United Arab Emirates
UAE - Dubai
Glad I read up on this country since its real color and personality is subtle. The Emirates is formed from 7 kingdoms sometime in the last 100 years, and is only swimming in its oil wealth since the mid-1950’s. It’s stewardship and investment of those oil monies is impressive and in direct contrast of what you hear about African countries and their squandering of their mineral wealth. It’s an odd and interesting study in contrasts - both areas colonialized by the West, hard-earned processes of independence, but two very different outcomes.
The Emirates is considered the safest city in the world to walk around at night. Due to the invisible but pervasive invisible hand of surveillance and harsh, unmerciful punishment that includes a lot of floggings. People obey the law, and stay out of trouble - it was only just a couple of years ago that alcohol was permitted even among Westerners. Incorporating Sharia law, a body of religious law, is based on the precepts of Islam (taken directly from wiki)and the sacred scriptures.
Floggings and lashings are common, for kissing in public if not married, verbal abuse even on social media, alcohol consumption if you are a muslim, etc…. It’s safe to assume all communications are being monitored and most actions filmed. It feels in some soft way like a well run household, where everyone knows the rules and the punishments are swift. Stoning is also an option they make use of from time to time. Homosexuality is a capital offense and sodomy can be punished with imprisonment of 14 years. At least unmarried couples can live together and drink alcohol - newly allowed since 2020.
The Wikipedia entry details the following - emirates only make up 15% of the population. Indians, from the subcontinent make up 30%, and it’s only a 3.5 hr plane ride from New Delhi. Expats and migrant labor for the hospitality and construction industries make up 70% of the population to serve the other 20%. Its economy is of the most diversified in the Gulf.
The Atlantis, where we are staying, is a $3b hotel finished in 2007, themed after the lost city of Atlantis. 1600 rooms, and the largest water park in the world. Set on the man-made Palms of sand dredged, blown, tamped to created a whole new area of Dubai. I’ve stayed in some nice hotels, some that claimed 3 or 4 or 5 stars, but here, the opulence is in every detail of architecture and service. In some ways, the service is so well done, the training so precise and its execution so consistent, you feel the same laws and codes of behavior carry thru throughout the hotel, that a vein of fear, subtle and nuanced, codify the efforts of individuals. Let’s just say you could get used to this, and it makes a lot of other hotels that stake a claim to good service look poorly executed in comparison.
https://www.atlantis.com/dubai. (Take a look, it’s cool).
Gigantic aquarium that anchors the whole hotel around fish and water (note the pun with ‘anchors’The waterpark is insane.
The water park is insane. World's largest they claim.
There are several things to note - mostly about the heat. The ocean is literally like 95 degrees. Not refreshing, so the 6 pools around the place help a great deal. It’s summer here, and temps are averaging 100 degrees during the day, and 95 at night. You can’t walk barefoot without burning the bottoms of your feets
On the Catskills side of things, the team did good and I’m looking forward to getting back and leading from the front - first man over the hill type of thing. We got a ton of stuff going on and there is really nothing that happen right now that would change the fact that we are a financially stable company, regardless of what macro recessionary winds are blowing this way. We have at least 6 houses under contract that we are working on, and 3 independent projects where we are being paid to build on of our homes on land purchased by the homeowner - 1 of them is a client that bought our very first or 2nd home in Ulster County back in 2011 or 2012. That’s always validating for sure, as are the resale prices our existing clients are getting when they sell these little jewels we build.
I would add pictures, but that always just turns into a huge debacle. But a good lesson and perspective I always keep -
I think it’s hard to argue my haircut and shave for 550 dirham proved worth every penny. My barber was a super nice guy with limited English from Uzbekistan, and worked in Russia, then somewhere, and now Dubai. I was still unshaven from the safari and the beginning of the trip so it felt good to let someone else do the heavy lift of cleaning me up.
