Would be freaked out in Dubai. Where everything is truly up-to-date, in the twenty first century.
As for the darkness... It was only seven o'clock, what's up? Then I wondered if I had it backward, maybe it was seven a.m. and it was gonna get light soon. I mean fly in a tube for fifteen plus hours and you're all screwed up. As for the vaunted Emirates airline... It was very good, but not as great as Cathay Pacific, not even as great as Singapore. The flight attendants were from twenty nations and the food was tasty and there was a lounge in the back but the truth is it's still an airplane, you get inside and it feels cramped, no matter what the pics online show. Then again, it was an A380, a double-decker, an Airbus. Now Airbus has made Boeing up its game, but the point is not everything great is made in the U.S., and the A380 is pretty great, first and foremost it's QUIET! You can read, you can hear yourself think, there's not that constant whooshing sound.
But let's start with the lounge.
No, let's start with getting to the airport. They send a car. That's right I flew business, fly in the back of the plane for a day and it'll take you a month to recover. I know, I know, this separates the men from the boys, the rich from the poor, but the left wing is constantly dumbing itself down and the right wing is constantly luxuriating in its riches and it's no crime to get ahead, as long as you carry those less fortunate along with you.
But it took almost as long to get to the Tom Bradley International Terminal as it took to get from my house to the airport. How are they gonna accommodate more passengers in the future? Damned if I know. And checking in... There was a father wrapping his son's snowboard in plastic tape, to protect it. I'm not sure it would, but then they ended up taking it on the plane with them anyway.
And in the lounge, they have a prayer room, right next to the bathrooms. And a greeter, just like Wal-Mart, made me wonder if I could leave my bags unattended, did I ever tell you I was paranoid about my stuff, even though at this late age I think I could tolerate losing it all? But not my data, never my data.
And then on the plane a guy wanted me to trade my aisle single seat for a center double, facing the wall. Come on, at these prices? You should have booked earlier. He ended up getting another guy facing the wall to switch, and then he never ever talked to his wife across the aisle, amazing.
And after catching up on the Sunday "Times," why is it I read the paper slower on the plane, am I fearful I'll run out of things to read, I started reading this book "The Family Tabor," by Cherise Wolas, I read about it in the "Book Review" and downloaded it to my Kindle in the lounge. Luke sent me his autobiography, but I'm not taking a hard copy on the plane, I'm already carrying too much stuff.
And "The Family Tabor" is about a middle class family in crisis, middle class crisis, the kind the self-deprecating call "white people problems." But the truth is existential issues are the worst. Just as a poor person can only think about money, someone who is depressed or without love or who can't sleep or who has committed crimes can't get their issues out of their heads. It's all interior dialogue, rotating the characters, and I'm about forty percent through and not absolutely sure I can recommend it, but it's a great antidote to the endless preaching by the supposed winners in this world. You keep telling us you have it all, and then we scratch the surface and find...you don't.
And the A380 is like a lumbering bus on the way up, and although we hit some turbulence over the North Pole, when we gained altitude it was like riding a couch, and although the landing in Dubai was heavy, it was a good experience but as I said above, I was stunned to find Dubai in darkness.
Turns out they do not have Daylight Savings Time.
As for the airport...
Makes America look like a second class country. You see they were afraid of us, our freedom and cash and wherewithal, then we became afraid of them... How is it going to turn out? Well, there's more of them than there are of us, think about that. You can only keep your finger in the dike for so long before the dam bursts. Kinda like globalization, we're citizens of the world today, and if you don't like it, give up your mobile phone and flat screen made in Asia and your cars made in... Wait, just wait, that's what Trump's trying to do, make it all "Made In America"! But countries that do this fall behind, best to outsource, but you can't say that here, er, there, you've got to keep wrapping yourself in the flag and saying U.S.A, U.S.A! Meanwhile, the people yelling this loudest have never been anywhere else, Denmark is pretty damn good, as for Dubai...
I'm not gonna leave the airport, but the airport...
It's like living in the future. The elevators hold thirty people. There are waterfalls, the place is clean and...
Silent.
Yup, that was a note on the screen before we left the plane, that Dubai's airport has no announcements, although they did have some on the train to the B terminal and I just heard some prayer music, but it's absent all those gate announcements that no one listens to anyway. We live in a self-serve world, where you've got to be aware, not only know how to fix your electronics and sites, but navigate yourself through this world.
It's different here. The bathroom has a water sprayer next to the toilet, in case you don't use paper...
And for some reason it's dark in the lounge too, which supersedes any in America, even the rebuilt American and AmEx ones. Is it the oil? What is paying for all this?
I think it's the oil.
Meanwhile, American airlines are trying to get Trump to cripple Emirates, since it's supported by the government, but Trump can only look backward, allowing more coal emissions. Why is half of America so backward? Did you see that article about Google trying to sell self-driving technology to Detroit and the carmakers saying no? Because they're selling fashion, the exterior, but it's the interior that counts. Kinda like the YouTube stars, if all you've got is how you look, telling others how to look, you're gonna be in trouble. Of course there are models, of course there are Kardashians...then again, the Kardashians are all about business, entrancing and ripping-off the lemmings. That's the America we now live in, whereas the rest of the world has woken up and is focusing on electric cars and... There's a guy in the WSJ, Holman Jenkins, who can't stop beating up on Tesla. I'm not gonna defend Elon Musk or the company's financials, but I will say that Tesla single-handedly got the rest of the world's carmakers to get on the electric bandwagon, the leader being BMW, once again a foreign company, whereas Ford can only say it will sell SUVs instead of cars, you give the people what they want and then suddenly, they don't want it anymore. Steve Jobs had it right, you win by selling people what they NEED!
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