Litter-Free Propaganda

Growing up in the States I was exposed at a young age to clever trash-free slogans like "leave nature cleaner than you found it." And man did this propaganda ever work. When I came to Cairo in 2007 I found myself paralyzed by the trash disposal system there, which is that you throw your garbage into the street. Unable to throw my food scraps or plastic bags, I would carry my trash in my hands for HOURS, just out of habit, thinking that maybe a garbage can would appear like some shimmering mirage in the desert. Inevitably some well-meaning merchant would take the trash off my hands, only to chuck it into the traffic-clogged street. I never got used to it.

That was before the swine flu panic. Continuing its long tradition of genius policymaking, the Egyptian government prepared for the worst. Only two people have died from H1N1, but one province has actually picked out locations for mass human graves in case the pandemic reaches Pharaonic plague proportions. The national government has tried to stem the oncoming calamity by slaughtering all 300,000 of the country's pigs.

Of course, the pigs were crucial for the garbage pickers, a small community of Christians who collect trash from off the streets (I think I paid around 90 cents a month for their daily doorstep services). Now that they are dead, they have no way of disposing with food waste, so they have stopped collecting it, and only pick up inorganic waste.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/world/africa/20cairo.html

Now nobody has ever visited Cairo and come away awestruck at its cleanliness, but there might soon be some new Pyramids. The goats just aren't cuttin' the mustard.

Dubai, to my knowledge, doesn't have pigs to eat its food trash. It does, however, have effective anti-litter propaganda.

Take, for example, this amazing sticker which I found on my window when I moved in:

It's non-removeable, as if I would ever want to peel off such a masterpiece of contemporary art. At first I thought the intended message was:

VEILED LADIES, DO NOT THROW YOUR PURSES AT THE CREEPY LOOKING MAN BELOW WHO LOOKS LIKE HE IS TRYING TO STEAL SOMETHING.

However, if you look closely you can see the writing on the window: DO NOT LITTER.

Now I will admit, in spite of the puritanical litter-free-ness so deeply engrained in me, I do occasionally get a hankerin' to get wild and crazy and chuck my trash out my 28th floor window just to watch it fall. My inner mischief maker is dying to gleefully launch banana peels into the swimming pool or nail some unsuspecting sunbather with my empty milk cartons. Fortunately this sign is there to dissuade me, and dissuade me it does, a modern day eleventh commandment etched on my window and my heart.

Well played, Dubai. Well played.

Distractions from the 30th floor window

September 9th, 2009 (posted late)

So I'm working from home today, which means I'm sitting in my friends' apartment, who were kind enough to let me house-sit while they went trekking in Nepal and Tibet. The thing is, I get distracted by stupid things while I'm proofreading some dry reports for work. Exhibit A: the round-about outside the apartment.




Even for a lifelong connoisseur of ways to zone oneself out, this thing is RIVETING. It's like staring into a fire. You just look out, see the cars going around, the people that occasionally wander out in the way, and BAM you're totally zoned out. It's the worst during the morning rush hour, but it goes on all day.

Next is the window cleaners who came by and cleaned the 30th floor windows, also providing a convenient distraction from my job, as well as making me suddenly grateful that I was doing such dry work. I think this is going to be the first part of an ongoing series called "Jobs I'm Glad I Don't Do."

Jobs I'm Glad I Don't Do, Part I: Window Washing on 30+ Story Buildings

Please note the cable in the background which looks like it's not quite taut. That's cuz it wasn't quite taut. For some reason the cord had gotten tangled, so when the man in the picture finished fixing whatever was going on (about 5 seconds after taking this picture) the entire side of the applepicking/windowwashing machine just dropped like six inches before the cord caught. I felt my own heart leap into my throat, and also nearly browned my shorts, and I wasn't even in the thing. I can't imagine how the man in blue and his unpictured companion must have felt. All I can say is "THIS guy is glad he's not THAT guy."

Dubai!!!!

After a long hiatus due to the general un-blog-worthiness of my life in Washington DC, I feel like it's time to revive the CBennyC Journal of Discourses so that any of you out there who might feel inclined to stay in touch has a little window onto my life. Just to fast-forward from the last post, we successfully finished our tour of the world last summer, visiting 15 countries in 6 weeks, including Egypt, Greece, Macedonia, Kosovo, Albania, Montenegro, Croatia, Bosnia & Hercegovina, Serbia, Hungary, Germany, Estonia, Russia, Hong Kong, and Japan. It was nothing short of epic. I then hung out in the SLC for a couple of months, spent the rest of the year in Washington DC, and am now back in the Middle East.

So where do I start with Dubai? My first impression was the tremendous heat. The day I left I checked out weather.com which told me that the high for that day in Dubai would be 104. Not bad. Except that underneath it was the little note: feels like 129... And it does. The humidity is killer. I ran a marathon in Death Valley when the temperatures soared above 130. And Dubai in summer is worse. My glasses fog up every time I go outside. It is nasty.

The second thing about Dubai is the construction. Everywhere. The entire city feels like a giant construction zone. The view out my friend's window where I'm staying is of a place called "Business Bay" which in a few years will be kind of like the Manhattan of Dubai, a financial center of high-rises centered around a lake:

Note the Swiss-cheese looking building in the middle. That is for real. I actually googled "Swiss cheese building Dubai" and the following article was the first to come up: http://www.building.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=3134358.

Also, the malls are awesome. I hate malls except in Dubai where I think they're cool. Especially Dubai Mall, which opened 10 months ago. It is the largest mall in the world, even bigger than Mall of the Emirates down the road which has a ski resort in it. Dubai Mall has a skating rink, a theme park sponsored by Sega, and once all the spots open up, over 1200 stores. My favorite parts about it are the shark aquarium,:

and the awesome fountain shows which go on at night:

After a frenetic week of apartment hunting, getting settled in at my new job, and general stress at moving and adjusting to a new place, I'm finally getting around to enjoying the place. And what better way to enjoy a place with nothing but luxury options than a trip to the pool? Note the picture on the right, where my camera lens, like my glasses, had fogged up due to the humidity. And also note the building in the background, the Burj Dubai, the tallest in the world.