Corniche

The Corniche has become a sort of saving grace for me in Doha. It is 8 kilometers of sea-lined park, separating the Persian Gulf from the busy streets, chaotic roundabouts, and skyscrapers stretching from the diplomatic district to the airport. Traditional boats periodically dock and depart, as do airplanes that take off directly over the water. Ocean washes up on shore. Yachts drift by on weekends, overtaken by jet skis. In the distance lay man-made sandbars that will in the future be developed shoreline and land on an updated map.

While at night the walkways and grassy knolls are crowded with families and lovers and friends, around noon the Corniche is practically deserted. This is my favorite time to set out for a run, baking in the heat that will soon be hotter and drier as we move deeper into the middle of the year. This time of day separates the men from the boys -- a silly mind game I often play in my head on runs -- when in reality it probably just keeps away those in search of a more pleasant stroll where they can hold someone's hand without them sticking together. In either case, it is nice to have the place to myself and get away from all that has become a daily grind. It has been nice, and necessary, to sweat a few things out. 

My Dream Last Night

I dreamt curiously of Buenos Aires last night. I was en route to the city and came over top of some tall mountain and saw this delightful place spreading out to the coast. I have never been to Buenos Aires, so I do not know if it looks anything like I pictured in my dream. I do not think there are even mountains. But it was one of those dreams that felt so real and created so much fullness, as if all roads were leading there. I carried on about my day thinking back on a place I visited the night prior, hoping I might see it again soon.

Into the Desert

I arrived in Qatar on a Turkish plane one evening after midnight. I was greeted by an Indian cab driver who took me to my Islamic hotel where I slept next to a Quran written only in Arabic. First impressions were the warm and dry air at night, a soft breeze from the gulf, and another impressive skyline dominated by cranes and lights and other strange super structures. I knew little about Qatar then, and still do not know enough now, but this odd peninsula supported by hydrocarbons and expatriote labor has since turned into an equally odd sort of makeshift home.

Qatar itself has a uninteresting history, notable only for fishing and pearls until recent memory. But with the discovery of obscene quantities of natural gas in the latter half of the 20th century, the last ten years especially have taken it from a splotch of desert to hosting the World Trade Organization, the World Cup 2022, and US Central Command for the Middle East.

At its core, Doha is about money. Everyone from oil executives to high level escorts are here for it, and they have it in large quantities -- amongst the highest in the world -- only leaving them bored without enough ways to spend it. Then there is the other end of the spectrum, where thousands of blue collar workers from Ethiopia to Nepal have flooded the country to support the exploding economy, only to be exploited on a employer sponsorship system that leaves them stuck in a modernized form of 21st century slavery. As I sit somewhere in the middle, gazing out pensively at both sides, I realize neither side is really me so I am probably best set as I am.

There are other facts too that have their implications. A country 75% men and 80% Muslim is a tough world that lends itself to a general aura of peculiar masculine frustration. We are indeed in the conservative Islamic world, but I will not be in Qatar forever, or even six months, so it seems silly to miss other places and not take it in as another place that exists, another reality that people live.

I recently went out into the desert -- the most authentic and natural part of Qatar. It is a barren landscape that spans hundreds of miles into Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait, Iran, and Iraq, supported by sand dunes that roll continuously on unchanged. It is rough country, occasionally spotted by refineries and gas flames, but one that has always resonated well with me at other periods in my life I needed to get away and look panoramically at nothing in particular. I laid down in the sand, looking out on the Persian Gulf while keeping a careful eye for scorpions, and felt the hot sun on my neck and back. The quiet is calming -- a welcomed change from Doha -- and so the vastness let the last few weeks settle in.

Brussels to Doha

On airplanes, while many watch movies and television on their personalized screens, I almost always resort to the interactive map. I probably spend hours staring at it, watching it change viewpoints and the plane itself weave in and out of its predetermined course. You can see the sun -- where in the world it is light and where dark -- and other places you have been sometime before. The obsession with maps goes back a long ways.

The interactive map was especially interesting on my flight from Brussels to Doha. From Istanbul we seemingly went out of our way to avoid Syrian airspace, which put us right over Baghdad, Iran looming off to the left. Then it was Kuwait, the beaches of the Persian Gulf, and finally the peninsular state of Qatar. There were certainly a lot of tough things going on 35,000 feet below, but life was peaceful and smooth up in the cabin.

There has, of course, been a lot of other plane rides recently. A month ago I watched volcanoes outside my window, saying goodbye to Guatemala and Central America. I flew into Dallas and picked out landmarks deeply routed in my suburban childhood. A few weeks later I saw Manhattan and that impressive skyline for the first time. Then I flew right over Seville and Madrid where memories are still so vivid I get anxious every time I think about the possibility of going back.

I do enjoy these maps, because most of the time the cabin is dark and everything outside the window is dark too. It is worth imagining what is going on below, filling in blank space, thinking how massive and impossible the world is to see. With the Middle East glittering in the distance, expansive deserts sprawling out below, sometimes I think about just how far away some very special people are, and that is a little sad, because they really are far in more ways than one when Mesopotamia is outside your window.

