Dubai

We have decided that in order to make our lives work here, we are going to have to get out of Al Ain every weekend and do something a little more lively. So, we went to Dubai this weekend.

Turns out, most of Dubai is under construction.


What is finished is beautiful in its big city way. This is the marina...


And the Gulf is warm, very salty and lovely. That's a replica of the Bahamian Atlantis in the background. One $25,000 per night suite is just not enough for this planet, so they made two, and put it here.




Awesome food....
That's a Johnny Rocket's.



I kid, I kid. We ate fantastic Thai food on the Dubai Marina waterfront. Nick's dish came with a little bit of jicama carved like a duck, complete with peppercorn eyes and a bit of carrot for a bill. Nick had the fish, I had the duck and lychee red curry. Why he got the duck carving, I do not know.


One last beach shot...


All told, Dubai is a place that casts aside stories of building houses on sand, and instead turns its eyes towards a Las Vegas optimism that keeps churning with fantastic restaurants, accommodations and other accoutrement of distraction. And like any oasis in these parts, we will be back.

This weekend, fingers crossed, Muscat, Oman!

Oopsies...

We accidentally ascended the highest peak in the UAE a few days ago...





The Jebel Hafeet, which looks over the Empty Quarter (that's Al Ain in the background). Really, we were just hungry for a recognizable lunch to ease our transition...so we drove up the mountain road to see what the resort on top could offer us.

I will say the rock formations are unusual and interesting in a sci-fi kind of way, but I had much the same impression I did when I moved from the American West to the northeast of the same country and mistook Mt. Washington in New England for a hill. That probably says more about me than the geography.

As g-d wills it....

In some way, we're all captive.

Al Ain is a millenia-old oasis in the desert. The ethnography and archaeology here by my research dates back three, four thousand years. I imagine humans then found entertainment in watching other humans and animals carry about their business. Today, we're no exception; the day of our arrival we watched one of three annual downpours flood our street. We stood outside the villa walls just to see who could drive through the lake that formed on the street outside the driveway.

Another thing to do here is go to the Al Ain zoo. Full disclosure: I am not a fan of zoos. But I am a fan of meerkats and big cats, who are suited to zoos, really. Think of it. A cat that does not in fact have to patrol a perimeter and hunt their own food but instead sleeps all day in the sun and waits for someone to throw in nutritionally balanced meals? It doesn't matter what size the cat is, the mentality is the same. They don't really care about you unless you are failing to provide something to them.

I have no idea what runs through a meerkat's mind; they're just darn cute.






One of the most difficult adjustments I am making moving from the states where we are constantly bombarded with information and The Next New Thing is the complete lack of all of those. The ability to access those things exists here, but it is culturally absolutely unimportant and awkward to attempt to affix that life to this one. Al Ain is a crude downshift into a slower life that doesn't necessarily mean a lack of things, but more a mental housecleaning to reframe the addictive behavior of unconsciously checking our cell phones, twitterberry, facebook, the news crawl and email. I am the worst culprit of this. A number of times expats have told me to get rid of the BlackBerry mentality. It was one of the first pieces of advice I received, actually, and I get it now.

I am not a fan of zoos, but today, the lazy puma, the rhino finding the perfect spot on the log to rub an itch and the giraffe staring quizzically at me while I stared quizzically at it reminded me of the imperative of simplicity as a lifestyle. I have come halfway across the globe to absorb the idea, but the notion is going to make going anywhere else really, really pleasant.

A trip to the store

I confess, when we first started wrapping our heads around moving here, I thought my trip to buy food would be by strolling through an old souq, where I haggle with the shopkeeper about the price of cardamom.

The reality is not quite drawn from the same picture.

The market closest to us is in the Al Jimi mall, and it's the Carrefour, the French supermarket chain. It is awesome in its own way, in that almost every product I can think up is on the shelf. The produce aisles have exotic things like jackfruit, durian and Egyptian custard apples sitting alongside the more familiar but still not everyday quince, mandarines and the like. The spice aisle is a collection of open bags, people come up and taste them right out of the bag before buying. Part of my food budget is devoted just to trying new things, so yesterday I purchased "lemon salt". When home, I tried it, and to my amusement it was citric acid. Add that to the lost in translation list. Whole nutmeg in the shell, whole cardamom, rice, rice and more rice, and amazing fresh fish will make it into our kitchen when we have our own place. We made simple ol' fresh perch last night, smothered in a yogurt and gouda sauce, broiled. The recipe came straight out of a Dubai lifestyle magazine.




