dubai is a strange place

i left lisbon to go spend the day in london. this time the mad city felt great :) first of all because i know i don't live there anymore. it was cold and wet and i felt so thankful for the lovely weather in portugal in the past 14 months :) now london took the best form possible as i stopped there to enjoy the best that london has to offer, my friends :) i had a great day! and i agree that scheduling only 1 day for this was not a proper thing to do! but on the way back i'll have many new stories and our conversations will be filled with exotic tales :D (thanks you lovely londoners for the hugs & smiles!)
i'm now at the airport in dubai. weird place.
i slept heavily on the airplane until the canadian guy sitting next to me woke me up all excited saying he was seing a place he knew from up there and i had to see it. in the middle of the desert he recognized a place where he spent 2 months doing the art direction of a kurdish film. in the film a village is invaded by crows and in the end all the population acts as scarecrows. it all sounded dry and strange and deserted of several things. that was the guy sitting on my left. he said he doesn't like canada and i got all defensive because i love the place (and i feel a bit canadian). anyway, i thing i got his heart when i told him i'd love to get a double double now :) and he laughed out loud when i told him i went out curling in sudbury last january! we hangued out at the airport till 2am when he boarded his flight to corea, where he lives. we shared dinner and film tales, family stories, love stories, weird stories, and both smiled at how great it is to be all the way in dubai in the middle of the night sharing bits of intimacy you don't share with friends back home :) i presented him to herzog and robert fenz's films :) he offered me his coppy of 'a day in the life of ivan denisovich', a book i always wanted to read. i have a strong belief that books find you, and this one just bumped into me when it must be the time to read it :)
so that was jay, the guy sitting on my left.
on my right i had kamal, a sweet pakistani guy from lahore. i managed to sit in between people from 2 of my favorite countries in the world :) we talked about lahore and i shared my love for the icecream place that is open well into the middle of the night selling you a variety of flavours that makes it hard to chose and impossible to eat only one cup! so me and his family had a nostalgic moment thinking of the joy that places brings us :D he's a professor at cambridge and seems to think i should go do a phd in the US, maybe in boston. kamal is going to be in lisbon next year as he's organizing a conference there. it's on economics and it will be in mid july. i'm in charge of finding a bar where he can organize a party for 100 people who'll be at the conference. kamal's kids bought a souvenir from emirates that was called pedro - a stuffed bear disguised as a mix of a bird and an indian. he also had a belly button which made him a very unlikely bird. pedro was an enigma, strangely sold inside of a little purse from the emirates and came with a little story explaing how pedro flew here from south america, where he comes from...
haha
so these are the tales from dubai airport. up in the plane i could only see sand and sand and more sand. until many lights started to form a road arriving into a wild amount of bright lights showing huge and fancy buildings in what looks like a mad city! the airport in itself is strange, it's like a giant corridor that is made in a way that you always need to keep on walking, like you're not meant to stop here. so you walk and walk and you go by ridicoulous amounts of shops. they sell the whole world in here! it's mad! except that they don't have the lonely planet indonesia, so i still don't have a guidebook for the 17.000 islands :) anyway, it will be fine!
very happy to be here :D this is a really different journey as i feel i have painfuly earned my right to be here :)i survived a huge car crash and then spend 7 months living with a hurt knee. then got surgery and spent 14 months recovering the whole body. now i can walk properly and have the strenght to carry the 7 kilos i'm traveling with :) i want to thank all the people that helped the rehabilitation of the left knee and all the connected things :D a huge thank you!!!! (you all travel with me as i move now!) and most of all i want to thank kyle, for supporting me so much with this! (k, you're the best! even though you live so many miles away you were always there! never to be forgotten!!)
i'll be boarding the flight to singapore soon. and still have a stopover in colombo. it will be great to see sri lanka from above. i'll try to spot my amazing meditation centre :) and wink down at it!
i haven't been sleeping properly for over 2 weeks now and maybe because i'm so exhausted i still haven't realized where i'll be tomorrow... it's either that or it just stopped mattering so much, the being here or being there. as moving is so natural and traveling is a way of breathing. i feel excited with what's to come and at the same time i have the relaxed posture like when in lisbon i take the tram downtown.
there is a swiss looking guy at a lindt chocolat counter and he just took a huge block of chocolate and is cutting it into little pieces. i might have to go there.
be well everyone!