There was a movie named, “If it’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium,” which kind of explains how these past couple days have felt. In the span of two days, I’ve been in four different countries and covered 12 time zones. Except for brief stops and relatively short layovers, it has been continuous travel. And I’m back to the office tomorrow morning…

Sunday morning started at the ridiculous (when compared to the preceding week) hour of seven, which was necessary for us to get up, get ready, get a bite of breakfast, and get to our airport transfer bus by 8:30. Then it was a ride almost the full length of Dubai through rush hour traffic, and about 15 minutes out in what seemed like the middle of nowhere; all told, about an hour to get to the airport.  If you have the option, you’d want to fly to the much closer DXB Dubai International, not DWC Al Mahktoum.

The two-hour wait at the airport was cut a little short by my explanation of what a “duty-free” shop was, and my wife picked up that souvenir booze that she just had to have, plus a couple other curiosities for the folks back home.  (Of the combined weight of our baggage, mine accounted for only about a third. I was getting worried about how she’d get it all to Mariupol.) Our wait was followed by a five-hour flight  back to Kiev.

(A quick word about the temperatures in Dubai.  I didn’t know how warm things were most days — other than “too hot” — but I was able to see the temps on the day we left.  When we boarded the transfer bus at 8:30 it was already 34 C — 93 F.  It was at 37 C when we got to the airport — 98 F.  The expected high for the day was 39 C — 102 F.)

We got into Kiev no problem, and got through customs and passport control no problem.  (Zhulyany is a dinky airport compared to every other one I saw on this trip, but at least now I can say I’ve been out of both the Kiev airports.) The shuttles between Zhulyany and the train station don’t run on Sundays, so we had to grab a taxi.  Between Dubai and Kiev, I have to go with Kiev for which city has the most nerve-wracking taxi service.  But we got to the station in one piece.

my wife’s train back to Mariupol was not until the next evening, so we got a room at the passenger hotel.  We had some dinner at the nearby (and apparently, new since last November) Pozhata Hata cafeteria, and then had a couple hours of rest before I had to catch the shuttle bus to the Boryspil airport.  So my first and last evenings in Kiev and with my wife were the same — separate twin beds in the passenger hotel.  Oy.

The airport shuttle doesn’t run as often in the middle of the night, so I had to go earlier than I would have wanted.  (But that meant that my wife could get a good night’s sleep before her day in Kiev, so there was a small upside.)  I had a couple hours to wait before I could check-in for my flight, and then a couple more hours before the flight took off.  I was pretty tired by that point, so even though I had an aisle seat for the flight to Amsterdam, I was already dozing off by the time we took off.  I think that may have been the first time I ever slept through a take-off.

The flight was OK and we got into Amsterdam a little early.  I only had two hours between flights, so I was able to get checked in almost immediately.  A little more waiting, and then it was an uneventful 10-hour flight back to Portland.  The real disappointment was that, yet again, my bag was not in the first 10 that got to the baggage carousel.  If my bag is ever number 1, I’ll have to do something to celebrate.

After traveling for about a day and a half, the thing I have to do now is try to stay awake.  I’ve jumped across 12 time zones, so this time it might be a little more difficult to get back into the right rhythms.  This is one of the times I wish I still drank caffeine…

I’ll do my usual wrap up and get the photos up in the next couple days.  (One of the nice things about the extra time in Kiev was that I was able to see the photos my wife took while in Abu Dhabi.  She had said that the camera stopped working, but she still managed to get some very nice images.  I hope I can describe them appropriately.)

I’m all packed, but my wife is busy trying to cram everything she has acquired over the past week into the larger suitcase I brought with me.  I was quite the pre-trip challenge to find a good sized bag for my stuff that would fit inside the larger suitcase that I had purchased in Mariupol last year.  (My wife wanted that suitcase so she could start packing her things to move to America.)

A quick note on Abu Dhabi before I get to today.  That was quite the bust from what my wife has told me.  In Abu Dhabi there’s this be Ferrari complex (“Ferrari World”), and apparently a couple of the tour people decided that they just wanted to stay there, which delayed the rest of the tour group, and as a result, they didn’t get to visit a couple of the advertised locations.  A couple of the sites were nice and impressive (I’m told), but overall, my wife was not pleased.  Glad I decided to pass on that one.  (Trust me, it wasn’t just because it was in Russian, but that was definitely a major reason why I didn’t want to go.)

