Thinking Allowed: Made with the finest camel’s milk, or, hocheckhutte!

I have abandoned my family. Tamar is singlehandedly staving off girls left and right while I gallivant off to the Alps. Instead of teaching children to behave (and do anagrams), I’m going to spend the next week teaching McKinsey consultants how to lead projects (and probably do anagrams.) I find teaching a lot of fun, so this should be an interesting experience

I’m looking down on the sands of Iraq as I write this. My flight went through Abu Dhabi, which was an interesting experience. A giant obelisk juts up out of the otherwise featureless desert. Bearded men in flowing white robes blessed (or maybe just greeted beneficently) the airport workers as they passed by on the moving sidewalk. The Etihad lounge could easily fit our whole apartment in just one of the four buffet areas. Sand-coloured posters invited me to try some indiscernible thing “made with the finest camel’s milk”. What does that even mean? Is some camel’s milk better? Or do they mean the milk of the finest camel?

I ticked another item off my lifetime “frivolous things that are a titanic waste of money” list, by getting to fly on the top floor of a double-decker airplane. As a boy, I yearned to visit the top floor of one of those red British double-decker buses; maybe Zadie will want the top floor of a spaceship (but is there a top floor in space?) Anyway, I had a little cocoon that turns into a sort of bed, and the bathroom looked like a nightclub’s and had no less than four different personal hygiene products. A woman who looked French (am I racist because I decide people’s nationalities based on looks?) set a little table for me (still the same normal airplane table, but with my own tablecloth!!!) and I tucked into tuna tartare, then bream something, with a Chilean wine of some sort and a champagne whose name I can’t recall, but it was 5 letters then 3 letters and tasted good. Worth it!

Oh man, and now I'm in Austria (fourteen thousand kilometres, or two letters, from Australia) and don't it beat all. I arrived all bleary-eyed at 4PM (aka midnight) to discover that I have basically a schloss all to myself. The program doesn't start til Monday, so I'm the only one who's shown up in this big hotel with a piano, gym, pool, spa, library, climbing wall (no lie!) and on and on. Vowing not to fall asleep before nightfall, I changed out of my gross travel clothes into gym clothes and went for a brisk brisk walk up a beautiful mountain. I ended up making it much higher than I expected, right up to Hocheckhutte in the open heaths above treeline. So now I'm tired AND exhausted, and also happy. So weird to think that yesterday I was in Canberra!