Aden

"It seems more modern here," said one guy I am traveling with. "It's a beach town."

Yes, it certainly is, I thought. As we drove back from the airport in the dark, I noticed jagged silhouettes of rock overlooking the sea. I noticed a jump to the atmosphere. Skirted men hung out in open air tea shops, while other men roamed the streets in jeans, and fitted collar shirts. Well-lit strip malls separated old Aden from the airport. The humid air curled my hair and soothed my dry throat. A musty smell of heated fish and sea filled my nostrils.

But it gave me the antithesis of the feeling that beach towns usually do. There was no sense of freedom and escape to a place of sun and sand. There was no draping my bare arm out the window and letting the breeze crawl all the way up it -- to the top of my tank top and the crown of my head. There were no women of all shapes and sizes in sun dresses and bikinis going home sun-kissed after a long day in the sand. There were just the walking black enigmas floating by the surf.

Aden is creepy.

It wasn't always that way. It used to be a land of relative freedom, where women could enjoy the sand and the surf in tshirts and bathing suits. At least that's what I've read. Before Yemen was united as one country, the south served as the only Marxist state to ever exist on the Arabian Peninsula. As you know, Marxism and religion don't mesh. This meant that women walked around without their veils and without anonymity. I can't picture it now, but I tried.

I tried to picture a place where women didn't have to swim at a separate beach, like I did in Aden. Although our hotel was situated right on the Arabian Sea, with the sand just a step away, we had to leave the hotel and go behind a wall to find a beach just for women. I didn't mind. Who wants to be gawked at for showing their arms at legs? Who wants to be glared at for letting the salt saturate their hair?

At the women's beach, my colleague and I had the Arab Sea all to ourselves, swimming and soaking in an old crater. On one side, the rockface created a perfect circle where the sea moved in and out under a setting sun. The call to prayer bounced off of all sides of the crater as our feet moved clearly beneath us. I looked as far into the distance as I could, and imagined I was seeing the tip of Somalia, or maybe it was Djbouti.

A woman with full red lips, and a flattering white tshirt, and stone-washed jeans served us Adeni tea, thick with milk and flavored like weak coffee. Behind this wall, with these women on the beach, I almost escaped post-unified Aden.

Until another woman arrived. Black.

Covered, she brought me back to Yemen. She swept past us, and in the nicest light of the day, dropped into the gym, which posed next to the rockface, and through large windows, overlooked the Arab sea. I listened to my colleague talk office politics, and stole glances of the woman. Was she going to run and jump in her abeya?

Not at all.

She tore off her head scarf and then peeled away her black cloak. She took it off, one button at a time, and hung it in the corner. I couldn't stop glancing. She was exquisitely beautiful, with large features, and thick, wavy black hair that was pulled back into a pony tail. She had on form-fitting workout garb, with huge hoop earrings dangling from ears. She, very intentionally, wrapped a pink bandana around her head. She took her tall, lanky body from the corner to the scale and weighed herself. I wondered why. Who was she trying to please? Was she trying to please herself or the one man who was allowed to see what was below the veil? I hoped it was only herself, for health and for nothing else but the empowerment of her own body. She hopped on the treadmill and began running, just like I do.

I thought about how freeing that must feel to her, to tear off all that clothing, and to run. She moved around the small gym, pulling herself up and down, folding into sit ups and dropping to push ups. She had quite a work out.

She then grabbed her abeya and she slid back into it. She placed her headscarf back on, first veiling even her eyes and then pulling the material from only her eyes. She transformed into every other woman I had seen that day.

She suffocated my illusion of freedom.