Yesterday was yet another beach.  Oy.  I have had enough sand for the balance of the year (which was another beach trip).  Yesterday it was out to Al Mamzar beach, which isn’t one of the big ones that most tourists visit.  I liked that part of it.  It was, of course, hot; the water wasn’t back, but it was actually a little warmer that Jumeira Beach.  However, in all other respects, it was like any other beach.  After a couple hours of that, it was back to the hotel for a siesta, which was pretty good.

The evening was souvenir shopping, which I probably could have lived without.  My wife loved it, though, and got lots of goodies for her family.  I’m not really a souvenir guy, but I picked up a couple stupid things.  (I’m not sure “restraint” is a word in my wife’s vocabulary — definitely not the English one — but let’s see how her packing goes.)  After we got back, there was just enough time to visit the pool on the roof.  That I liked.  It still wasn’t cool, but with no sun, it was quite tolerable.  A nice breeze made for a pleasant evening.

Evening is usually the best time to do anything.  The worst time to do anything is 11am – 3pm, which is when the sun is the hottest and there is almost no shade.  My wife never caught on to this, which is why I was getting snippy when she dragged me over to yet another beach today.  This was the worst, not only because we had to take the Metro and then walk 20 minutes to get to it (in the blazing sun), but also because there were no amenities anywhere.  Most of the public beaches have a vendor or two around, selling water and umbrellas and whatnot.  This place, because it was surrounded by private beaches for the exclusive use of hotel guests, had none of that.

I won’t go into it all, but it utterly sucked.  I think today was the hottest day of the week, and I’m pretty sure I could actually hear my skin sizzling.  I managed to get us away from there after an hour or so (an hour or so too long), and after another long Metro ride and a mid-afternoon slog through the heat, it was siesta time again.

As our final outing this evening, we went fora walk along Dubai Creek.  Of the time we have been here, there have been two sweltering evenings, and this was one of them.  Last night, it was actually quite pleasant out once the sun went down.  Tonight, it was sooo humid, it was really oppressive.  So naturally we went to where there was even more water around.  It was actually kind of nice, at least when the breeze came along, which wasn’t nearly as often as I would have liked.  But the view was really nice.

The Old Souk and Textile Souk are right there, so we wandered through those as well.  Like the other souks, there were plenty of carney types calling out their deals and trying to get you into their shops.  It’s really quite the experience.  My wife was much better today, passing up nearly everyone, but did manage to get sucked into one textile shop, where she bought an Arabic headdress for her son.  (I doubt he will ever wear it.)

After that it was back to the hotel for packing.  We’ve got to get to bed soon, since we’ll need to get up around 7-ish if we plan to have breakfast before heading out to the airport.  I wonder what that flight will be like, since we still don’t have anything for my wife to read.  Oh well, back to Kiev, and after a few hours there, I’m on my way back to the US.

Obviously, I leave out a ton of stuff in these posts, because otherwise I wouldn’t have any “color” to fill in with when I’m talking to people later on.  Also, it would be really tedious to read. And write.  As always, if you have questions, let me know.  But for the last post of my free day, here are a few small observations.

1. I am a terrible husband, because it failed to occur to me that this is our 6-month anniversary.  I blame all the travel and time changes and stuff, because I simply did not know that this was the 29th.  And how is my wife spending the evening?  A long bus ride to and from Abu Dhabi.  Maybe we can do something nice tomorrow.
2. The bus shelters are air conditioned.  They kind of have to be, wouldn’t they?  Apparently the AC isn’t on all day, but if you’re out walking and need a little break, look for a bus shelter.  (Even my wife, who complains about being cold if the temperature is below 22.5 C — about 72 F, has found the shelters to be helpful when we are out walking.)
3. I have yet to see any advertised price for gasoline.  There are cars and gas stations everywhere, but I haven’t seen any signs listing the price per liter.  It may be that gas is just so cheap that if you can afford to own a car, you won’t have any trouble buying gas.  Or maybe it’s free.
4. I don’t think I’ve seen a fast food establishment that wasn’t right next to a gas station.  Perhaps these folks take the “fast” notion a little too strictly.
5. In addition to Burger King, McDonald’s and Pizza Hut, you will also find Wendy’s, Fuddruckers, Hardee’s, Dominos and Round Table Pizza here in Dubai.
6. Despite the predominance of English speakers, Americans are still something of a rarity, if the reactions I’ve gotten from people are a true guide.  I hear British and Australian accents around, and I do know that there are some Americans staying in the hotel.  But any time I’ve been out and someone has asked where I am from, they seem genuinely surprised at the answer.
7. Apparently, I have the type of skin that simply cannot be blocked by sunblock.  So if you hear a report of a quiet American man who spontaneously combusted on a beach in Dubai, you’ll know that was me.

