Ugh & Yuck

A few years ago Dorothy and I were looking through one of Liz's old journals with her, circa 3rd grade, and she ended one of her entries in disgust like this:

ugh and yuck.

Ok, now to me that looks like it should be pronounced "ugg", but Eliz pronounced "ugh and yuck" as "eeew and yuck". My life will never be as dramatical as Liz's is, but I still find that sometimes it's appropriate to respond with ugg and yuck.

And now that I've been in Bangalore over a week, and still haven't posted at all yet, I feel like I need to start at the beginning. It's not the best part, but it's the best part to begin with. This is my ugg and yuck story that begins with flight out of Chicago was only ten minutes delayed getting out of the gate, but halfway to the runway turned around so someone with a medical issue could get off the plane. Two hours later, we finally took off. Two was the magic number of hours I had in Frankfurt to make my connection, so I knew before we'd even made it into the air that this would not be as simple as I'd hoped. But that doesn't exactly account for ending up in Dubai for nineteen hours. Ugg and yuck. So I stole a Lufthansa blanket.
After three hours of fighting lines and nohelp from Emirates folk, I was walking with my veryheavyifyoucarryitformorethanfifteenminutes guitar and looking for a place to camp out. Then I spied an army of Indians. Thirty five or so young men all in khakis with light blue oxford shirts and cocnutoily hair, looking like IT office people. Each one had a green gym bag with white piping on it, and Mountain Warrior stamped across the side. These guys were sleeping in a pack, some of them in the rows of airport chairs lining with backs up to the horizontal escalator (goes across not up) that runs through the Dubai airport. And others on the floor in front of the chairs. And then I saw that some of them had slipped in between the chair backs and the acrosscalator, and were sleeping in that little space.
I tried sleeping along the cold outside walls by a woman who was doing weird coughing things. Cold and yuck. I wiggled my way behind the chairs through a series of yoga poses that I didn't know I'd mastered. Wrapped myself in Lufthansa comfort behind the chairs, up against the glass of the acrosscalator wall, I surrendered to the way of the Mountain Warrior.
The weird thing about the place is that was totally concealed from the outside, but the people walking on the acrosscalator pass right by the sleeper, and can look straight down on you. I slept with a sweatshirt arm over my face but when I would wake up to check that my guitar was with me still, there was likely to be a person staring straight down on me with pity and curiosity. Private but not. I took two Benadryl and slept all the way through until an hour before my flight. Word up to all Millers for perfecting naps in public and awkward places and passing that on to me.

This entry is dedicated to the Mountain Warriors and their sleeping ways.