Now off to play my son (Lucas Petersheim) some basketball in the 99 degree heat. I beat him yesterday, and he’s been pouting ever since, but it is true, my 3-part game rarely comes together as nicely as it did yesterday. I think George Clooney called it the ‘old man moves’ but done right, downright hard to defend.
Travelogue, Part 2
God this fricking blog. I love my new website which needed to be done after my last was DELETED in July of 2020, but the bugs in the blog are never ending and turn what is already a somewhat heavy lift, - writing about my journey - into something altogether not fun, with unpredictable issues nearly every time I try - UGH. Maybe the 4th time will be the charm of trying to post this update (I'm sitting on a balcony on the 12 floor of the Atlantis in Dubai, home to the world's largest water park. There also seems to be 2 military jets skimming the coast line for the last few hours. I need to find the name of these crows that crow a bunch in a really obnoxious.
Ok, here goes the cut and paste again -
I chose wisely, my reading for this trip. A book about Stanley finding Livingstone in the African jungles, a Bill Bryson short book about his visit to Nairobi, and Out of Africa, which I also watched on the plane over.
(insert pictures of books here, not available though)Lucas doesn’t get why I read about the place I’m at, but for me it’s a no brainer. Like understanding something about art before looking at paintings, like appreciating the finer parts of music while listening to a composition, reading about where you are traveling to adds texture to the experience, especially a place like Africa, where it can go unnoticed, undetected without prompts from another more studied observer.
It could be the ‘boma’ which is a structure that is made to protect homes and herds from the native thorn bushes, encircling the encampment with hard to penetrate thorns 1” or longer.
It could be a narrative from the 1850’s journal of Dr Livingstone, the fearless Briton obsessed with trying to find the source of the Nile, describing the impregnable vegetation of the western Tanzanian jungle as it leads to the Lake Victoria.
Few can pick up Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa without hearing Meryl’s Streeps cadence and accent as she begins the 7 Oscar winning movie with Robert Redford and others. Streeps intonation and pace seems perfectly pitched to capture the voice of Dinesen’s writing - without rush, mirroring the natural movements of both the tribes and the animals of the African Savanah - without a jerk, or quick movement to draw attention to oneself, in a world of predators.
I’m gone, and will be until July 3rd. We will have closed on 3 homes in that time - one resale of an early Ranch in Narrowsburg on Lake Ridge Road, a forgotten road that I picked up some land in 2008 and have continued to build on since.
Another is Ranch 3 ( I believe), our first sale at the Crest, a several hundred acre project that I bought from an investor/speculator that got tired of carrying it on his balance sheet for 13 years without much progress.
So the show must go on, even in the boss’s absence. In fact, it’s a good test of the team, which I know will do just fine since they are good people, take pride in what they do, and have shown in many instances years of loyalty and respect for both me, themselves, the customer, and all else who play a part from town building departments to all the other assorted factors/components of productions.
Travels with Catskill Farms
Currently I sit in the Emirates International Lounge with my first born (and only) son, 13 year old Lucas Petersheim (I mention him by name cause he all his friends google each other and for better or worse, half of them end up on this blog reading it. As I posted prior, we are heading to Nairobi, the Serengeti, Zanzibar, and Dubai. 3 or 4 days in each, with little planes taking us up and over Mt Kilimanjaro, and from camp to camp in the Serengeti.
The little planes actually became a defining element of the trip, since you can only carry 32 pounds each onto these planes. So now we are traveling half way around the world with 4 very different destinations with only a carry on each, and a small backpack. This instilled a bit of stress, but actually in the end, you can fit quite a bit under 32 lbs, especially my son who wears basically the same thing every day so his bag weighed in at 14 lbs, and that included a football and frisbee. And even for me, when you think about it, you don’t actually wear have of what you take along on most trips so this one just was a sort of forced marched into spareness and packing efficiency. I’m only at 29lbs and that includes all the medicines and even my computer and 3 or 4 books.
