Gulf News - Part 1

So....here I am in Abu Dhabi.  Gonna be here a month so I thought I'd try and do a regular feature while I'm here.  Here we go....

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I never sleep well the night before a trip.  It doesn't matter whether it's a short one to somewhere like Frankfurt or Geneva or London, and a doozie like Trinidad or Almaty or this one to Abu Dhabi.  It makes no difference if it's a business trip or a family holiday.  Sleep will not come, and if it does, it doesn't hang around for long.

There is no good reason for this that I can think of.  It's not fear or nerves: I've made so many flights over the past 11 years or so that boarding a plane is as mundane to me as getting on a bus or the metro is to most people.  It's not even concern about missing the flight - nowadays with internet check-in I always do so the day before travel, as soon as I can: that way I can more or less guarantee the seat I want, and it also means I only have a brief stop at the airport desk to drop my luggage off (there's usually no queue - or at least only a couple of people, so only takes a couple of minutes).  This means I could safely get there at the last minute and still make the flight.  But I don't do that either, I'd rather get there a good hour before the gate opens and relax in the Business Lounge, have a coffee and some breakfast.  I'm not worried about oversleeping and missing all that, because I set my alarm in good time to allow me to arrive as above.

But despite all that, I can't sleep.  I've tried going to bed early and late.  I've tried various nightcaps before going to bed, ranging from vodka through beer to Horlicks or hot chocolate, and none of it makes any difference.  It makes no difference whether I go to my bed, kick one of the kids out and try theirs, or bunk down on settee.  I've even tried sitting upright in an armchair, but that only gave me a chronic back-ache.

It's a bastard, and frankly it seems to be getting worse as I get older - insomnia is apparently very common amongst the (shall we say) older generation, so I guess as I'm now 58 and suffering from it I can count myself part of that.  I'm not sure how I feel about that, quite honestly......I've always felt more concerned about growing older than dying, and my kids certainly keep me feeling young and vigourous (even if my creaking body sometimes refuses to accept the still juvenile mind controlling it). 

So anyway, Thursday night I turned in about 10, after the usual kids' bedtime stories and shower, set  my alarm for 4:15 and went to sleep.  I then proceeded to wake up at 12, 1:00, 2:15 and 3:30 - at which point I gave it up as a bad job, and lay quietly, staring at the ceiling and listening to everyone else sleeping soundly.  I got up at a quarter past 4, had a coffee, made a quick status post on Facebook (first time I've done that before a trip....) and got my cab to the airport.  I'd dropped my bag, collected my boarding cards and cleared security before 5.... bloody awful time to be on the road.  Fortunately the Lounge was open, so I had more coffee and some breakfast, then had a mooch round the Departure area.  It has very definately improved since Poland joined the EU and spent a bucket of money extending the terminal to meet the increased passenger numbers - a much better choice of shops and bars, even at that early hour.  The place was very busy too.....I don't usually fly that early so the number of flights between 5 and 7 took me by surprise. 

The flight to Frankfurt was half empty and almost pleasant.  I managed to doze for about 20 minutes after my ham salad roll (it's all LOT provide - or sometimes cheese), which made a change - I can't usually sleep on flights either.  And then, at Frankfurt something very pleasant indeed happened.

I've mentioned here before how much I loathe changing flights at Frankfurt, where the security can be quite ludicrously intense, with multiple baggage checks between flights.  Well this time, it was an absolute breeze.....we parked way out on the apron, somewhere in the vicinity of Darmstadt, and got the bus into Terminal 2, in through the Schengen area door and up the escalator to the Exit and Gate area.  Turned right for Gates B32 - 56, through passport control - and that was it.  My due gate was just round the corner, by the stairs to the Business Lounge.  No security check at all.  Including the bus ride in, the transfer took all of 15 minutes.  Unbelievable!  Whether it was pure luck or whether the airport authorities have finally done something positive and sensible to make the journey a more pleasant experience I have no idea......but it left me with an unexpected 3 hours to kill.  More food and drink in the Lounge (I could have got really pissed if I'd wanted to....) and a bit of shopping - magazines and a book to keep me going over the next month - took care of that.

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The Lufthansa flight down to the Gulf was ok.  German beer, beef stroganoff on the menu, and a comfortable enough seat (despite the muppet in front of me dropping her seat so far back her bonce was in my lap).  But my Lufthansa issue headset for the in-flight entertainment was crap - you had to add the spongy bits yourself to the earpads and mine ripped in half as I was trying - very carefully! - to fit it.  The movie and music line-up wasn't all that good anyway, so I didn't bother - I switched the tv channel to the route map (don't need sound for that) and settled for my trusty iPod.  And the guy sitting next to me (American, maybe 22-23) was suffering from a serious gas issue.  Every 20 minutes or so, maybe less, for nearly 6 1/2 hours, another ferocious pong would waft its way up and engulf me.  Try as hard as I might I just couldn't respond in kind.  At least I assume it was him.....although  I guess it could have been the muppet in front of me or her mate, or even one of the couple immediately behind.  But whoever it was, it was fuckin awful!

