I screwed this up the first time I moved abroad, but learned my lessons and want to share them with anyone who cares to listen.

The Problem: You are moving abroad, perhaps for a year, maybe two, and currently have an AT&T wireless phone.  You do not want to lose your phone number, which all of your friends have saved.  You also want to be able to use your phone when home for the holidays.

The Solution: In a nutshell, convert your post-paid plan (i.e. your monthly contract plan) into a pre-paid one from AT&T “Go Phone“, load it with $100 worth of credit every 365 days, and rest assured your phone number will be waiting for you when you return home.

The Details:

• You must be out of contract, or you will most likely incur penalties for breaking it
• Call AT&T, and ask to switch to a “Pay as You Go” plan (NOT a “Pick Your Plan” pre-pay account)
• Ask to add $100 worth of credit to your account, using your credit card.  When you add $100 or more in credits, these credits don’t expire for 365 days (instead of one month, otherwise)
• Use your phone while home on holiday, etc. so that you use up those $100 of credits.  If you are nearing the 365 day mark since you last added credits, you can add another $100 and extend the life of ALL credits another year.
• You cannot (at this time) get mobile data or blackberry services on Go Phone.  When you move back to the country you will have to upgrade to a regular monthly plan to get these.
• When you move back home to the US, any unused pay as you go credits can be converted to a credit on your new monthly plan once you upgrade.

Not with AT&T?: While I cannot say with certainty, I believe this approach would work for T-Mobile customers and other GSM phone subscribers as well.  You would first need to port your number over to AT&T Go Phone, but otherwise all of the steps above should work.

I fervently believe that gay marriage is the human rights issue of my generation that will be most deeply regretted and pitied from the future. It is the black rights issue of my lifetime. It is giving women the vote, more than eighty years on.

My generation’s children will read about these moments in their history books with equal parts fascination, horror, and surprise. We will answer their questions with shame, frustration, and discomfort.

Is it too optimistic to hope that California’s acceptance of same-sex marriages is the Rosa Parks moment for the gay rights movement that finally awakens this country to the hypocrisy of its laws and views on marriage?

I recently returned from another Memorial Day weekend spent in Boulder, and was pleasantly reminded of what I have pretty much always known: this is the best time to see Boulder. On this trip, you see, I had the unique need of impressing a special certain “someone” that my hometown was indeed a beautiful and pleasant place to live and visit, and that those epic snowstorms that shutdown the airports and trapped us in Boulder two years ago were indeed an exception, and not the rule.

Let me also say that although I am a “Colorado Native” and lived in Boulder for nine years before leaving for college on the East Coast, returning to visit is in many ways an act of re-discovering a city I once thought I knew very well. After all, a city is a very different place for a teenager than for a twenty-something.

While our visit to Boulder was wonderful on numerous levels, I want to focus on the two real attractions that make Memorial Day weekend uniquely well-suited for a visit: the Bolder Boulder and the Boulder Creek Festival.

The Boulder Creek Festival

The Creek Fest is an annual rite of summer. For three days, the public park space along the Boulder Creek, the library parking lot, and the surrounding downtown streets are taken over for carnival games, local food, art displays, and a healthy dose of Boulder Hippie-ness. Most things are organic, will help you purge your body of toxins, boost your energy, and help you come into balance with your inner chi.

It’s also just a lot of fun. Bands play, people sponsor rubber duckies in an annual race (dumped in the Boulder Creek, with prizes for the first 50 finishers a few blocks downstream), and free samples are handed out in abundance.

Oh, and it’s free.

This year we enjoyed free samples of a number of different energy bars, sampled locally produced kombucha tea, sipped on the latest brews from Boulder Beer, and even test drove the hybrid Toyota Highlander, to see if it drove any different than Ellaine’s own Scottish SUV (it did – but it was also five years newer).

The Bolder Boulder

This massive event is one of the largest 10k races in the country, and attracts both truly talented athletes from around the world (who enjoy the challenge of racing at high altitude and the large prize-purse) and local runners/joggers/walkers alike. This year, 53,000 people participated, making it the largest Memorial Day event in the country.

