours!
Thanks to webshots for the photo. Click the pic to take you to the site for some more photos.
I haven’t stayed in many hotels that I know were damaged by bombs, missiles or artillery fire - the Europa in Belfast was famously targeted on many occasions during the Troubles. But here in Kuwait, I’m staying in the Sheraton which, apart from being the first Sheraton opened outside the USA, was burned, looted and then hit by tank fire during the first war against Iraq.
The manager of the Sheraton hotel at the time, Mohammed Mousa, told BBC reporters he had been given an hour to clear the building and then Iraqi soldiers had looted it, taking everything from video recorders to the piano. They then poured petrol over the ground floor, mined it and blasted it with tank fire.
The hotel looks a little more salubrious these days, as does Kuwait itself.
Thank you to cargocycling for this image of serene Muscat - contrast this with Dubai.
My trip to the Gulf this week offered an interesting contrast in styles - between brash Dubai and reserved Muscat.
Dubai, it seems, is working to be the biggest and the best in the Gulf, in everything it does (typified by the richest horse race in the world, the Dubai World Cup, which I watched on TV when I got home last night) - it is competitive, thrusting, fast-moving and filling up with high-rise buildings of all shapes and sizes. Muscat, the capital city of Oman, on the other hand, from what I saw of it, could be described as serene in contrast. Muscat has wide roads, low, mostly white, buildings set well back from the street, few of them more than 2 storeys tall, and is altogether gentler and more diffident in its outlook to the world.
I like the big exciting cities of the world, but I prefer the calm detachment of cities such as Muscat. In any case, that outward serenity can disguise a level of ambition for itself and its people that other cities, such as Dubai, are only too happy to show off!
