On the road (again) plus a few Dubai insights...

i flew from kabul here to dubai yesterday... the flight departure from kabul was delayed and the aircraft we were to have departed on was finally switched after we stood on the ramp in a cold wind waiting to board for nearly an hour, freezing our respective tushies off... when we arrived in dubai, the temp was just over 90 with a sandstorm in progress...

i should add that, flying over afghanistan's central mountains, i was stunned by the amount of snow... those mountains are extremely rugged and barren, but the current snow levels are so high that all the harsh edges are now soft and rounded and the entire landscape looks like a big, soft, fluffy, slightly rumpled, startlingly white bed comforter, not unlike the one i'm looking at right now on my hotel room bed...

i should also point out that "sandstorm" doesn't necessarily mean blowing sand, although that's what's behind it... it also means fine, sandy, brown dust kicked up by wind blowing sand somewhere else that blows over huge regions, reduces visibility, and is generally quite unpleasant to look at... dubai is vulnerable to such from two different directions, iran and saudi arabia, depending on which way the wind is blowing...

yesterday afternoon, a colleague of mine and i visited with an egyptian general manager who is here running four processing plants for a local investor and he filled us in on the current economic situation in dubai and the gulf states in general... nothing disastrous yet but people are starting to stretch out the time it takes them to pay their bills... we asked him if he was worried about people starting to not pay at all and, in response, were treated to a detailed run-down on how the government protects business people... in short, if someone doesn't pay within a reasonable period, you can call the cops who show up asap, give the guy one month to fork over and, if he doesn't, it's off to jail, no passing go, no collecting $200... he also said that a number of privately-financed construction projects are on hold and that government-financed projects are moving ahead but more slowly... then he dispensed another another fascinating bit of insight...

the rule of law here is strictly enforced and apparently no one is above it... a high-level government official, someone very close to their majesties, got caught in a shady deal in lebanon... he's now cooling his heels in prison for fifteen years... what i found particularly interesting is that the government also seized all of his assets and put them in a trust out of which they are insuring his family is completely taken care of, housing, food, education, everything and what the assets don't cover, the government makes up the difference... yeah, things are done a bit differently here... the good news is that no one operates with impunity, completely unlike afghanistan and even my own home country (whose name i will not mention here)...

today, i fly on to amman and then to aqaba tomorrow morning to work through the middle of the month before returning to kabul where i will remain until the end of april... as much as afghanistan has come to occupy a spot in my heart, it's still a hard place to be and i'm glad to have a short respite before the six-week stint to come...

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