Arriving

Toronto to Dubai is 12 hours; I tried sampling the in-flight entertainment system, which now has a huge number of titles, but many didn’t have subtitles and you can’t hear anything over the airplane itself, so unsure what the point is. Ended up rewatching stuff where I already knew more or less what they were saying, namely the episodes of Succession in which this guy mops the floor with those rich fucks (“You can’t make a Tomlette without breaking a few Gregs?”)

Perhaps this was on the mind because my only previous association with Dubai was also this particular guy being really fed up, namely, in the reboot of Interview with the Vampire:

At the limits of that entertainment I also worked on what I’d meant to be working on for the last year, which was that I’d wanted to at least be able to sound out words in Arabic by the time I spent two weeks in the Middle East. Not exactly for practical purposes– in most of the places we’ll be going, all important signs and directions are transliterated anyway– but it would have been nice to have some mode of interaction with the environment other than wandering around saying “English?” like the north american anglophone tourist I am. However, I spent the past year learning circuit analysis and digital logic, not Arabic, so here we are.

I downloaded an Anki deck for the alphabet, and by the time we got off the plane was able to pan around Oman on OpenStreetMaps (the only one I’d downloaded yet since that’ll be most of the trip) and read the place names with, hmm, perhaps 57% accuracy. Extremely introductory language learners– I have noted many times from the other side– are the absolute worst company, because they are likely to point to any word they recognize in the wild and force a full reckoning of their thought process upon anyone in the vicinity. “Look!” I say, pointing to the sign that also says “Dubai Duty Free” in English right there. “That says ‘Souk Dooty something’!”

The UAE gives all incoming travellers a SIM card that works free for 24 hours, right there when they stamp your passport, which is both a) a thing that the kind of person who prattles about surveillance capitalism and the horrors of the corporate web and uses a VPN and surfs the Fediverse as a primary internet activity would never use, and b) a thing that anyone who has just spent 12 hours on an airplane and was already worrying about having to go find a SIM card first thing is absolutely going to use immediately.

Took the metro (“look! those letters spell ‘metro’!”) to the hotel. Perhaps this is just a function of it being, well, not cold as balls outside, but we were remarking on how the residential area surrounding the hotel, at around 10 PM, had a whole lot of people just hanging around outside in ways that you don’t tend to see in the West; for instance, sitting in circles in the middle of a parking lot outside storefronts selling snacks to fuel your parking-lot-sitting. I got some samosas from one such storefront and brought them back to the hotel to eat while engaging in my usual hotel activity of reading the literature provided beside the bed.

From the first few sections of the English Quran, I remarked in even more irritating fashion that a lot of Arabic words are recognizably, and understandably, derived from ancient Phoenician: for instance بَيت bayt, “house”, which corresponds to the (indeterminately vowelled since the Phoenician writing system was an abjad that only included consonant sounds) “BT” listed in the Xeroxed 1974 dissertation on the Phoenician and Punic languages lying around on my computer somewhere. Similarly, the Gideon Quran’s footnote on the use of the word رب rab, “lord/master,” which made me suddenly remember that that was the title applied to Carthaginian political leaders. Which is practically the only words I know in either of those languages, so not exactly conclusive, but (doofenshmirtz voice) it’s weird that it’s happened twice!