As I mentioned in the first post I made after getting to Dubai, we’ve been running around a fair bit.  Which is actually a little curious, since my wife told me that holidays were to “eat and sleep and eat and sleep.”  Maybe she meant for the “a” in those “ands” to stand for “activity.”

Despite this not being a pedestrian friendly city, we’ve been doing a lot of walking.  By which I mean some walking, but since the temperatures are crazy hot, it feels like a lot.  We’ve also hit the hotel pool a couple of times.  Here, though, is a run-down of our big activities so far.

Most of our first day was just getting familiar with the city and hotel, but my wife wanted to see the Dubai Fountain.  She had done her research (and talked with her travel agent friend) and wanted to see the “dancing waters” show of the Fountain.  So we walked over to the closest Metro station, and caught a train to Dubai Mall, which is also the location of the Fountain and the Burj Kalifah.  It was around dinner time and we hadn’t eaten since the morning buffet, so we snagged a table fountain side at one of the Mall restaurants (a TGI Friday’s of all places).

The fountain is supposed to do these shows every 30 minutes beginning at 6pm, but I think things got a little off when we were there.  We definitely had to wait for more than 30 minutes before we saw anything.  But we did manage to see a couple of the shows (each show appears to be just one choreographed musical piece).  My wife got some video of one, which I’ll post when I can, but here are some links that will give some notion of what it’s like:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5S8WcK3VDU and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoxxK-8MeWw. (We didn’t see either of these numbers.)

Something that sounds like more fun than it actually is, is a ride on the Palm Monorail.  Dubai has expanded its shorelines by building islands, and one of the biggest of this is the Palm.  As the name implies, it’s in the shape of a palm, and much of that engineered space has been taken up with ritzy resorts and homes.  I mean, there’s a Trump Tower there, so, you know…  Traveling up the “trunk” of the palm tree is a monorail, which will take people from the “mainland” to the Atlantis Hotel and Aquaventure park at the far side of the palm.

I think we got there far too late in the day for it to be interesting.  The sun was already going down when we grabbed a taxi to go there, so things were already dark by the time we actually rode it.  (That was definitely a steamy evening; because of the temperature and humidity, my glasses and camera both fogged up the minute we stepped outside.)  There weren’t a ton of things to do when we got there, not at that hour.  My wife has been told there was a big (and free) aquarium in the Atlantis, but I’m quite sure she was misinformed.  There is an aquarium, but it cost 100 AED (about $28) to get in.  I told my wife we could go, but I think she was disappointed that the free one wasn’t there.

Yesterday we were wandering around the souks of Dubai.  The souks are kind of like “wholesale districts,” where you can find a ton of similar shops grouped together.  The best known are the Spice and Gold souks, but there seemed to be a bit of everything around.  As it turns out, my wife was on a mission in visiting these souks:  she was shopping and ended up buying one of the most incongruous things for Dubai — a fur coat.  Don’t even get me started.  But she wanted it and she actually brought money for it.  Apparently, even with airfare, it is cheaper to buy it here than in Ukraine.  I really don’t know.

You do have watch out for the “helpful” people in the souks.  There are a lot of shills for the different stores, so if you’re looking for something, they are more than happy to be your guide — at least as far as their store.  The general souk that we were in does know its audience, because there were Russian signs in many of the windows.  And three of the “helpful” people we met were fairly well versed in Russian.  (One of them, a Chinese immigrant from what I could tell, was able to take us to the fur shop that had been recommended to my wife, and he spoke Russian the entire time.)