Tomorrow

The past few weeks are difficult to categorize, but they involve Presidential meetings and ambassadorial visits and that is never a bad piece of experience for someone my age. I drove by the European Union Parliament and navigated the ins and outs of Brussels and had runs under windmills and along bike paths cutting through flat Belgium farmland. It was a successful few weeks indeed, and the future promises to bring more like them. From laying concrete on the Honduras border with a lovely mason who had spent years in the US before being deported, to shaking hands, formally dressed, with that same country’s ambassador an ocean away, these changes do not get much more drastic. 

It was a strange few weeks too, living in a house with ten other people of all ages and backgrounds. It felt fit for a reality show, and as you got to know the various players, all the necessary characters for good television stand out and do the work themselves. All you really need in the end is a good cameraman that does not miss the good stuff. I would not have been surprised to find a few hidden behind clocks and atop doorknobs. 

Part of me felt off in the situation: its isolation, its lack of autonomy, and a few of the odd encounters along the way. Part of me recognizes this new job follows no normal format, and so no normal mind-set will do. One night only a few nights ago, a guy walked into our house and told me I would be moving to Qatar by the end of the week. This piece of news, which for many might define a period of their life, feels second nature now. It came with good timing, and tomorrow I will wake up feeling excited and ready to get on a plane; This is not new, and I have a hard time remembering a time that I didn't.

New York City

The United States of America, I regret to say, has been uninspiring in terms of a place of permanent residence, for a long time. In its defense, this probably has less to do with its normalcy and more to do with its perceived singularity, its place as part of a much larger whole. I have yearned for other places, and the many things -- overly-philosophized as they are -- that come with travel and movement. This attempts to explain the constant coming and going, the life free of exhorbant possessions, that has been the past few years. It also explains why this past week in New York City is so significant to me.

The moment I landed I had this refreshingly free, innate desire to put on shoes and walk and walk and walk and walk. The first day I walked four hours from Park Slope in Brooklyn to West Village in Manhattan, and the days that followed, followed suit. It seems unimportant, but I distinctly remember arriving in Marsailles -- the then declared cultural capital of Europe, or some award by a similar name -- one day last August, and planting myself on a hostel couch with a book for five days. My periodic adventures out would be to buy food I would cook later in a kitchen. I could not be bothered by the exploration one was supposed to do, the things one was supposed to see. I remember not ever wanting to feel that stagnant again while traveling, so how different New York was.

The grand parks and the prestigious universities and the tallest skyscrapers and amazing food around every corner and then the tragic memories of a day now more than ten years old, they inspired me, for the first time I can remember, to be my own citizen again. It won't happen for some time, but it was nice to imagine home, in a futuristic sense, that may yet someday come. It was nice to stand on some real American history that happened one day back in 1776 when Washington marched troops to protect the little island from redcoats. It was good to walk through Chinatown and only find out later one of the major intersections was the setting for Gangs of New York. It was good to settle my long time personal quarrel of traveling to far off cities without seeing the greatest city on Earth just at my doorstep. It was great to just be and be excited.

But for now it is Belgium, and later somewhere else I do not know yet but that is not my country. A friend told me that they did not know how I do it; their heart would hurt all the time. A fair statement, because it often does hurt, as it did on a plane with the New York skyline fading in the distance, the Empire State Building and Liberty Tower presiding above the rest. But we are never really alone on trips like these, and I often end up curiously stumbling after someplace new where I do not know anyone, again.

Mayan Ruins And A Few Goodbyes

The day I left Guatemala began with a beautiful morning. Smog and haze from the capital had not yet blown in, leaving every detail of the three surrounding volcanoes visible from base to peak. Fuego, our ever-active friend in Antigua, remained calm without any moderate eruptions. Tuktuks rattled along the cobblestone streets. You could smell fresh banana bread outside Doña Luisa. Things were like they were the day I arrived.

Then in a rare display of Guatemalan punctuality, my taxi driver showed up 20 minutes early and we were off, ascending the hills that surround home before descending into the hustle and bustle of a sprawling Guatemala City. A few hours later Cuba was outside my right side window and a few hours more I landed where it all began.

The transition feels stronger, maybe harder, than those before and it has kept me quiet since the day I left. Driving along the same suburban roads I have driven more times than I can remember, I thought about 24 hours earlier passing miles and miles of poverty-stricken shanty towns that themselves surround gated communities of the few but powerful European ancestral elite. While buying a suit and a new smartphone, I thought about a ten year old I saw once lugging firewood on his back alongside a highway near the Honduras border. It is contradictions like these that characterize Guatemala as a whole for me and when other things feel far away as they are now, those polarities still feel near.

I love the story of a 16th century Spanish explorer who, during his travels through the Guatemalan jungles, stopped late one evening to rest under the stars. He awoke with the sunlight the following morning to giant stone temples covered in thick vegetation -- the ruins of ancient Mayan cities long ago abandoned and swallowed. I walked those ruins one Saturday morning, 500 years later, and found myself taking comfort in the very normal fact that I am but one person of many who has come and had to say goodbye.