[And if anyone correctly guesses the number of hours it took me to edit this video I'll buy them a beer.]
--click the little X next to 'vimeo' to get it full-screen.
Yemeni women are beautiful, I think. Of course I can’t be sure, since I’ve never actually seen one—only the black silhouettes which sweep along the street in groups of two or three, either following a husband or with small children in tow—wrapped totally in black except for their eyes. But some of them have very beautiful eyes, and so I’m an optimist about the rest. Yemeni men are pretty impressive too. Mostly dressed in white cloaks, adorned with a curved dagger, held in place by an embroidered waistband. There are also a lot of children; but it’s difficult to tell how Yemenis get the money to fund so many. A lot of time is spent negotiating, buying, and then chewing bag of qat—the mildly hallucinogenic green plant—which seems to render the population good-natured but pretty lethargic. One bag costs between $3 and $5 per day, even though the national per capita income is somehow only $2.50 per day.. Some have their cheeks so full they can’t even talk. Bits of green leaf sometimes drop out the side of their mouth.
[Big fat qat. (and Yemeni bling.)]
I postponed coming here by a few days since the government was digging in its soldiers around the airport, expecting mortar fire from the hills around. Earlier this year the US Embassy got attacked by mortar rounds, several people got blown up by a suicide bomb, tourists got shot dead in the east of the country, and the government are fighting a civil war 50 miles north of the capital city, Sana’a. So—putting travellers’ bravado aside for a minute—I was pretty scared, even though Sana’a itself was apparently OK to visit.
But I also surprised myself with how much my own feelings about the Middle East have changed after three years watching TV footage of Iraqi carbombs and kidnappings. I had such great memories of backpacking through Iran, Syria, Lebanon and Gaza in 1999—people welcoming me warmly, inviting me into their homes, telling me with great dignity about their lives. Middle Eastern hospitality is legendary. But these memories underwent a kind of attrition since then. Now, in a taxi from Yemen’s international airport towards the centre of the city, I lock my door to guard against kidnappers (as though that would help!) and peer nervously through the dirty windscreen at scrappy shopfronts and graffitied walls that look like a down-at-heel version of Baghdad. Even if these people haven’t changed since 1999, my perceptions got infected by mental association.
I postponed coming here by a few days since the government was digging in its soldiers around the airport, expecting mortar fire from the hills around. Earlier this year the US Embassy got attacked by mortar rounds, several people got blown up by a suicide bomb, tourists got shot dead in the east of the country, and the government are fighting a civil war 50 miles north of the capital city, Sana’a. So—putting travellers’ bravado aside for a minute—I was pretty scared, even though Sana’a itself was apparently OK to visit.
But I also surprised myself with how much my own feelings about the Middle East have changed after three years watching TV footage of Iraqi carbombs and kidnappings. I had such great memories of backpacking through Iran, Syria, Lebanon and Gaza in 1999—people welcoming me warmly, inviting me into their homes, telling me with great dignity about their lives. Middle Eastern hospitality is legendary. But these memories underwent a kind of attrition since then. Now, in a taxi from Yemen’s international airport towards the centre of the city, I lock my door to guard against kidnappers (as though that would help!) and peer nervously through the dirty windscreen at scrappy shopfronts and graffitied walls that look like a down-at-heel version of Baghdad. Even if these people haven’t changed since 1999, my perceptions got infected by mental association.
[Petrol pump in one hand, cigarette in the other.]
Anyway, then I got walking in the old city, and things felt very different. The streets are positively medieval: cobbled; quiet; shielded from the sun by tall stone buildings. Occasionally the calm is broken by a beaten-up 1970s Toyota pick-up truck careering round the corner and swerving to avoid a motorbike coming the other way. It took me an hour to get 200 metres from my hotel, after stopping to answer the questions of each person I passed about where I’m from, accepting gifts of bread and pistachio nuts, hearing the mantra: “welcome to Yemen”, being invited into shops for sugared tea.
My hotel—a palace with stained-glass windows and panoramic roof terrace—is almost completely empty. The flow of tourists has slowed to a trickle, and there are three power-cuts just in my first day here. Somehow Yemenis still take this deteriorated situation with good humour—perhaps gallows humour: when all the lights go out, the shopkeeper I’m with exclaims “Ah! It is good. They are conserving electricity for us!”
Anyway, then I got walking in the old city, and things felt very different. The streets are positively medieval: cobbled; quiet; shielded from the sun by tall stone buildings. Occasionally the calm is broken by a beaten-up 1970s Toyota pick-up truck careering round the corner and swerving to avoid a motorbike coming the other way. It took me an hour to get 200 metres from my hotel, after stopping to answer the questions of each person I passed about where I’m from, accepting gifts of bread and pistachio nuts, hearing the mantra: “welcome to Yemen”, being invited into shops for sugared tea.
My hotel—a palace with stained-glass windows and panoramic roof terrace—is almost completely empty. The flow of tourists has slowed to a trickle, and there are three power-cuts just in my first day here. Somehow Yemenis still take this deteriorated situation with good humour—perhaps gallows humour: when all the lights go out, the shopkeeper I’m with exclaims “Ah! It is good. They are conserving electricity for us!”
