Dubai last day

Hi, The flight on Emirates to Dubai was on a B-777 which had a seatng config of 3 -4 3 but had a lot more leg room than Air Canada's 777. There were 11 cabin crew which offered service in 11 languages. We came into Emirates own new terminal built for 380s which is breathtaking in it beauty. Dubai is pretty breathtaking in an odd way. What is going on here is remarkable in every way, but not necessarily too interesting. They have 100's of empty and half empty hotels and are in the process of building 68 more. This place is a revolving wheel - the sheiks have all the money and control all industries and finance and govt. So it is the govt building everything . A guide told me that if you buy a home here, you boroow money from a bank owned by a sheik to pay for the home built by the sheik who built it with a string of companies he owns as his own vertical supplier. That, sir, is the main reason this small place is so apparently wealthy.
They are insanely proud of their endless glam malls, but there is a chinese one on the way out to the desert - Dragon Mall - which is a one storey, pretty ugly mall almost one mile long with 1,000 stores.
Last night I went out to the desert from 4 to midnight mainly to see the stars which failed to show up - just Venus and Pluto, apparently because of the pollution. But they had entertainment which I thought I would dislike and I liked it a lot. The belly dancers were v. good and the whirling dirvishes were astonishing. There were parts of the adventure I disliked a good deal, but I don't want to even think about that.
Today is my last day and my friedn Lalit cannot get off work until afternoon so he wants me to go his five star restaurant for lunch and then we will leave and go meet some of his Nepali friends here. His restaurant is in a five star hotel 9they are starting to build 7 and 8 star hotels here which I cannot understand at all), where the minimum room rate is $1,100 night. He manages 22 employees and some days they do not have even one customer. They are not part of the hotel, just a really fancy place that rents space there and they would have to close except that the umbrella co that owns it has two nightclubs that are doing just fine and enable his place to continue operating.
Lalit is a great guy, which is the reason I stopped here. He just had to show me about 300 photos of his extended family on his laptop and I noticed that in addtn to his three yr old boy, there was a little older boy too. He said that his wife's family had been caring for the orphaned boy in their village and everytime they went there, the could see that altho the boy is very intelligent, nothing is happening for his as they cannot afford to send him to school out there. Lalit and his wife decided that they had to bring the boy to Kathmandu and put him in school even tho they are just scraping by all the time to make ends meet for the three of them.
During the late portion f the Maoist rebel period in Nepal, they boy's father was killed, and later they came back and killed his mother. Lalit said it was all too gruesome to speak of - which almost always means, at minimum, that the parents' heads were cut off - often with saws - in front of the kids and left in the street for a week to frighten other villagers. Since they came back and killed the mother later, the boy probably saw both killings and the heads in the street for the weeks. They may acutally have done worse things to them as well. The Great Creeps are alleged Maoists there to help these poor oppressed peasants. Imagine.
I noticed in the photos that the boy often had a blank look in his eyes and I think they might as well have killed him as well, because they did. But, since he is alive, he could not have had better luck than Lalit and his wife taking him in. There is not a person in the world who coul d be a better mentor and father to the boy than Lalit, and already he speaks of him as tho he is a natural son. This is truly heroic in a society that shuns such people.
Lalit and his parents are so loyal to me because when he developed a waterborne illness in the rainy season after I left there in '01, I bought the medication that kept him alive and made hs recivery possible. I also gave him some money to get to Dubai and work, and after that as my own income declined and he was working, I sent little or no money. But it would be such a disaster if he fell on harder times and had to give up the now 8 year old boy - for Lalit and his wife not to mention the kid - that I now have to start scheduling some money a couple of times a yr to help them out.
That is the powerful punch in the psyche of travel; you read the stats and listen to the news, but it is hard to see real people there. Out here, you feel it. You cannot imagine the number of guys here from Iran, Iraq, Afg, Pakistan, etc. all fleeing their own deaths. One pak taxi driver lost his two brothers to a suicide bomber, another his mother, father, sister and her three kids. They came as taxi drivers to Abu Dhabi and were ok there until recently an Arab govt official cancelled the permits of 800 of them when they found out that they were here because they hate the Tailban. This is bad news as the govt only found that out by some connection to Taliban in their home areas. Now, the govt is starting to cancel their visas here in Dubai and they tell the straight out, "You should support the Taliban at home. They are the good Muslims."
No matter what< I will be on that 380 out of here tom'rw. Hope you are fine. Kevin