Curtis Goes Fashionista

Nobody has ever accused me of being overly fashion conscious. I mean, I hardly remember clothes. My mom gave me the same button down shirt three Christmases in a row because I kept leaving it my closet, unworn. Not that I didn't like the shirt, it's just that clothes don't occupy a very large spot in my brain.

However, just because I’m not into fashion generally speaking doesn’t mean that I don’t recognize AMAZING fashion sense when I see it. And Dubai is full of it. Just take this chap: neon yellow shoes with matching neon yellow shirt. I won’t even comment on the fact that he has a hoodie vest with fur lining on it, the matching yellow is enough to make me want to stand up and clap.

I mean, this is beyond stylish. This isn’t tacky, it’s “OMG is he serious or joking? Cuz I hope he is serious!” However, Mr. Yellow Faux Fur was one upped by the Bumblebee Twins with their matching neon yellow pants AND shoes. Twinners, just on a little man date, rockin’ out in skinny yellow jeans at the Mall of the Emirates.

Yellow is apparently in style here. Even some of the robes come in it:

Then, of course, there was The Man with Golden Pants and Golden Shirt and Golden Shoes and GOLDEN MULLET. That thing is Pure Money. You stud, with your yellow everything and your posse of women.

Of coures, it's not just yellow. It's anything colorful. This mulletman went with all white, except for the lime green shoes. I applaud him.

However, nothing compared to the breathtaking trifecta of matching shirt/shoe combos : a trifecta of matching shirt/shoe combos, Pink, Purple, Blue.

Inspired. All of these, with the exception of the Golden Mullet, were captured in about a five minute span at the Mall of the Emirates. I felt like I was witnessing a fashion revolution. But where do they get these clothes? Recently I found it: a ghettofabulous market-place-cum-shopping center called Karama. It specializes in being cheap, tacky, and good for a laugh. It is a place where East meets West to produce some bizarre twists on globalization. All the stores, for example, are named after Western cities:

Among the various treasures to be found in this amazing place are “Tough” handbags, Super Mario boxers, and vintage NBA jerseys from the 1990s:

Good to see Scottie Pippen lives on. My favorite, however, was the Obama Buckle. Who says Arabs hate America?:

Here, in this treasure trove, I found what I was a looking for. A veritable carnival of chromatic cornucopia. The colorful shoes:
The colorful pants: Of course, I soon discovered that the lure of the skinny yellow jeans went way beyond the aesthetic appeal. Read the label: “The Original Military First Men’s Jeans: Brand Good Feeling Let’s Have a Good Workout Super Design FM”

I mean, who can resist here? There’s something in that for every one: Design, Comfort, Working Out, implied Military strength durability.

I was hooked. Rarely do I feel the shopaholic compulsion to buy something where I feel like I have no choice, but this was once occasion. Then, of course, I had to complete the outfit, so I bought matching purple pants and purple shoes. Then I sat back and let the Original Military First Men’s Jeans work their magic.
It didn't take long.
Booyah! Who’s got a Brand Good Feeling now?

Rwanda Rweekend

I know some of you felt sorry for me after my post last week, but rest assured, my life is pretty sweet. Exhibit A: What I did over the weekend on January 29-30, 2010. I only have 3 things to say about it:

1. Tracking wild gorillas in the mountains of Rwanda is INCREDIBLE

2. Baby gorillas are really cute while 800 pound Don Corleone Daddy Gorilla is freakin huge

3. To my mother: sorry I didn't tell you that I was going to do this, I didn't want you to worry and I only decided to go a few days before

Dude-bai

So I knew coming out here that Dubai would be a bad move for my dating life. I checked out gender ratios on the CIA Factbook to discover that the male-female ratio of people between the ages of 15-64 in the UAE is 2.74. Meaning that there are almost 3 guys for every girl in the country. Further research revealed an even darker picture, as I discovered that the next highest countries on the list were Qatar (2.46), Kuwait (1.78), the Maldives (1.62), Oman (1.38), Bahrain (1.34), and Saudi Arabia (1.29). Meaning that not only does my new country have no girls, but neither does any of its neighbors.