Honestly, the souks aren’t my thing, because price haggling is expected.  Even so, I think I helped my wife get a good deal on a watch for her son.  The guy wanted 600, and my wife was going to counter-offer 400.  I suggested that she offer 200 instead, which the guy thought was far too low (for that particular watch), but brought his price down to 500.  That’s when we started to say no and that we were going to leave, and voila, the price came down to (a grudging) 400.  I’m pretty sure that, if that had been my wife’s counter offer, she would have paid more.

And finally, we went on safari.  At least, that’s what it’s called, but there were no lions or elephants.  (I’m sure that safari has some general meaning of wilderness adventure.)  This is a very big tourist thing, and as a result the process is very well defined. I thought it sounded interesting on paper, but given the polished process, I really wasn’t expecting it to be as fun as it was.  It’s a bit of a trip — about 30 minutes outside Dubai, which is probably quite a good ways out, given the very straight highways — but it goes by pretty quickly.

Once you get out to the target area, the first activity is “dune busting.”  It’s just like it sounds — you cruise around the dunes in SUVs (Toyota LandCruisers in our case), going up and down the dunes, and sometimes making hard turns at the crests to really kick up the sand.  It is rather exciting, but 20 minutes is almost pushing it.  Would you want to be on a roller coaster for 20 minutes?  My wife was starting to get queasy by the end.

Then it was off to the “Bedouin” camp for some Arabian snacks and entertainment. You could hold a falcon, get a henna tattoo, try a hookah, get into some traditional attire for photos, ride camels, or if the dune busting only got your juice going, ride around on some quads.  After some time for that, there was a belly dancing show, a buffet dinner with a good variety of Middle Eastern foods, and then a final show with a guy that I could only describe as a whirling dervish.  It was really all a lot of fun, and we had a great host and driver (an Iranian who has been in Dubai for almost 30 years).  It was still a little warm for my tastes, but it was still a great evening.  (If I ever come back to Dubai — preferably at a better time of year — I would definitely do this again.)

I think the agenda calls for another beach tomorrow, but maybe that will change since the week is already running short.  (Thursday already? Oy!)  We’re definitely taking photos, and I’ll get them up as soon as I can.

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the Citymax Bur Dubai hotel.  In case you were wondering why the lobby is always busy (unless you check in around 1:30 or 2 in the morning), it’s because they have a pretty nifty arrangement that keeps them full.

I’m not sure how Citymax and Alpha Tours (dba “Natalie Tours” in Russia and Ukraine) hooked up, but hooked up they have, and as a result, there are tons of Russian speaking people here.  There are three room service menus here — one in English, one in Arabic and one in Russian.  Most of the staff speak a little Russian as well, sometimes not much more than the basics related to their jobs, but still some.  English is still the better language to know to get around, but this place had made it very easy for Russian speakers to visit.

They were down to a single non-smoking room by the time we arrived.  It wasn’t in the best place — first floor (which is the second story of the building) and right next to the elevator.  Plus the window looked into an unused courtyard area.  We could have gotten a smoking room that might have been a bit better, but I didn’t want to be smelling smoke all night.  (I don’t care how thoroughly you clean a room; if people regularly smoke in it, you’re gonna smell something.)  Fortunately, we were able to grab another room the next day, 5th floor, with a westward looking window.  There’s a lot more traffic noise, though.  Traffic noise or people/elevator noise — sometimes you just can’t win.

The hotel is OK.  Kind of a Motel 6-y sort of place, but with a pool on the roof.  They do have three restaurants and a bar, though, and I don’t think Motel 6 has gotten to that point yet.  Small rooms, but OK; if you’re not really attached to the person you’re sharing the room with, you might want to get a second room.

Here’s something crazy:  wi-fi is free in the public areas of the hotel, but you have to pay for it in the rooms.  However, the wired internet is free in the rooms. That just makes no sense to me.  Things work, though, so I can’t really complain about that.  Fortunately, I had brought along a laptop that I was planning to leave with my wife.  If I had just come with my iPad or iPod, I would have had to spend a lot more time in the lobby.

