Do Buy!

So I spent a week in the OTHER Las Vegas of the Middle East, with the same Russian girl that I went to Egypt with in February.

It's been getting some bad press recently for jailing people who kiss on the street, side by side with a reputation as a good place for sex tourism. But it's an interesting place to visit -- a lot of it looks like a futuristic city from a 70's science fiction movie.


Basically, it's about half mall, half slum. I imagine most of the planet will look like that within 15 years. Even the beaches are man-made and very-well landscaped, and the new subway runs on time. . . but you can't chew gum there.



So I was there for 5 days with the Russian girl that I know; we did all the touristy stuff like go to aquariums and the big malls, which are impressive even to a guy who doesn't much care for malls -- people of all religions and nationalities joined together in their love of buying a bunch of crap they don't need. We also saw the elaborately artificial recreations of traditional Arabic houses and stuff, and at my insistance wandered through the poor slummy areas where all the Indians and Pakistanis live who built all this stuff and keep the services running.



Also, I had two days there by myself. Alcohol is available only at hotel bars there, so I went to one; it was full of whores from Africa, China and Russia, most of whom were bloated and terribly unhealthy looking, with walking-dead eyes. The Africans were the nicest-looking -- I guess their complexion doesn't suffer as much from the late nights and the all the booze and cigarettes.

I'd already had sex with my Russian girlfriend twice that morning before she left, so I declined when one of the prettiest prostitute in the place (a Ghanese girl with corn-rowed hair) offered to spend all night with me for $150. I just wanted to relax and drink some beer for a few hours. (Most of you probably wouldn't have found a place full of bloated whores and equally bloated and rancid-looking whoremongering expats relaxing, but such places at least offer little pretension.)

I told the girl I wasn't going to take her home; I said I'd consider it the next day. (I mean, for $150, you want to be fresh, you know.) She sat with me and gazed adoringly for a couple hours anyway, saying I was the nicest guy in the place. We chit-chatted.



The story she told me wasn't especially terrifying; she wasn't stuffed in a box or facing a huge debt. She had a friend who worked in Dubai, who helped her arrange the visa, and she came. (Not much work in Ghana, even though she claimed to have a degree in business administration and had worked at her mother's shop that sold jewelry.) As with most whores I have known, when I asked her if she liked her job, she just kind of shrugged.

Then of course when she found out that I really WASN'T going to take her home, she wasnted me to pay her for her time. I gave her the equivalent of about $15, which I thought was generous in addition to the two vodka and cokes I'd bought her. She didn't agree.

I think I drank 5 pints of beer, total -- supposedly Heiniken -- and was home by 1.30am, which back in Vodkaberg would have been considered a VERY quiet night.
I hadn't felt that drunk when I went to bed -- no vomitting and no spins, certainly -- but when I woke up the next day I had a fucking HORRIFIC hangover, a pounding headache and nausea that I just couldn't shake.

I'm not sure why -- maybe the beer was bad quality or maybe the hooker from Ghana put a hex on me. Whichever, I couldn't shake it, and didn't do much that day other than go to the movies to see CLASH OF THE TITANS, which coincidentally is also about the death of legends.


Then I ate a tuna sandwich at Subway, and then come back to the hotel room and watched CSI:LOS ANGELES on cable and cleaned the keyboard on my computer with Q-Tips.