Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Travel funnies 2013 (5)

Travel funnies 2013 (5)
Torrey Orton
July 3, 2013


Each night a wind rushed by our hotel window, with unpredictable patterns, though greater intensity and frequency when the temperature dropped on our third of four days in town. It actually was a bus of pre-Liberation (‘90’s variety liberation) vintage which compete with trams of requisite modernity for the carriage of Budapesters about town. The thing about pre-Liberation is that it was pre-customer service and quality in vehicle production pretty much everywhere in the fading remnants of the communist world. So, a Budabus (product of the now defunct Trabant factory in the old GDR??) is likely to have a suspension which specialises in direct translation of all movement effects to passengers, both viscerally and audibly. Those passing our window (which we also used personally a couple of times) mostly seemed to exhibit these criteria, aggravated by the fact that the streets outside our window were paved with 4 X 4 inch cobblestones of significant antiquity and modest residual grouting.

The effect of their passing was to produce a wind-like noise which came out of nowhere and disappeared as quickly, much like a winter wind in a mild storm pushing against hard surfaces (houses and bare trees usually). On the last night I actually thought it was a wind which at times in fact it was - an aftereffect of the temperature dropping weather front descending on Budapest from the northwest in the afternoon before. The balance of the impressions was exactly the kind of perceptual fuzziness that leads to really serious misimpressions – like, a bus and a breeze hit you with disturbingly different effects.

And grandiose makes a late reappearance…

Dubai is a regular passing thru point for us, and occasional stopover, of which this was one. Passing through almost annually over the last ten years has made the persistent growth of the Emirates Airline hub unavoidably present to view.

I’ve not been to all the deserts in the world but I’ve learned some serious pleasures of seeing and being from venturing out into parts of the biggest one in the world which is
Australia, perhaps; certainly united under one flag.

The Dubai version of desert gives the whole genre a bad name, mixed with pretences to orderly modern living which are irritated by continuous efforts to reclaim land by dredging from the Gulf on the way to the next property crash after the recovery from the last one a few years ago is worked through. There is almost nothing naturally great or grand about it. They make up (is that what’s happening consciously??) for this by grandiosities of construction. The Burj Khalifa may come to mind, being clearly the biggest manmade thing pricking the heavens with no other intent (as communication towers have) than to prickle.

This time I’m thinking of their latest airport wonder which wows with its extreme approach. What most glares is the sunlight in the huge four story open spaces which are the entry halls, ticketing desks (well run, by the way), and more sales sites than your average mall. All air conditioned. That’s the bit which suddenly got me – the grandiose bit is showing off that electricity is a meaningless concern there by building hothouses which require it without growing anything but passenger through put. Without aircon, the throughput would wilt as the internal temp rose to the 50’sC.

The buildings are, of course, modern ugly with lots of glistening polished metal sheathing of everything standing over polished stone floors. It is after all just a hothouse masquerading as a country mall in a temperate climate. Remember, 40C-plus all day every day (with a drop to 28C at night) is Dubai’s fate 10 months a year approx… so hot that outdoor work like construction stops from about 11:00am to 3pm and workers do beach cricket in open lots (there was a five hectare one opposite our window, which probably was actually a manmade ‘beach’ like much of the waterfront of Dubai) from 6am to 7am.

Desert skating rink!?

One last thing: the Dubai Hyatt’s in house mall had an ice skating rink in it with figure skates for rent and easy availability …which gave me a serious pause, thinking how long has it been since I’ve been on skates (30 years approximately since I used my last pair on a small lake in Beijing in 1983!)? Yes, I was already thinking it, tempted by the double achievement of just skating again with that desert rink add-on. And, no, I did not take it up because they only had figure skates and I’ve never skated in them and I could already see myself stumbling forward on my nose as their toe teeth caught in the ice and I’d look like a beginner and probably break something too. So, I didn’t though I knew my skating skills would all be there (I’d done an inline roller skating run 20 years ago) and those skills would be what almost insured my falling to the toe teeth.

 

 

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