Abu Dhabi airport was another pleasant surprise.  The building has a number of satellites thrown out around a central hub, all circular and domed and serving 4 departure gates, linked to the hub by covered walkways.....from above it must look like a beached space station from Star Wars or something.  But it was very efficient - off the plane, a five minute walk through to passport control (then a two minute pause for a comfort break), another 5 minutes queueing there to be processed, stamp in the passport (30 day visitors visa), through to the baggage hall, where the bags were already coming out on the belt.  Mine was about twelfth off, no more than a couple of minutes.  Through the exit, driver waiting with my name on his board, two minute walk to the exit and into an air-conditioned Cadillac limo for the ride into the city.  Painless, and so unlike the chaos I endured every couple of weeks in Beirut, another Middle Eastern destination I know well.

The ride to the hotel took maybe half an hour, along modern and well lit motorways, and in quite heavy traffic, much of it coming in from Dubai along the coast.  There was parkland and smart housing on both sides, floodlit sports arenas and shopping malls, and link roads to the many islands and public beaches.  We came into the city with its Manhattan skyscrapers and well tended housing, smart car dealerships and more sports arenas.  In the centre we hit roadworks, and the traffic was a bit crazy and manic as everyone tried to cut everone else up as the streams merged and then separated again.  But throughout the drive my overriding impression was one of care......the roads and pathways and parks and buildings all had a well tended and highly maintained look - no sub-Banksie grafitti here.  Even the roadworks seemed less dirty than one would expect. 

It made me think that when a relatively small but oil-rich nation like the UAE (and, further up the coast Qatar and Bahrain) could invest wisely and provide infrastructure of this quality what a tragedy it is that the regimes in Iraq and Iran, across the Gulf and with equal or more wealth, could only manage to blow the lot on warfare, corruption and repression, leading their populations into nothing but misery, fear and deprivation.

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I slept like a log in the hotel, once I'd checked in and unpacked.  The room is very good, and the bed very comfortable.  I woke to sunshine streaming through the window, pulled the curtains and went back to sleep for another couple of hours, then showered, dressed and headed for breakfast.

A first disappointment.  The buffet was very good and well stocked with plenty of choice, and I went for a full English (since it's included in the room cost to be picked up by the client).  The sauteed mushrooms, hash browns and saffron rice (OK, not strictly English but what the hell....they were there) were nice, but the sausages and bacon were foul.  Being a Muslim country, pork is strictly taboo, so the substitute meat was veal.  Now I like a bit of veal - my wife made quite delicious veal cutlets earlier this week - but I'm afraid it doesn't lend itself well to sausages, nor to being sliced very thin and fried like bacon rashers.  The coffee too was way too strong and not very hot - certainly not Nescafe - but the apple juice and toast and apricot jam were fine.  But it was an ok start to the day.

Back to the room, and time to iron the shirts that came out of my suitcase looking like dishrags.  But first, quick Skype call home to say hello to my beloveds - I'm 2 hours ahead of Warsaw so they had only just got up.  It was wonderful to see them.

On my fifth shirt, there was an almighty bang, sparks and smoke everywhere and the iron was gone.....a nice big smudge of soot on the shirt too.  It could only happen to me......  I called the Front Desk, who sent someone along to take a look.  He seemed more concerned about the shirt, took it off and disppeared for half an hour. Then, with a beaming smile, he returned it, beautifully pressed and with not a mark on it.  I asked him again for a replacement iron, so off he went again.  Another half hour passed, and I called the Front Desk again.....where's my bloody iron?  By this time it was past lunchtime and I was getting nowhere quite fast.  I turned the tv back on....and found that it, too, was out - clearly the iron had fused all the power points.  I gave it up as a bad job, put my trunks on and headed for the beach (pausing only to stop off and bollock the Front Desk).

The hotel beach is ok.  It's small, evidently man-made and has plenty of loungers and umbrellas.  On both ends of the bay there is major construction work going  on - at one a new hotel, at the other a group of tower blocks labelled the new financial district of Abu Dhabi - so it doesn't have the best of sea views, but as I'm working here I won't get to make that much use of it (weekends only) so it's not a concern really.  I had a swim.  It was like diving into a hot saline bath - way too salty.  Things must be bad when you need to rinse your eyes out in a chlorinated pool to stop them smarting!  So I didn't stay in long and returned to my lounger, listened to my music and read my book for an hour in the sunshine.  Right now it's about 42C here, so that was quite enough......and besides, I was hungry.

As well as the main restaurant, the hotel boasts Italian and Thai restaurants, a sports bar and (happy days!) an Irish pub....so food will not be an issue (I'll just ignore the veal sausages and bacon).  I decided to try the Irish bar, and wasn't disappointed.  Inside it looked and even smelt like a proper pub - spilled beer, stale cigarette smoke, kitchen odours - and had a lovely dark and traditional pub decor, with tables and chairs scattered around the place and rustic tables and benches in little alcoves.  There was a good selection of beers and a decent menu of authentic pub grub.  I settled for a pint of Kilkenny (served chilled and quite delicious - my favourite Irish beer, much better than Guinness) and a steak and onion ciabatta with fries.    And very nice it was too.....total cost about AED 70 (so about GBP11 or if you prefer PLN52) - pretty good value, I thought.  More importantly, well within my per diem allowance.

By the time I got back to my room, the plugs had been fixed, and a new iron delivered so I got my ironing out of the way.  Now I'm all set for work tomorrow.  It's early evening here, the sun going down, The Weakest Link is on BBC Prime and time for dinner.....the Sports Bar tonight I think..