[Sana'a is added to my list of honeymoon destinations.]
Three weeks earlier I was in Oman—next-door to Yemen on the peninsula—visiting my friend Lamya. Everything seems to flow smoothly there. Lamya drove me around the city in her silver Mercedes Benz, driving with one hand, swerving us between construction lorries. The capital city, Muscat, is incessantly white, and hot, and humid; we dive between air-conditioned car and air-conditioned restaurant, house or glamorous hotel. Smooth roads weave between barren rocky mountains, on the way to Shangri-La hotel, between stopping at the regal atrium of the Hyatt, or the seductive elegance of the Chedi. The sultan of Oman—who apparently may be gay—lives some of the time in a squat blue-domed palace; however, he was out of the country in his holiday home. The other mini-sultans—those in the oil and gas industries, including many chubby expatriates—were still there, sliding through the marble-floored shopping centres.
Finally, when I wrote this, I was in Dubai. For me, Dubai was the real dystopia. The streets were blisteringly hot: a thick heat, which drips off your skin and soaks through your clothes. It was a Friday, so bus stops were crammed with Indians, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis and Sri Lankans on their day off, waiting for buses which pass without stopping, also full of South Asians on their day off. Finally we were rescued from this sidewalk on a 6-lane freeway by a bus with standing room only, and we crawled through traffic into Deira—the closest thing Dubai has to a city centre. The place felt like something in between Brave New World and The Handmaid’s Tale: society is sharply stratified by economic category—an ‘A’ (Arab in his SUV), ‘B’ (sunburnt Brit or other Westerner trying to hail an air conditioned taxi), ‘C’ (Canny Nigerian buying up stocks of clothes and watches to sell in Lagos) or ‘D’ (Dazed south Asian, after many hours of work). Meanwhile there’s a tension in the city, continually raised by the distant roar of the outside world: perhaps the nearby war in Iraq, but most immediately the stream of Boeings and Airbuses hauling themselves up into the heavy blue sky.
The whole place is a jumble of the brand sparkling new and the rusting mouldy old. A dirty tiled kiosk sells samosas and fresh squeezed orange juice; its customers’ shirts have turned transparent through sweat, and a Visa card payment machine in the corner is strapped with an elastic band onto a Chinese four-way electricity socket, already worn and faded. The inside of Burj al-Arab, hotels in Jumeirah, luxury villas—or even the indoor ski slope in the ‘Mall of the Emirates’—are a different story; but the temporary paradise they provide seems even more surreal when it is supported by such a mass of struggle and sweat.
Three weeks earlier I was in Oman—next-door to Yemen on the peninsula—visiting my friend Lamya. Everything seems to flow smoothly there. Lamya drove me around the city in her silver Mercedes Benz, driving with one hand, swerving us between construction lorries. The capital city, Muscat, is incessantly white, and hot, and humid; we dive between air-conditioned car and air-conditioned restaurant, house or glamorous hotel. Smooth roads weave between barren rocky mountains, on the way to Shangri-La hotel, between stopping at the regal atrium of the Hyatt, or the seductive elegance of the Chedi. The sultan of Oman—who apparently may be gay—lives some of the time in a squat blue-domed palace; however, he was out of the country in his holiday home. The other mini-sultans—those in the oil and gas industries, including many chubby expatriates—were still there, sliding through the marble-floored shopping centres.
Finally, when I wrote this, I was in Dubai. For me, Dubai was the real dystopia. The streets were blisteringly hot: a thick heat, which drips off your skin and soaks through your clothes. It was a Friday, so bus stops were crammed with Indians, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis and Sri Lankans on their day off, waiting for buses which pass without stopping, also full of South Asians on their day off. Finally we were rescued from this sidewalk on a 6-lane freeway by a bus with standing room only, and we crawled through traffic into Deira—the closest thing Dubai has to a city centre. The place felt like something in between Brave New World and The Handmaid’s Tale: society is sharply stratified by economic category—an ‘A’ (Arab in his SUV), ‘B’ (sunburnt Brit or other Westerner trying to hail an air conditioned taxi), ‘C’ (Canny Nigerian buying up stocks of clothes and watches to sell in Lagos) or ‘D’ (Dazed south Asian, after many hours of work). Meanwhile there’s a tension in the city, continually raised by the distant roar of the outside world: perhaps the nearby war in Iraq, but most immediately the stream of Boeings and Airbuses hauling themselves up into the heavy blue sky.
The whole place is a jumble of the brand sparkling new and the rusting mouldy old. A dirty tiled kiosk sells samosas and fresh squeezed orange juice; its customers’ shirts have turned transparent through sweat, and a Visa card payment machine in the corner is strapped with an elastic band onto a Chinese four-way electricity socket, already worn and faded. The inside of Burj al-Arab, hotels in Jumeirah, luxury villas—or even the indoor ski slope in the ‘Mall of the Emirates’—are a different story; but the temporary paradise they provide seems even more surreal when it is supported by such a mass of struggle and sweat.
