Trouble in Montreal, Trouble in Dubaï

Along with Spring often comes multiple colds. I woke up every morning of the week with an ashtray in my throat. I can't eat anything unless I've had my giant coffee mug. Then the day goes on OK, and when night comes I'm short breathed. I feel like an elderly looking for his long lost dog in a never ending staircase.

I haven't been very cooperative with my health lately : I barely dress to go out, I drink like a pig, and I sleep about 5 hours a day. This régime de vie keeps me sharp and on the edge, as Pacino would say in Michael Mann's HEAT, but after a few days of sleep deprivation, I simply crash. That's what happened yesterday : I was watching L'AGRONOME, the french version of Jonathan Demme's heartbreaking documentary about Radio Haïti's Jean Dominique, and I died.

I woke up in heaven this morning : smooth weather, blue sky, sun. Still a sore throat, but a clear brain is a bonus. My brain cells are no longer swimming in mucus and even tho I am stuck at the office on this beautiful day, I'm still pretty satisfied, thanks.

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Drinking with friends and getting wasted to go out can always be fun, but when it becomes a habit it tends to sound bad. I have a drinking problem. Ever since I discovered champagne at the tender age of 13, I have been struggling to achieve the correct level of drunkeness for any given situation, and this fight isn't always victimless.

Most of the time the more important factor to consider is money. We're not in the US and the booze isn't cheap. With taxes on alcohol and its business being regulated by the provincial government, it's kinda hard to get away from the "fixed market prices", unless you want to drink terrible homemade piss. Or beer. Which tastes pretty much the same for me. Not that I don't like beer, but drinking more than 1 or 2 can be a difficult task for me. The taste isn't the greatest, and you know it - and it's kinda hard to stomach.

So, getting wasted costs money. It also damages the liver. And the brain, mostly. I don't want to be the drunk fool everybody's tired to see everywhere. I go out a lot and when I don't remember most of the evenings, it means something. It means I might say things I don't really endorse, or behave in an overall stupid way.

I went to see the Glimmers on Thursday, at SAT. These two belgium DJ's know how to get a party movin' and their visit in Montreal was long-awaited. And at 10$, it was quite a bargain. However, I started the evening the usual way : by drinking at my place with friends. The night before, I had seen Norway's Annie with a crowd of about 30 peers at Club Lambi, because the Arctic Monkeys were also in town, and a show on a Wednesday night, even in a crowded metropolis like Montreal, is not easy to pull. Annie got us drunk, and even tho I didn't go to bed too late, I had to work early the next day + go to my Planification of Transports course afterwards at UQAM. So Thursday was a LONG day.

Shit happened : I was too drunk even before we left my place. I continued drinking once inside the SAT, and we stayed until the lights came back in, at 3:15. We left the place and went to Resto du Village to eat something, since we were starving. But there were way too many people, just one waiter, and we would have waited forever. So we left. And I forgot my camera there !!

On the way home, we saw one of the rabbits that live around Usine C. I had seen them with Mr. Bérêt last autumn and our speculations were that they would freeze to death over the long winter. Apparently they didn't ! This is heart warming. But seeing the black rabbit jump around made me realise that my camera was left somewhere.

Call me brainless, but know that this doesn't happen to me very often. I got the camera back the next day, but some of the things I said in my drunken stupor cannot be taken back.

My apologies.

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Burj Dubaï, the world's tallest structure, is currently being built in the United Arab Emirates. Dubaï is host to a construction boom that ressembles a miracle, and borderlines on megalomaniac. Skyscrapers are rising everywhere, fast, and you have to see their waterfront to believe it :



They have so many impressive projects going on that I'll post something about that later on. But what catches our attention right now is a strike trend among Dubaï workers. People laboring to build the Burj are reported to be paid about between 5 and 10$ US a day, and have to live with less than 200$ a month. They work 12 hours shifts and their camps are set up far away in the desert, which makes the ride to their workplace a fun 1 or 2 hours trip. They mostly are from India and the Philippines, poor, and hopeful. A dream was sold to them, and this dream is slowly evaporating in the desert dust.

Lots of landmarks have been built through slavery, in the history of mankind, and societies were able to evolve when "thinking heads" were relieved from the task of cultivating their own food - which meant that a select few had to cultivate more than their share to supply others. However, now that we have evolved, cheap labor has became unacceptable. A country such as UAE, with a city such as Dubaï, wants to show the world how modern they can be, and how leading they are in any field. Why not start with the human field and treat their migrant workers with respect ? If locals aren't even dirtying their hands to help, and workers have to come from other countries, they should be compensated for the sacrifices they make and the long hours they work.

If labor wasn't so cheap, however, would the building boom be as huge ? I'll let you meditate on that while you take a look at what the Burj will look like once completed. Will this be the economic symbol of a powerful nation, or a monument to the sad and heartless exploitation of third world workers ?