It’s a good race, with a lot of happy spirits all around. Local schools send volunteers in abundance to hand out water, locals along the route camp out with music and cheers aplenty for those passing, and more than a handful of runners make sure to try and outdo each other in the absurdity of their costumes (ourselves included).

We decked ourselves out in full-body pink spandex we had left over from the Bay to Breakers in San Francisco the week before, and ran with Smurfs, Crayola Crayons, Pirates, and even a guy who managed to juggle while jogging for all 6.2 miles.

What Else to Do:

While the festival and race will keep you busy for a good amount of time, there is also plenty to see and do during the rest of the three-day weekend. Below I offer a few personal recommendations, but nothing close to a comprehensive list:

Nature:

• Chautauqua Park
• NCAR
• Eldorado Springs
• Views from Flagstaff Mountain

Local Attractions:

• Pearl Street Mall, including:
• Art Mart
• Into the Wind
• Boulder Arts and Crafts Cooperative

• Coors Brewery Tour
• Celestial Seasoning’s Tour
• CU Boulder Campus

What to Eat:

Breakfast:

• Moe’s Bagels

Lunch:

• Illegal Pete’s

Dinner:

• Southern Sun
• Old Chicago Pizza
• Dushanbe Tea House

Ellaine was accepted last week into the University of Sydney’s Masters program of Applied Science in Molecular Biotechnology and will begin her studies on July 28. What an impressive title! I am extremely excited for her, and am more than ready to fulfill my part of our bargain to follow her to Australia for at least a year.

While I do not yet know what I will be doing once we land in Sydney, I do plan on working. My hope is to continue to shift my career focus on working with entrepreneurial startup companies, in strategy or corporate development, or as an investor.

I recently began working for Zecco, the fast-growing online securities brokerage where my good friend and flatmate Tony Leach is a Product Developer, as a project consultant for their product development and marketing strategy teams. My work there is expected to carry through the rest of the summer.

And then, come late July, Ellaine and I will be moving to Oz. I can’t wait.

Over parts of January, February, and March of this year (8 weeks in total), I lived in a one-bedroom apartment in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg while working for a consumer products client of the Monitor Group. Unlike my experience in Riyadh, which was defined both by international travel and treks to parts of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia rarely seen by foreigners, my experience in Johannesburg was largely spent in the northern suburbs of that city, mirroring the lives of most of my South African colleagues. During those eight weeks I did escape for a weekend safari in Madikwe Game Reserve, and for a relaxing exploration of Cape Town, but even these were not uncommon destinations for locals.

While short, my experience in South Africa left me with several important and lasting impressions of the country:

Living the Good life in the Northern Suburbs

One of the striking elements of my day-to-day life in Johannesburg was its high quality. While it certainly didn’t hurt that I was there during the South African summer, escaping London’s dismal rain and chill, the quality of life went beyond good weather.

Diverse restaurants and lively night spots abound in what is described as the most “first world” of cities on the “dark continent.” While it is true that persistently high crime rates require most restaurants to be located in fortified centers, complete with fences and parking lot guards, the most popular are focused inward on well-decorated and lushly planted courtyards.

The threat of crime kept me on my toes while I was living there, but didn’t result in any real significant impact on my ability to enjoy life as I normally would. In fact, it was the car culture of living in the suburbs which caused the greatest concern. The need to drive everywhere, and the fact that people lived in apartments scattered all over the northern suburbs, led to many more risky situations of driving home after a few drinks than I was really comfortable with. This problem, however, is really no different than you experience in the suburbs of the US.

Beauty and Diversity of the Country

In my brief weekend adventures outside of Johannesburg, and in the planning I did for potential future trips, I came to appreciate the immense diversity and beauty of South Africa. Prior to arriving there, I had assumed that in order to go on safari I would need to take a trip to the middle of the continent - someplace like Kenya or Tanzania. The opposite was true.