You know how most of the lower cost hotels have a free breakfast for you?  You know — toast, muffins, a bit of juice and coffee?  Well, this place definitely amps that up.  Free breakfast here is a real breakfast, and is included as part of the tour package.  (Like I said, Citymax and Alpha Tours.)  Every morning there’s a breakfast buffet, which makes their main restaurant a busy, noisy place.  There is a good variety of stuff, including some common items from the American breakfast table.  No bacon, I’m sorry to say, but then again, this is an Islamic country.  (They don’t even sell bacon-flavored potato chips in the stores. And the ham here is turkey ham.) This morning, in addition to some of the more common fare I prefer, I tried this Indian rice and corn thing.  It was something like grits and it tasted pretty good.  The other morning I sampled a spicy vermicelli; I liked it, but my wife’s not big on the spices.

This is a 600-plus room hotel, but so far, the staff has been pretty prompt and attentive to any questions or issues.  I’m not saying that if I found myself in Dubai in the future, I would absolutely stay here, but it’s not bad, and I’m sure there are other places that are worse.

This was the first time I had ever been to Zhulyany airport. All my previous travel in and out of Kiev had been through the larger Boryspil airport, so this was a new experience. Like with O’Hare in Chicago, the city of Kiev had grown around Zhulyany, so the shuttle went from cityscape to airport with very little transition. It’s a small place, too, so it was no trouble finding the check in counters or anything else. I kind if I liked it; it had a much more relaxed feel than the hubbub of Boryspil.

There were lots of new experiences in this trip for my wife.  She has only been on an airplane a couple of times, and only domestically going from Boryspil and Donetsk. I don’t think that checking in was very different for her, other than having to show off her spanking new international passport.  (I think I got to see her new passport — and driver’s license — within about 20 minutes of our reunion.)  Everything after that was a bit different.

In addition to the security screening, there were also stops at customs and passport control.  I think she was a little disappointed when my passport got stamped, but hers didn’t.  I was trying to point out that it was because I was leaving the country (Ukraine), but I don’t think she got the whole in-out thing until we got to Dubai. (She also didn’t realize that, as a couple, we could approach the customs etc. desks together, rather than waiting one after the other.)

I’m going to say that waiting around is not my wife’s strong suit, and in retrospect, that may have clued me in to what I would experience on the flight.  Somehow, though, she managed to survive the almost two-hour wait before we could get on the plane.  (Eh, the drawbacks of international flights…).  The last half-hour wasn’t too bad– there was a nifty little wind/thunderstorm thing that blew through Kiev.  But the rest of the time was interspersed with eyerolls and comments about how having to be there two hours beforehand is really dumb.

And then there was the flight.  Not an overly crowded flight, thank goodness, since I was assigned a middle seat.  (My wife likes the window seat so she can look out.)  Our flight was with FlyDubai (I hadn’t heard of them either), which is apparently the low-cost carrier that is run by the higher-cost Emirates Airlines.  This meant that we had to buy any food or drinks unless we brought some with us, which we didn’t.  It also meant that there was little in the way of entertainment in the seat video screens, unless you bought one of the movie or TV packages.

As I said, my wife has been on a couple for flights, from Donetsk to Kiev and back.  These flights take just over an hour, and the airlines flying between those two cities are the full-service carriers.  This means that just after take-off, you get a drink and snack, and by the time you’re done with that, it’s pretty much time to land.  My wife “knew” the flight to Dubai was longer than the flight to Kiev, but there’s knowing and then there’s experiencing.

It takes about 5 hours to get to Dubai from Kiev.  This is about the same amount of time as it takes to get from Atlanta or Washington, DC to Seattle or Portland.  (I know, because I’ve been on both of those flights.)  It’s about half of the time it takes to fly from Portland to Amsterdam, which I’ve also done a couple times now.  Really, 5 hours is not that bad… unless you’re with someone isn’t mentally prepared for a five-hour flight.  So, yeah, my wife “knew” it was 5 hours, but I just don’t think she realized that meant being in your seat for 5 hours.  I suggested we get a magazine or something before we took off, but she said she didn’t need or want one.  After a couple hours, I think she might have been regretting that decision.