The reason for this is that these countries import a lot of laborers from various South Asian countries to do all the blue collar jobs, but don't want the workers to actually settle so they don't let them bring their families. So if Pakistani construction workers is your target dating demographic, you're in business. If your target dating demographic is, well, female, then the odds are stacked against you.

I thought I had mentally prepared myself for this. After all, it was an adventure, and I have spent most of my 28 years being fairly content with my single dude status. Plus, gender ratios aren't necessarily a good or bad sign of somplace being a great place to move to: 2 of the top 3 countries with the most favorable ratios for men are Zimbabwe (0.81) and Chad (0.85), not exactly paradisiacal locations to cruise for chicks.

However, I underestimated the strange behavioral difference it would make in me to not have a proper gender balance. Not having girls around you start doing strange things. After about a month in Dubai I found myself on ITunes doing something I thought I would never do: downloading Britney Spears. At first just a few songs, then when I saw that I could have all 17 songs to complete her Greatest Hits album for only an additional $4.44, I went ahead. Then in a flurry of activity, I started downloading Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Rihanna. In the space of about 15 minutes I ended up spending around $40 on songs that I think were written with a target audience of 15 year old girls.

Not that this was entirely unprecedented in my life: I have previously admitted on my blog to listening to Madonna's "Material Girl" and the disco classic "It's Raining Men" (click on the titles to go to confessions). In high school I may or may not have purchased a Spice Girls T-shirt and may or may not have stolen leotards from the dance team for my Halloween costume. But those things were done in a perhaps misguided attempt to get laughs. When I made the Backstreet Boys spoof video it was entirely tongue in cheek: I didn't actually start listening to the band with any regularity. I never actively sought out or bought any Madonna music, it came on a compilation album. But this time, I'm not into Britney Spears to be funny, I'm into it for reals.

All of this has prompted a lot of soul searching. One day, while at the gym on the rowing machine with "P-p-p-pokerface" pulsing in my ears while at the same time falling in love with Sarah Bareilles whose "Lovesong" was playing on the television on mute, I started to wonder if the Middle East was really messing me up. After all, gender relations are notoriously complicated or backward, depending upon your perspective. Your "gay-dar" can really get thrown off: men hold hands and it's not a sign of anything other than friendship. It was in Egypt that I started reading the "Modern Love" column in the New York Times and dropped my "must be with a cute girl" rule for watching romantic comedies. Could it be that I am compensating for the shortage of female contact? Am I trying to create a 1 to 1 gender ratio within myself?

I don't really have any answers, nor am I getting better. I now have Lady Gaga on three different playlists for my Ipod. Last month, however, I reached a new low. The Dubai International Film Festival was in town: dozens of international films playing, a chance to get cultured. Instead, I went with my [male] roommate to see "Twilight: New Moon." It was the only movie playing after 11 PM, so when I finished my work at 10:55 I literally raced sprinted to get there to make it on time. I pushed my taxi driver to drive recklessly so that I could make my man-date to see the biggest chick flick ever made.

As I came in to the theaterI told my roommate: "I hope you'll be flattered to know that going to see Twilight with you may be the gayest thing I have ever done." Then it occurred to me that we may have actually had a stroke of genius. I mean, could there possibly be a better place to meet girls? Based upon the descriptions I had read, the movie theaters everywhere else in the world were packed with young, attractive, single, lonely women. This is the crowd that reads Twilight, and aside from the confused looking woman at the front it looks like my target demographic:

Yet it was not to be. With a mixture of amusement and disappointment I ended up sharing a row with my roommate and three Egyptian men. Only in Dude-bai can you go to see Twilight and have there be more men than women in the theater. Go Team Khalifah.

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.