And boy did we bring some medicine. Having a good doctor, and a good travel med consultant, we are loaded up with pills if we get covid, pills if we get bad stomach, pills if we get a cut and need anti-bacterial. We (this is more of a ‘me’) have some valium for planes and assorted travel stress management, some viagra just in case and our malaria pills which true to its reputation, gives you some peculiar dreams - in my case I’m dreaming of arguing with friends, having my own personal hot air balloon crash into one of my rental units injuring the tenants and a few other oddities.
For books, we went regional. Lucas is going to read I Dreamed of Africa (much to his chagrin - “School just ended!” He pleaded. I’m reading Bill Bryson’s short African diary, and Into Africa- The Epic Adventures of Stanley and Livingston. I also brought a sketch pad and a book How to draw perspective - which will be my 40th try to learn to draw. It’s not as if I do or don’t have a knack or interest in it - I just don’t stick with it.
Since this is being posted a few days after being written, we have successfully landed in Nairobi, flew into Arusha Tanzania, flew the first 4 legs of our 10 seat small planes on airports that have quickly become dirt runways with assorted wildlife running across them. It's funny how traveling can be intimidating beforehand, but you settle into the groove pretty quickly, especially for an old nomad like myself.
We are currently 15 miles or so from the Kenyan border in Tanzania's Serengeti Preserve. Been on half a dozen game drives resulting in a plethora of game sightings, 5 small planes, a tent, a glamp and a hotel inn on former/current coffee plantation.
Lost track of day of week days ago.
Hybrid work and its benefit to the Catskills
Crain’s, a newspaper about NYC issues of interest to the business community, reports that just 8% of NYC workers are in the city Monday through Friday according to their most recent business survey. “Only 49% of Manhattan office workers are expected to be in their seats even after Labor Day,” they report.
That bodes well for the Catskills and Catskill Farms and give credence and added legitimacy to what I’ve been pretty sure of for awhile now, and that is the good times in the Catskills aren’t going away anytime soon, and things can trend back to ‘normal’ without denting the demand-supply imbalance that has defined the Catskills real estate market since April 2020.
I remember when the vaccine came out in November 2020, and I thought that could actually spell trouble for the upstate marketplace - but 2 things were true that kept mass vaccinations from eliminating the upstate demand. 1, the vaccines didn’t really work that well - at least not well enough to signal the end of the pandemic, and 2, hybrid work showed it could work.
Most of our clients are pretty well-established in their careers and are part of the decision-making around these workplace decisions and pivots, and if they were buying, and continuing to buy, that pretty said all there was to say. Hybrid work, especially around the NYC metro area, where people and families could better balance the hard life that is city life, the expensive life that is city life, - that almost everyone could split their time more evenly where before only the luckiest could count on a consistent Friday off, and a longer weekend.
It’s actually hard to overstate the disruption that Covid wrought - all sorts of things in the workplace that were hardly ever seen, that are now so commonplace as to be unremarked on.
Lawyers closing real estate transactions remotely. Digital signing of documents. Zooms instead of face to faces. Video calls in general. Online tutoring. The list is too long to even begin to list comprehensively - effective and efficient improvements to the workplace that never could have happened without some sort of disruption that outweigh all the interests that have to be shoved aside.
Some I just can’t buy into, however, such as camera video tours of homes to perspective buyers - any time someone would ask me to do that, I’d just say ‘no thanks’ - our stuff can’t be appreciated by video.
As had been true since the beginning of my upstate journey, the little niche I work in keeps defying national and regional trends. In 2008-2012, my NYC niche kept producing profits for us when the rest of the building industry was getting decimated - kept producing because NYC real estate held steady while the rest of the country dropped. Now, NYC was MOST impacted by the pandemic and the disruptions wrought by the pandemic, and that again benefited us.
12 days till we head to Africa.
Home we just sold in Saugerties, the 15th of the 16th that got started in April, 2020.
Ranch 54 - link and description.
