“Oh the places you’ll go” – The Mushroom Collector photographer talks about a trip to Dubai and the characters he met en route
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On the Emirates flight from New York, I watched Stanley Kubrick’s film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. The seat next to me was empty, so I set its screen to the live video feed looking down from the plane. As clouds moved from the top of the screen to the bottom, I noticed that the second half of 2001 takes place at a similar constant, slow speed. When we made our final approach into the Dubai desert, it felt like we were landing on Mars.
Over the next ten days, I met an Australian pilot, a French banker, Irish accountant, Indian construction worker, British playboy, Dutch builder and finally an Egyptian engineer. He was there working on a massive project in the Persian Gulf — a twenty square mile archipelago of man-made islands that form a rough map of the Earth’s continents. He handed me his business card, which read:
“Nader Abdullah
Engineer
The World”
