Well, actually I’m not. But 5:30 this morning we’re going on a business trip to Dubai. Instead of finding an Internet cafe and a few minutes to spare like I did in London this summer I thought I’d actually post the obligatory travel blog post now already. I love spontaneous trips, but this one was quite rushed: last week was full of discussions concerning whom to send down there, which company should do what, should we send one or two people, if I were to go how the hell should I get a new passport instead of the one I lost in Cyprus, how should I get remote access to my development enviroments, why did the installation of the remote access software corrupt my Windows installation, and so on. It was late December 22nd when I gave up on trying to see whether or not I should go and had a few cold ones instead. A quick trip to Stockholm and further north resulted in a nice Christmas celebration…only interrupted early December 25th.

‘”Yeah, well, I guess we might as well go down there.” That little response made me look up trains to Stockholm and back here. (Here is Linköping. Pearl of Sweden; majestic flower of the North; heart-warming sight for weary travellers. Nah, not really. It’s dull as crap.) The clock is now 4:30 and I have been packing, washing up, had a long bath, watched The Simpsons (hey, I had episodes I hadn’t seen) and doing all kinds of important preparation-y thingies. 4:30? Bloody hell – no use going to sleep!

I’m pretty unusure what to expect from Dubai. I’ve read up a bit on Wikipedia and travel information sites, but it’s still rather vague to me. I didn’t even know that it was part of the United Arab Emirates – I just had an idea that it was somewhere around the Persian Gulf. If there’s something I’ve learned from my casual browsing, it’s that I’d better find some nice gold trinkets or electronics while I’m down there. Good thing that I’ve been planning on getting an iPod Nano anyway. Here’s to wishing that I get some time off for shopping. With my luck they’ll just keep me busy with work.

I had planned on writing a final paragraph here, where I mentioned how we’ll be greeted by unhappy Arabs out for blood. This would have branched off into a rant about how it’d be hard to do some coding with my hands chopped off, and all other kinds of stereotypicial almost-racist non-politically correct comments. While this is something I have no trouble writing, it felt instinctively wrong. It sounds too much like what a narrow-minded American would say. (Here’s a quick test for you: Are you American? Did you get annoyed by the previous sentence? Read it again and read “narrow-minded” as a qualifier; not as a generalization. If you did get annoyed, chances are reasonably high that you fit in with the narrow-minded group, though.)

Countries 2006: (Sweden) England, Cyprus, Dubai. Not great, but not bad. A decent year all in all I suppose.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 26th, 2006 at 4:56 am and is filed under Travels. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.