DUBAI — Greet­ings all… As is obvi­ous, I’ve not been writ­ing much. There are some good rea­sons for that. First and fore­most, I’ve been busy. Since Novem­ber of last year, I’ve

• Got­ten married
• Moved to Dubai
• Taken on a new job
• And started a new phase in my career.

Mar­ried life is great, and very com­fort­able. Mrs. Back-to-Iraq seems to like it, too, but to be hon­est, I got the bet­ter end of the deal. (That’s usu­ally the case, no?)
Dubai is less com­fort­able. It’s a strange place, an odd cross between Sin­ga­pore and Las Vegas with­out the former’s clean effi­ciency and the latter’s cheer­ful and unapolo­getic sin­ful­ness. Its love of bureau­cracy, lack of any con­cept of cus­tomer ser­vice and no real plan­ning makes it much less of an ideal place than peo­ple should believe. It’s also damn expen­sive, and the era of good liv­ing, cheap hous­ing and fat salaries is long over.

But the new job is a good one. I’m edit­ing [Trends Magazine](http://www.trendsmagazine.net), one of the region’s top busi­ness and polit­i­cal mag­a­zines, if I do say so myself. My bosses are really devoted to the idea of jour­nal­ism — a rar­ity in this part of the world — and are will­ing to take on big pow­ers here, like real estate com­pa­nies. (They’re all con­nected to the gov­ern­ment, which has any num­ber of vaguely defined “red lines” that jour­nal­ists cross — or even approach — at risk to their jobs and res­i­dency visas.)
But the big news is that I actu­ally won’t be stay­ing here. I’ve been awarded the [Knight Stan­ford Fellowship](http://knight.stanford.edu/), one of America’s big jour­nal­ism fel­low­ships, to go study the fea­si­bil­ity of var­i­ous busi­ness mod­els for online news. I plan to con­cen­trate on for­eign cor­re­spon­dence, nat­u­rally. Back​-to​-Iraq​.com was a big part of get­ting me into the fel­low­ship and I look for­ward to nine months at Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity with excite­ment and humility.

So my four years in the Mid­dle East seem to be com­ing to an end, for now. I’ll be back in Dubai in July 2009, armed with expe­ri­ence, con­tacts and new lan­guage skills. Let’s hope Back-to-Iraq can be revi­tal­ized with the experience.