Guests Wishes

Yesterday we said our goodbyes to our house guest and drove her to the airport. She was our second visitor this year who stayed for a week, evicting cats from their spare bedroom hidy holes and who doubled the missuss's kitchen duties. The concept of "help yourself" is a western barbarism, so I've been told, and hosts, in particular Asian hosts and, from my own experience, especially Iranian hosts are obliged to never stop serving food and beverages to their visitors. And as far as I can tell, whether the guest is thirsty and hungry or not, they are also obligated to never say "No thank you" when being served coffee, breakfast, after breakfast tea and sweets, pre-lunch tea and sweets, lunch salads, lunch main courses, post-lunch tea and sweets--serving trays revolving to and from the kitchen to dining table and back again is constant.


This is the second time this year that I've weaseled my way out of "the tour". The first time was last January when my brother-in-law came, and I went to Nepal to do a quick hike up to Poon Hill. This time, praise be, I had to work.

The "Dubai tour" consists of visiting at least four of the world's largest malls. One has an indoor ski slope. Another has an impressive aquarium. One overlooks a marina where the local movers and sheikers park their yachts. The other is part of the Burj Khalifa, and is not only one of Dubai's world's largest malls, but is next to the world's tallest building which must be conquered.

The tour also includes a trip in a water taxi across the Dubai creek (I argue that it's a river, albiet a much lazier river than the Mississippi) where there is an open air market and museum that is a must see. Then there's now also a metro sky train that has to be ridden. And along the way there are food courts and Starbucks aplenty where guest and host stage shouting matches over who's getting the check.


We live in Sharjah, which is Dubai's New Jersey. So the tour also involves bridges, tunnels and the dreaded heavily trafficked and often deadly Emirates road. God forbid I ever have to do the tour and spend each day risking life, limbs and what little sanity I have shooting down Emirates Road.


But then, I thought I'd get to leave this world never having had to do the Statue of Liberty. Last summer I got nailed when the missus and I visited New York. So chances are there will come a time when we have to kick the cats out of the guest room for a week and I'll have nothing on my plate. Maybe I'll be able to fake daily passings of kidney stones.


I used to live in New Orleans, and playing host there was not too shabby. First off, I lived in the French Quarter most of the time, so having to drive was not a must. Second, instead of tea and sweets, guests were usually eager to be steered from one booze house to the next beginning with breakfast Bloody Maries and Mimosas to start the day and which help steel me for the tour which included a ferry ride across the Mississippi (where one disembarks for oysters and booze), strolls through the cemeteries (where one can find a sweet deal on corn bread, red beans and rice, and pitchers of beer), a street car ride up St. Charles (which ends at a bar that claims to have the largest selection of imported beers in New Orleans) photo shoots of mimes and other charletons in Jackson Square (surrounded by 90 proof taverns) and playing the slots where the likker is free.


When I didn't live in the French Quarter, I lived in Lakeview which was a 10-minute straight shot by bus to the Quarter. Now, there's a street car running the line (again), so if I were to ever live in Lakeview (again) and I were host duty-bound to do the New Orleans tour, I would be able to cross two things off the list--cemeteries and the street car ride.

If the winds of good fortune continue to blow other obligations, duties and plans my way, I will escape this place one day and will never have had to do the Dubai tour. My hope is that wherever the winds blow me, I'll end up in a place where there is little to see and do and no reason for friends and relatives to plan their vacations around me. A place like Elk Grove. Or Houston. Or that I end up back in New Orleans. (But not during one of my AA phases).