Since we had the row, she was able to stretch out a little and doze a bit; that was OK.  And, for the first time apparently, she got to see a mountain with snow on the top.  I wasn’t ready for that; I was sure she would have seen one somewhere, but she says no.  We were above the clouds much of the time and there wasn’t a lot to see (yet another reason to have a magazine), but there was a break in the cover when we were passing over some mountains in southern Turkey.  My wife looked down, saw the white topped mountains and asked me if that was snow.  Then she asked again, just to be sure that I was sure.  And then she was very excited.

When we reached Dubai, it was after midnight and the outside temperature was still over 90 at the airport. We landed at the smaller of the two airports, which is still pretty big, and made our way through immigration and customs without any issue.  We had a moment or two of delay in locating our ride, as the Arabic man had a bit of an accent, and his pronunciation of her name is not anything I can even approximate.  But we got hooked up, and took a 30 minute ride into the city and got to our hotel.

In case you’re keeping track, my arrival in Dubai was almost exactly 24 hours (by local times) from my arrival in Kiev.  So, two days, two major world cities, and both times I arrive in the middle of the night.

My wife and I have split up. Yup, after four days of living together, we have gone our separate ways… For the day, that is. My wife is off to Abu Dhabi for a pre-packaged tour of the city; I elected to skip it because it was going to be in Russian and that didn’t seem like a fun way to spent the afternoon. So I’ve got a few free hours now, and I’ll try to get caught up on my posts.

I will start by turning the clock back a few days and finish up with Kiev and the trip to Dubai. As I had already posted, the ridiculously small transfer window I had between flights in Amsterdam got even ridiculouslier smaller when my flight was late arriving. Once I got everything squared away to actually get to Kiev, and knew that my wife knew I was going to be very late, I was able find a somewhat comfortable chair and grabbed a couple hours of sleep, intermixed with some reading and wandering around. An unplanned 11 hour layover is not a great way to start a vacation, just in case anyone was curious.

The flight into Kiev wasn’t overly crowded, and we got in just after midnight. Getting through passport control was no problem, but my bag was a slight issue. It wasn’t on the plane with me, although KLM had told me that it would be. In fact, my bag got to Kiev about 5 hours before me. Apparently another carrier had a flight between the one I missed and the one I was rebooked on, and the efficient handlers at Schipol airport put it on that one. After standing around watching the carousel for a half hour, I went over to Lost & Found and was told it was in the storage room. Finally, bag claimed, I cleared customs (nothing to declare), and at last got to see my wife again.

My wife had gotten us a room at the traveler’s hotel at the main Kiev train station (she was surprised when I told her we didn’t have those in the US), and there’s a bus that regularly goes between the airport and the train station. It was an uneventful trip, and it was just really nice to sit and touch my wife again.

Our room at the hotel had separate beds, because apparently they just don’t have double beds. (It makes sense — you only have to buy one size of sheets.) They also have some “dorm” rooms, for single travelers who don’t want to spring for a full room. There’s a shared bathroom and shower, which was on the clean side of grotty, and a “kitchen” with an electric kettle and a not very cold shared fridge. It’s the place where you stay for convenience, not ambience.

We were up the next morning at nine. Actually we were up before then, but if not, we would have been up at nine. As I had mentioned in my previous posts about my time in Kiev, there’s a church right across from the station and, as it happened, just outside our window. At nine there was some sustained bell ringing — a couple minutes at least — and if we had slept thought that (which, for me, could have actually happened), there was a companion ringing of the bells after about 20 minutes. Yes, apparently that church is an alarm clock, complete with built-in snooze.

Most of the day in Kiev, such as it was, was very uneventful. I’m sure I would have had much more to say if I’d arrived on schedule and had nearly to days to play.  However, I was able to get in touch with my friend Vova, and he was able to join my wife and me for a small snack and some conversation before we had to head off to the other Kiev airport. (Vova was the friend who helped me get word to my wife about my delay, so I was quite happy to see him and thank him in person.) After spending a couple pleasant hours, we collected our bags and grabbed one of the shuttles to Zhulyany airport.

Before you panic and start digging through my site, no, there was no posting for “Dubai, Day 1” nor one for “Kiev, Once I Finally Got There.”  Maybe I’ll need to backfill a little.  But it is day two for us — which is actually our first full day here. It’s not quite over yet, so maybe there will be a part two to this.