South Africa in fact is a land of myriad environments. Its offerings range from tacky and exuberant gambling centers (Sun City) to sunny beaches and natural beauty (Cape Town) to metropolitan and suburban (Johannesburg). It contains desserts, lush mountains, grassy plains, and forests.

South Africa’s national parks, from the famous and massive Kruger to smaller private game reserves and the vast rural landscape of the middle of the country, host incredible populations of wildlife. When visiting Madikwe Game Reserve near the border with Botswana we encountered nearly every variety of native African wildlife we could have hoped for. The only creatures missing in our weekend safari were a Buffalo and a Leopard. From conversations with others who had traveled more of the country, our experience was not entirely unusual.

Unfortunately, in addition to wildlife and landscapes, South Africa’s diversity also includes a range of impressive wealth and devastating poverty.

Apartheid Museum and Race

One sleepy afternoon I took a trip south of the city to visit the country’s lasting testament to its dark past: the Apartheid Museum. The two hours I had to spend there were not nearly sufficient.

The museum starts by educating the visitor on the history of South Africa, and the long road to Apartheid. It explains the country’s initial inhabitation by the British, the conflicts of the Boers, and the discovery of gold in Johannesburg. It documents the injustices that were enforced through the system of apartheid, which echo elements of the Nazi persecution of the Jews and US oppression of African Americans and the Japanese in World War II. It goes on to explain the roots of organized opposition, the rise of Nelson Mandela, and the importance of the ANC political party.

The sad reality is that understanding many elements of Apartheid is possible without ever visiting the museum: its traces are etched in the racial divides of the city. Soweto (South West Township) was one of many ghettos into which Africans were forced to live after they were ejected from their homes in the center of the city. Even many years since the collapse of the apartheid system, this and many other townships remain densely populated with blacks who continue to live an impoverished and difficult life there. The Northern suburbs also remain much as they were during apartheid: enclaves of wealthy Caucasian life.

Concerns About the Future

Perhaps the most enduring memories from my experience in Johannesburg were related to the challenging questions raised about the country’s future. In the first two weeks that I was in Joburg, the city (and whole country) experienced a series of devastating blackouts, eventually causing the weeklong closure of the world’s largest gold mines, and causing the price of gold to skyrocket. As a professional, I became suddenly and painfully aware of my reliance on both a computer and communications technology to accomplish even the most slightly productive tasks. Several-hour-long blackouts wrought havock on our work schedule, despite the fact that we were unusually well protected because most of our work is done on laptops which bought us a couple hours of productivity before they too died.

Colleagues, clients, and newspapers were harshly critical of the government in failing to adequately maintain the electrical system. They blaimed the government of taking for granted the high quality of infrastructure that had been put in place under the Apartheid governments, and not investing in upgrades or its continued upkeep. These critiques mushroomed into speculation about what other elements of basic infrastructure might be next to collapse: water? sanitation? transportation?

While I was pleasantly surprised by the country I had encountered, few people who had been there longer had similar sentiments. They described growing crime and increased “white flight” to other English-speaking countries, in particular Australia. I only hope the comments were alarmist. South Africa and its people have an immense amount of cultural and natural wealth to share with the world.

The most important step was finding a wagon to transport the whole device, because I knew building our own axle and wheel system would be far more trouble than it was worth. Ace Hardware in San Jose had just the vehicle for us: a large green wagon with pneumatic tires and a base just long enough to fit my planned 4-foot-long Zs and wide enough to fit a keg in between.

The sides of the Z were cut from 3/4 inch particle board, and provide the primary structural support. The Zs were then framed with square 1×1s, and joined together with lateral supports from the same material. We cut sheets of 5mm luan plywood to cover the Zs, and taped the seams for optimal painting. The bottom piece of plywood was cut out to allow space for the keg to rest directly on the bottom of the cart, with enough room for a bucket of ice around it to keep our beer nice and chilled.

We first sealed the whole vehicle with white latex primer, then covered the Z in bright pink, traced out the remaining letters of Zecco, and filled them in with the last of the pink paint.

