Sharja- Day 8

Today was a complete breather. It was Father's Day actually. Happy Father's day to me and all! And as such, I instinctively felt the need to sit on the couch and veg all day.

I was feeling very sore and beat up from the day in the desert, so I took my last 600mg Ibuprofen and lounged about sleeping, writing, and watching some Arabic TV.

The weirdest thing I saw on the telly was this music vieo from Iraq. It was sort of like a children's song, led by two Raffi type guys and a chorus of Iraqi children. The raffi type guys (RTG's) were aping about on the tv, flashing american money, climbing trees, and looking really sad as they were rotting in a jail cell. When the chorus came the kids all sang and clapped, and then it cut to a row of about 5 people all dressed like the Abu Ghraib tortured prisoners. It was surreal, grotesque and shaming. Try to tell me were screwing these people up royaly. (One good thing about 'liberating' Iraq, however, is the fact that a bunch of Iraqi hotties now have a music video show where they all dance together in some kind of late 70's disco hall. One of the guys here called it arabic pole dancing, even though these girls were all fully dressed and hardly being erotic)

After sleeping off my pharmaceutical coma, I went out and took a trip to the Mega Mall down the street. By the way, the girls were out doing their own thing today, Al Hamdelela (God is Great), so I could be by myself. I bought a few books at the bookstore and had some coffee in the crappy cafe they had there. I bought a nice sci-fi book for mind fodder, and two other ones for later.

One book is calle 'The Alhambra' by Irving Washington of Sleepy Hollow fame, and the other is excerpts from the travells of Ibn Batuta. Ibn Batuta was a middle ages traveller, much like Marco Polo. He is pretty famous in the Arabic world, I think, and it looks really interesting becasue it's basically history, philandering, and adventures. My kind of stuff!

I went home and read till my eyes popped out and I fell asleep.