Day One = Overwhelming travel business

I left Boise at 12:30 on Wednesday, April 6, and I just arrived in Dubai, UAE at about 8 p.m. on April 7th. I’m officially 10 hours in the future, and it doesn’t work like I thought it would in the movies. I can’t bet on sports scores I knew 10 hours ago or anything cool like that. I can’t even see a younger me on Facebook.

In any case, I’m here for the night after three flights – Boise to Denver, Denver to Washington, D.C., then D.C. to Dubai. The last flight was the long one, but not as long as I thought it would be. It was 12 hours exactly, and I slept through most of it, so that was cool.

I met cool people as well. In the Denver Airport, I met a guy who has been doing contracting work for many years and has a wife and kids. We talked about music stuff (since I was carrying my mandolin) and I never got around to asking the obvious question – how in the world do you do all this travel with a family at home and somehow keep it all together? I’ll catch him the next time around.

On that flight I talked to my neighbor who was traveling  back from Montana on a business trip. She’s a lawyer with the WWF. “What’s Hulk Hogan really like?” I asked. “Not that WWF dipsh*t,” she responded. Those DC lawyers are a bit testy. But really she was with the World Wildlife Fund that preserves wildlands all over the world. That was cool since she was fighting to preserve some parts of Wyoming that I could swear I went to high school in.

The long flight featured me sitting next to “Tim” (his American name.) Tim is middle-eastern, 6’4″, about 220 pounds, and ripped. I asked the flight attendant, “Excuse me Miss, do you know where the closest Veterinarian is? Because my friend here is in really good shape.” Tim is a supervisor on the project building the Afghan military air force base. He’s from Afghanistan and seemed to be really nice. He did comment after seeing the large cross tattooed on my forearm that he would like to kill all infidels, but besides that, he was very polite.

So tomorrow morning I’m up early to see the sun come up over the sea, between the huge high rise buildings that sprout from the sand. I’m excited about it, but by 2p.m. local time, I’ll be in Kabul, starting work. Vacation’s over.