Part one, though, was the beach.  This hotel — as do a few others here in Dubai — offers shuttle buses to a couple locations around the city, including a large public beach.  It is Jumeira Beach, and it is definitely set up for the tourists. Don’t get me wrong — it’s still a pretty decent place — but it is crowded (mostly with vacationing Russians, it seems) and the vendors there know they’ve got you captive.

It wasn’t a bad time, though.  We rented an umbrella and a couple towels, and as long as the breeze was up, being on the beach (in the shade) was actually pretty OK.  Once the breeze abated, that’s when you remembered that the still air is about a billion degrees.  That’s when you hit the water, which was great.

Honestly, if it wasn’t for the water — the Persian Gulf — I would have been hating the morning.  However, the temperature was great.  Standing out up to my neck was nigh perfect.  My wife loved the water too, which made me curious:  she always seems to be cold (except when we are out in the desert heat), and I would definitely call the water temperature a “tepid warm.”  Maybe she just doesn’t like air when it’s that temperature.

A couple hours there and we’ve had enough sun, surf and sand… although it seems like the sand might be sticking around a little while longer.  Even though I’ve showered off a couple times (once before leaving the beach, and again when back at the hotel), I’m still finding little bits grit here and there. I’d say I’ll probably get it all by the time I get back to Portland, but since we’re doing the safari thing tomorrow evening, I’ll be getting a fresh dose of sand to deal with.

So, I’ve got a little to write, but not because of good things. My connection in Amsterdam was tight — 50 minutes. The travel engines have given me this connection in the past, but having been through Amsterdam airport, I was wary. I even sent an email to Delta asking if fifty minutes was really enough time, and they said, sure, that’s the minimum they need.

So I booked the flight with the fifty minute connection. Bad, bad idea.

The flight out of Portland got off late and got into Amsterdam even later — 20 minutes late. After taxiing forever, I got off my 8:30 arrival at 9:00. And — of course — my connection was on the other side of the airport.

After rushing across the airport and going through the security screening again, I arrived at the departure gate 5 minutes after they closed the doors. So, yeah.

I’ve gotten rebooked on the next flight to Kiev, but that’s not until 8:00 pm tonight; it will get into Kiev just after midnight (local time).

I’ve sent texts to my wife which hopefully made sense. I also sent a message to my developer friend in Kiev — which I hope that he will see — asking him to call my wife and explain things. But now I’m just stuck here for the next 9 hours.

As I said, major suckage…

Quick update:  I got online again — lucky for me I have both a laptop and tablet with me on this trip, because Schipol limits your wifi connections — and was able to see a message from my friend.  He got in touch with my wife, so I can sure that she knows what is going on.  (We communicate OK, but sometimes you want to be extra sure.)  My flight is just a couple hours away, so I will get to Kiev, but I really hate that I’ve lost a full day with my wife.

If any Delta people read this blog, I hope that you feel really, really bad.  (And I haven’t even mentioned the issue with the flight from Portland, other than its late departure.  So far, this has not been a great start to my vacation…)

Still here in Portland, but won’t be for too much longer. Boarding will kick off in about a half hour, and then there will be a lot of waiting around because this Portland to Amsterdam flight is always full, and then I’m on my way. Once again I’m hoping to get some sleep on the plane, and I might have a better chance this time. I got up about an hour and a half early today, and I have a good notion why. But that may work in my favor for a change, instead of just making me groggy during an afternoon meeting.

I still have a touch of the sniffles, but overall I feel pretty good. Hopefully being in a flying metal tube for the next ten hours won’t re-embolden the germs.

I checked the weather, and oy. The lows for the week will be in the 80s, and I didn’t see a high temperature for the coming week below 102. I am starting to think that my photos for this trip will be interesting things in my hotel room and stuff I see out the window.

In looking ahead, I might not have a post until I get to Dubai. Although I’ll be in Kiev for a day, I don’t think the place where we’re staying has wifi. We will be staying at the “traveler’s inn” at the train station in Kiev. It’s mostly for people who need a place to sleep between trains (so prices are by the hour, kind of), but anyone can usually get a room there. My wife has used this place many times, but this will be a first for me. In Dubai we have a more Western hotel, so then it will be advantage James.

So, my next post may be in a couple days, but it will probably seem sooner, since I’ll be 12 hours in the future at that point.