Dubai Observations, Part One

If I had not seen this with my own eyes, & had one for myself, I would have called the person who said, 'dude, have you seen this at Mickey D's?' a bald-faced liar. However, at Mickey D's in the Arab world, there is an honest-to-Allah flatbread sandwich called the McArabia. I actually had this as my first meal in the Emirates, minutes after being picked up from the airport...but I had the Chicken rather than the Kofta. Actually, it was rather tasty; certainly beat the daylights out of any McRib I've ever tried here in the States.
My loving wife goes on the road about 20 weeks out of the year, often to these telecom conferences & IT shows. I've seen the contents of her bags before she leaves as well as when she gets back, & it amazes me to see the amount of stuff she lugs along with her...especially in her backpack. One more piece of paperwork and I swear that bag would have been much too heavy to carry...what a way to get your abdominal work in. There were six cases of coffee mugs shipped over, as well as what is affectionately known as booth in a box. There's a couple of hundred pounds worth of stuff...most of which needed to be given away before the last day. Either that, or we'd have been playing the old Rolling Stones tune as my personal song: '...I'll never be your beast of burden...' Again.
Sometimes, business conference travel can be as physically arduous as athletics...once you take away the late-night (over) eating & the short/disturbed sleep cycles. I turn into a pumpkin at 9 p.m. during the training year, which in my case is almost all year long. We couldn't get into a restaurant before 7:30 p.m., & service most of the times was glacial at best, because we were going to places that were more frequented by locals than turistas. That meant most nights ended at 2:00 a.m. if we were fortunate. Normally I would not have complained much, but I was trying to fit something that resembled a workout in each morning before we had to be at the conference expo at 10 a.m. After two or three instances of this I felt like turning into Rain Man...Judge Wapner's on at 11.

If this election cycle were a running event, we would be at the point on the course where the riff-raff barriers on the side of the road are starting. I have to admit I will look forward to seeing it end. I don't make any bones about my political point of view in front of my athletes or my friends, & some of us pretty much agree to disagree for the time being. However, it's interesting to see the stuff (junk, in my humble opinion, & that is being polite) that gets thrown up on social networking sites, such as Facebook.
One of the folks who is slightly associated with my training group never fails to pull up some of the most outlandish videos, straight from the colons (oops, columns) of Fox News (They Distort, You Decry). After a while you just want to find a way to put them on ignore, or the next closest thing to block. As I said, I'll provide my opinion, but I'll also try to present it in a manner that's reasonable & rational.

You don't have to agree with me...just make certain to listen when it's time to work out.