The final result is a beautiful creation - I can’t wait to get a keg inside. Thanks so much to Zecco for the inspiration and funding, to Tony and Ellaine for helping build it, and to my family for lending a driveway, beer, and pizza for our construction efforts.

Tony has posted a whole series of photos on Flickr , and written about the float on his blog, Philotech .

This innovative museum tells the story of American history through a far more approachable medium than the typical museum exhibit: through the front pages of newspapers, television snippets, and even internal emails from the New York Times to its reporters on the morning of September 11th.  It also tells of the important role of the media in our country, and in a democracy.

The first exhibit I approached was a collection of every Pulitzer Prize winning photograph since that prize was first awarded in the 1950s.  It’s a stunning visual walk through history, from Vietnam and civil rights to Oklahoma City and Kosovo.  It reminded me of the power of a photograph to deeply impact emotion: seeing a photo of the World Trade Center still shakes me to the core; an image of white students using an american flag pole to beat a black man fills me with disgust. 

The exhibit made me ponder that career path I never really considered seriously, yet briefly pursued: photojournalism.  The museum pays their tribute as well as that of their pen-wielding compatriots.

A video on the Sedition Acts, President Adams, and the creation of the freedom of the press made me consider the act of history repeating that occured in our own generation with the passage of the Patriot Act.  It told the story of a part of our history I never knew, or at least never appreciated.

If you get a chance to stop through DC, I strongly suggest passing through the Newseum.  My next visit will likely be a matter of hours away.

Therefore, in order to travel between the two countries, it was necessary to fly from Riyadh to Amman, Jordan, and hire a car to take us from Amman to the Border. There, we passed through a slow, if thorough, immigration process and security screening on foot to cross the border. On the other side, we hired another van to take us through the West Bank to Jerusalem.

General Impressions:

• Israel is the most developed country in the middle east. Many of the modern amenities that I would expect in Europe or the US, such as high quality organic foods, decent hotels, and a good nightlife are present in abundance
• Many cultural eccentricities are pleasant and truly unique to this country. One night we watched a crowd of traditionally dressed teenage Jewish boys dancing in a plaza to a rock-singing Yiddish-speaking Rabbi - all I could think was “this could only happen here”
• Old town Jerusalem is a fantastic and bustling maze of clothing shops, jewellers, butchers, churches, and temples
• Israeli girls are fun and beautiful; matched, perhaps only by their neighbours to the North, the Lebanese

A Feast in Old Town Jerusalem: The old city was a sea of life and commerce - streets crowded with shops and shoppers and a vibrant buzzing of activity. By the time we arrived, we were starving and sought nourishment at the first little cafe we passed, just inside the old city gates. We were not disappointed.

An old man with shaky hands and a warm smile set us down at his only two tables, and proceeded to feed us an incredibly memorable feast. It started with simple hummus and bread, then fattoush salad, then delicious chicken and peppers in a lemon and butter sauce, all served with fresh squeezed pomegranate juice. Our host was chef, waiter, and juicer, so the meal proceeded at a leisurely pace over a couple of hours, allowing us to fully take in the coming and going of hundreds of visitors to the markets.

Night Life: A visit to Ben Yehuda Street for dinner opened my eyes to the simultaneous fun and beauty of the city and its residents. We enjoyed a few cocktails at the hotel before we departed, and were already in a festive mood when we arrived on these streets crowded with young Israelis looking for a fun evening on the town. We found a good restaurant, and proceeded to finish a carafe or two of wine while hitting on our drop-dead gorgeous waitress (who, perhaps for the benefit of the tip, and perhaps due to our impaired perception skills, seemed to be enjoying this immensely).

After dinner we hit the street and enjoyed a bit of people watching as we searched for a promising bar. It seemed the average age on the street was about 23, and the number of attractive girls staggering (we were, remember, a group of five guys not used to seeing much more than a woman’s eyes in Saudi Arabia). Enter the singing rabbi I mentioned above, and it was a scene of beauty, culture, and festivity.

