It was nice to return home to Amman after our recent trip to Dubai. Don't get me wrong...Dubai was nice, but it made me appreciate Jordan. Everything in Dubai is shiny and new, if not a little artificial. If nothing else, Jordan is authentic. It is dusty and a little dirty. Its sidewalks are crooked and its streets meander. Nothing is too easy in Jordan, and therein lies what makes it real...and comfortable, like a home. Sometimes, it takes getting out of a place to make you appreciate where you are, and that was how I felt about coming back to Amman.
The trip to Dubai was short, four days and three nights, but seemed to last a lifetime. Elise and I found it exhausting. And I would be lying if I said I wasn't more than a little disappointed with the trip when it was all said and done.
It was supposed to be the trip of a lifetime and cost about as much, to boot, but as I walked to work the day after we returned, I couldn't help fighting this feeling of being unfulfilled. I didn't want to fully acknowledge it, and felt guilty for feeling let down at all, and yet it crept up on me, and as much as I wanted to deny feeling disappointed, there was no mistaking something wasn't quite right. I wanted to remember Dubai in all its magnificent and elaborate golden, sultan glory, but I knew assigning those memories to this particular trip would be as artificial as the place itself, a Disney World-like artifice, a wooden backdrop, just facade with nothing behind it but two-by-fours.
In the end, I would tell myself, the kids had fun. In the end, that's all that mattered. We spent four days in Dubai and went to the water park every single day. That -- in and of itself -- should be a feat to be proud of. Weeks following our return, they still ask each other which slide was their favorite, and even yesterday, at the school's winter bazaar, they played on the playground, pretending to slide down the completely vertical water slide, Leap of Faith.
I spent the first few days following our return from Dubai dissecting my emotions. Why was I feeling this why? Why was I disappointed?
I would come to realize I had built up the trip in my own mind as much as the kids had. When Elise and I were dating...long before we had kids or were even married...we spent a couple of magical days at the Atlantis resort in the Bahamas. We drifted down the lazy river on our inner tubes, played ping pong on a table beside the massive aquarium tanks, had impromptu lunches of conch fritters and Kaliks, ate dinner at Nobu (salmon skin sushi rolls we didn't finish and took back to the room with us). There was no way this trip to Atlantis could ever come close to replicating that one. Perhaps, on some level, I expected it to. As though the place itself, as magical as it is, held special powers.
But wherever you go, there you are, and as I was checking into the hotel, in the shadow of a four-story Chihuly glass-blown masterpiece, the kids are fighting over the map of the water park the front desk clerk gave us.
More fighting ensued over the course of the next three days. Thursday night, Thanksgiving, Clementine had one of her patented meltdowns as we tried to convince three utterly exhausted kids to go out dinner by the pool when all they wanted to do was order room service and watch cartoons on the hotel TV. Elise's ear and sinuses were clogged most of the time we were there. By the second day, my contact had irritated my eye to the point I could barely keep it open and was desperately sensitive to light. By the morning of the last day, we finally had a relaxing breakfast at the resort's Starbucks and a fun morning at the water park. Elise captured it best when she said, "We were so spun up from the preceding week, it took us three days to unwind."
It wasn't all bad by any stretch of the imagination. We did meet up with friends from India who had traveled from Dushanbe, Tajikistan to meet us. And ate dosas at Sangeetha's, a South Indian favorite from Chennai with a couple of outlets in Dubai. On our last night, we had burgers and fries at the resort's food court, an unremarkable meal in and of itself, but Jeff had brought the last of his Woodford Reserve bourbon from Dubai duty-free and shared it in paper cups, and a relaxing warmth finally washed over me after three very long days in the sun.
When we told the kids we were moving to the Middle East, I promised them all we would go to Atlantis. It was on my list of places we definitely had to go while we were here (along with Petra, Egypt, and Jerusalem), and I don't at all regret going. I just don't see us going back anytime soon.
The trip to Dubai was short, four days and three nights, but seemed to last a lifetime. Elise and I found it exhausting. And I would be lying if I said I wasn't more than a little disappointed with the trip when it was all said and done.
It was supposed to be the trip of a lifetime and cost about as much, to boot, but as I walked to work the day after we returned, I couldn't help fighting this feeling of being unfulfilled. I didn't want to fully acknowledge it, and felt guilty for feeling let down at all, and yet it crept up on me, and as much as I wanted to deny feeling disappointed, there was no mistaking something wasn't quite right. I wanted to remember Dubai in all its magnificent and elaborate golden, sultan glory, but I knew assigning those memories to this particular trip would be as artificial as the place itself, a Disney World-like artifice, a wooden backdrop, just facade with nothing behind it but two-by-fours.
In the end, I would tell myself, the kids had fun. In the end, that's all that mattered. We spent four days in Dubai and went to the water park every single day. That -- in and of itself -- should be a feat to be proud of. Weeks following our return, they still ask each other which slide was their favorite, and even yesterday, at the school's winter bazaar, they played on the playground, pretending to slide down the completely vertical water slide, Leap of Faith.
I spent the first few days following our return from Dubai dissecting my emotions. Why was I feeling this why? Why was I disappointed?
I would come to realize I had built up the trip in my own mind as much as the kids had. When Elise and I were dating...long before we had kids or were even married...we spent a couple of magical days at the Atlantis resort in the Bahamas. We drifted down the lazy river on our inner tubes, played ping pong on a table beside the massive aquarium tanks, had impromptu lunches of conch fritters and Kaliks, ate dinner at Nobu (salmon skin sushi rolls we didn't finish and took back to the room with us). There was no way this trip to Atlantis could ever come close to replicating that one. Perhaps, on some level, I expected it to. As though the place itself, as magical as it is, held special powers.
But wherever you go, there you are, and as I was checking into the hotel, in the shadow of a four-story Chihuly glass-blown masterpiece, the kids are fighting over the map of the water park the front desk clerk gave us.
More fighting ensued over the course of the next three days. Thursday night, Thanksgiving, Clementine had one of her patented meltdowns as we tried to convince three utterly exhausted kids to go out dinner by the pool when all they wanted to do was order room service and watch cartoons on the hotel TV. Elise's ear and sinuses were clogged most of the time we were there. By the second day, my contact had irritated my eye to the point I could barely keep it open and was desperately sensitive to light. By the morning of the last day, we finally had a relaxing breakfast at the resort's Starbucks and a fun morning at the water park. Elise captured it best when she said, "We were so spun up from the preceding week, it took us three days to unwind."
It wasn't all bad by any stretch of the imagination. We did meet up with friends from India who had traveled from Dushanbe, Tajikistan to meet us. And ate dosas at Sangeetha's, a South Indian favorite from Chennai with a couple of outlets in Dubai. On our last night, we had burgers and fries at the resort's food court, an unremarkable meal in and of itself, but Jeff had brought the last of his Woodford Reserve bourbon from Dubai duty-free and shared it in paper cups, and a relaxing warmth finally washed over me after three very long days in the sun.
When we told the kids we were moving to the Middle East, I promised them all we would go to Atlantis. It was on my list of places we definitely had to go while we were here (along with Petra, Egypt, and Jerusalem), and I don't at all regret going. I just don't see us going back anytime soon.
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