I was not sure if it was Karma or Karama Center as I asked, lost for a moment, at the desk of luxury Hotel Dubai. I was gently corrected by a nearby Yank from Bristol, California who overheard me as suggested I may be looking for the market known as Al Karama. “The place that sells the cheap stuff,” and he nodded in approval, producing a ‘replica’ famous maker watch from around his wrist and smiling. Seems he has been coming to Dubai for years, buying various objects for his store, coming here when Dubai was a forlorn sandy outpost back in the long ago and forgotten nineties. It is hard to believe that only a couple decades ago Dubai was nothing much, and now it is a juggernaut on the sea, a great exciting modern city on an unreal scale, with giant building and giant gold courses and giant palm trees artificially created in the sea. But I was interested in shisha pipes and wanted to buy and ship off a few for friends. Happily, hookah and shisha are the same thing, and when I got to the market I was prepared to haggle. Well these things were just beautiful, with ornate brass and and flowing pipes and I wished my friend from the hotel, the guy from California, was here to help me out. I really did not know what I was doing. I decided t retreat and maybe run into my friend, and to do a little research. Apparently, the Turks started doing this over five hundred years ago. But since tobacco is a New World plant, I wonder how it got there so fast. Maybe they were smoking something else. I looked forward to the look on my friend’s faces when they receive a shiny new Shisha pipe in the mail. Now maybe they will invite me over.

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