Bethlehem: On our second day, we made a trip back into the West Bank to see the birth place of Jesus. We arrived at the church of nativity just in time to catch the mid-morning prayer in the square outside, and got to enjoy the juxtaposition of hundreds of faithful Muslims honouring their faith immediately next to one of the holiest sites in Christianity.

Inside the church, a tour group of Spanish faithful had arranged a special ceremony and service with a Latin and Spanish speaking priest in the crypt where Jesus was born and where his manger lay. It was powerful to witness the passionate faith of the guests, and to see the markers representing these important landmarks to history and the child stories of many Christmas’ past.

Dead Sea: As we made our way back to Amman to return to Riyadh, we were forced to take a long detour to an alternate border crossing into Jordan. The delay cost us the opportunity to visit the Dead Sea during the daylight, but two of us braved the detour in our journey to the airport to spend 45 minutes floating in the intensely saline waters of the Dead Sea, the lowest point on earth’s rocky surface. The eery feeling of weightlessness in the water was a strange but exciting experience that epitomized the weekend. My visit to Israel would turn out to be my favourite part of my adventures in the Middle East.

Tabuk province enjoys the longest coastline in the KSA, along the Red Sea.

I arrived here on a business trip, and unfortunately much of my time was spent in business meetings and at a mediocre, but passable hotel. During the various meetings, and through two tours of city facilitated by our hosts, I was able to develop a reasonable picture of the place.

Based upon the research conducted prior to the trip, I expected to find something more closely resembling Egypt than Saudi Arabia. Its GDP per capita and education rates are significantly below the national average, for instance.

Instead, we encountered in the city of Tabuk the first real “oasis” I would visit in Saudi Arabia. The best analogy is to compare Tabuk to the Midwest of the United States. It is an agricultural area, with a pleasant climate, and a population that enjoys a quieter pace of life. Generally, the quality of life that we witnessed was good, and the people warm, hospitable, and occasionally, quite entrepreneurial.

Plants Rising from the Desert

One of the most shocking impressions that the region left upon me was how agriculture has been successful despite the negligible annual rainfall and sweeping desert sands. As we drove along the highway to visit a large commercial farm, watching the flat sands pass us by on either side of the car, we suddenly came upon life. Tall stalks, like corn (though probably not corn… it’s too water intensive), rose from the desert sand in a tight circle around the rotating irrigation equipment that gave it life.

As we explored the farm, we learned how high water intensity crops like wheat are being substituted for more resilient ones, like olives, and higher value crops, like fruits and vegetables. The water for the crops is drawn from a large aquifer which lies below the valley where Tabuk city is located. How sustainable this is in the long run, is a question to which few appear to have an answer.

Untouched Coastline

While meeting with different business and ministry leaders, we heard them describe the virgin coastline on the Red Sea as a paradise of sand, water, and endless potential. In many ways, they were right. The trick, however, is that a “virgin coastline” might in fact be covered in SUV tracks, littered with garbage and debris ranging from bottles and wrappers to car tires, and in many places completely without trees or other plant life. Nevertheless, sand and water are plentiful, and as far as I can tell, so is business opportunity.

Breathtaking Mountains and Desert

What actually impressed me most about Tabuk and its potential as a future tourist destination was not its coastline, but the desert and mountains which separate the city of Tabuk from the beaches an hour and a half to the west. What starts out looking like the deserts and mountains of Western Colorado and Eastern Utah turns into a terrain altogether unfamiliar. The area’s craggy peaks and jagged rock formations reminded me more of what I expect Tierra del Fuego looks like than anything I expected to find in Saudi Arabia.

Unfortunately, our short visit didn’t afford the opportunity to explore further. We read and heard about archeological sites ranging from castles to old temples similar to those found at Petra in Jordan to the North. Who knows - perhaps I will return one day.

Monitor’s Dubai office, and the Hilton hotel where I stayed, is in The Marina, next to the massive Jumeirah Beach Residence development, which alone incorporates 40 nearly-complete buildings. The Marina will soon include 200 high rise buildings, about 120 of which (by my naked eye estimate) are already well underway or finished.

To share a few of my first impressions of the city:

Floating, Skiing, then Partying - The fact that in a single day I managed to float in the gulf, attend an office meeting, go skiing for two hours, grab some dinner, get some shopping done, then go out to party at a ritzy night spot is just incredible. Ski Dubai, while not exactly the best ski experience in the world, was a fun and novel way to spend a couple of hours at the mall. The slope was actually pretty impressive, and a decent challenge, so I walked away happier than I expected to be.

My visit was during Ramadan, the Muslim holy month, so the options to party were somewhat limited - essentially, we had to stick to hotel bars. Luckily, Dubai has a lot of high class hotels with equally impressive bars. Buddha Bar, at the Grosvenor House, was quite a scene, and fully on-par with many of the great night spots I have been to in San Francisco and London.

Dubai is not Las Vegas - I have frequently heard Dubai compared to Las Vegas, but feel the comparison is inaccurate because of the attitude of the two cities. Whereas in Las Vegas many resorts and developments are huge and ostentatious for their own sake, big projects to build the “biggest,” “tallest,” or “best” in Dubai are about garnering respect and prestige. This is a city that wants to be taken seriously, but also embraces the fact that novelty and innovation attract tourists, investment, and money. Let’s just say that I don’t expect a Hooters Casino to open here. In the near future, anyway.

Sleek, Modern, and Developed - Dubai is quite upscale, at least in the parts of the city that I saw. In fact, the degree to which there seemed to be very little in the way of “budget” accommodations, etc. was surprising compared to Bahrain, Riyadh, or Egypt. The beach was a line of hotels ranging from a Sheraton to a Hilton and on up the chain of prestigious hotel brands.

The Mall of the Emirates, another example, is also quite upscale. It’s actually nicer and larger than most that I’ve been to in the US or Europe. Not cheaper, however.

It’s in a Desert - This one shouldn’t have been any shock, but I found myself disappointed by how unattractive certain sections of the city were because they were un-landscaped, un-developed, and essentially swaths of dirt. Empty plots of land and things like highway medians simply don’t grow anything. No grass - no shrubs - nothing. Until confronted with this, I never realized how attractive undeveloped countryside is in most other countries.

Also related to its desert climate are the heat and humidity that come with the package. Every time you walk outside your sunglasses immediately fog up with condensation. It’s also impossible not to mention that the water temperature is almost disgustingly warm. While I am sure it’s great for arthritics, water that is 32 degrees C / 89 degrees F is simply not that refreshing. I am sure when I return in a month or two however, and have been living in a colder climate, I will probably change my tune.

Difficult Conditions for Foreign Labor - Dubai imports a lot of working class labor from places like India and the Philippines. From what I have seen, this is true across the region - it seems like half the coach class seats on any flight to Riyadh are full of migrant workers with little experience flying (the kind that hop out of their seats and rush for the doors while the plane is still taxy-ing).

In Dubia, the sad situation is that for all the novelty of seeing hundreds and hundreds of buildings rising into the air at the same time, the reality is that hundreds and thousands of poor foreign laborers are the ones who are toiling beneath the midday sun to get them built.

The businessman and economist in me feels that this is “okay” because these workers are employed voluntarily and are earning far better pay than they could in their home country. They’ve decided that it’s worth spending a year working in the harsh conditions to get themselves ahead in life, maybe to buy a car or put their kids through school when they return home.

The human inside me is nevertheless disturbed to look from the balcony of my luxury hotel room and see young men of my same age doing hard labor in the midday sun, only to be packed into an un-airconditioned minibus to be brought back to wherever it is they spend the rest of their day. One of the salesmen at the mall said it best: “They treat Indians like dogs here.”

Ultimately, it is the availability of this massive, cheap labor force that makes the miracle of Dubai possible. Love it or hate it, that’s how it’s happening.