On the recipe note, I tried to go shopping for cookbooks here, but they're all in Arabic. Recipe searches I do online drive me to Gourmet's Morrocan Chicken, or Epicurious' Lebaniese tagine; not authentic in the slightest, so I'm looking for a good archive based here, in English is the trick, for the stuff that our next door neighbors are making.

Clementines and basmati rice from Pakistan, mandarines from Lebanon, yoghurt from the UAE; everything is labeled with the country of origin. And, the halal meat is fantastic. I recommend to anyone who can buy it, do so. We had some of the freshest beef I have had in a long while, and I have roots in cattle country, Nebraska. The chickens are normal-sized and fresh, with labels that say halal and 'hand-slaughtered'.

Tonight, we're having a mint and paprika chicken with peper and tomato relish, with couscous.


These first posts are definitely not my shining moments in journalism; I'm just trying to catch up on the experiences here.

A word on mosques

I mention the mosque because a couple of nights ago, I was on the couch with my LC and the last evening's call to prayer started. I looked at him and said "I think that's a real guy singing that". He started laughing; I honestly thought it was a recording for the first two days here. Nick explained that we are in a place that takes religion a bit more seriously than in the states, so, um, yeah, it's probably a real guy singing. Anyway, the guy on this night had a little more vigor in his voice than the other two guys. If I could revise history, my point would have been that the other two guys sounded the same. But it already got out of the gate that I thought it was recorded.



This is our back yard, and the call to prayer we hear is about a hundred yards out the back, so you can't miss it (which I love, by the way, it is very soothing). As you can see, the back yard isn't really a back yard, it's more like a back sand drift. Our accommodations for the first 90 days here are at the company villa, after which time, we will seek our own place. It probably won't be a villa. These places are huge, the small ones starting at maybe 4,000 square feet. We're in one about that size, with a couple of outbuildings that are separate residences. The sense of space here is enormous. If apartments are nice, I'd like to opt for one of those.

I owe everyone a little explanation. We moved so quickly to the UAE that we barely had time to have a going-away party from Los Angeles. Such is the world of television production, and why I chose it as an occupation was for the opportunity to travel to places like this and get paid for it.

My loving compadre and I were each offered jobs by the same company here. We will be setting up and running an in-house video production unit, which so far seems to indicate that by the end of the project we will have rounded out our experience as directors, producers, equipment gurus and editors. That's how it looks so far, anyway. But, the work the least interesting part of the journey.

We have been here for a week and a half already, so there is some catching up to do on experiences so far. The beginning is probably a good place to start.

Back in Los Angeles, we boarded for Dubai on the 6th of December. It was an 11 hour flight to Amsterdam where we made our connection. That connection is a more potent experience on the trip so far. Walking through Schipol, we were surrounded by preened and chipper Euro travelers and businesspeople on their cell phones, in chatty groups...until we got to the gate for Dubai. First of all, we had to go through an extra set of security to just get into the gate, which I now know was why the ticket indicated to be at the gate an hour and a half before departure. Our flight wasn't filled with the contented savvy Euro travelers found in the rest of the airport. It was filled with contractor and engineer expats, people in national dress, and haggardly military guys returning to the Middle East probably to end up back on base. On the whole, no one was excited to be on this plane like I noticed other people in other lines were. This, unfortunately, included me. A six-hour flight after an 11-hour one, and a complete unknown ahead; would we like it, what's it like, am I going to need to cover up, tack on some sleep deprivation... Worse, my loving compadre and I were booked so late on the flight that we didn't even have seats together. I was wedged in between two giant engineers who barely fit in their seats and spilled over into mine. Six hours later, at midnight, we landed in Dubai.

The car hire booth didn't have our reservation. We didn't get to our hotel until 3:30am in Abu Dhabi, an hour's drive away. However, there are certain things that can take the sting out of a 3:30am check in to a hotel. Five stars is one of those things. We had to pass through security to get into the hotel; a temporary fixture due to one of the Asian football teams staying in the hotel for the FIFA World Cup Classic (or something- I have a lot of ramping up to do culture-wise).

Within about two days, and not due to the five-starness, I realized I could stay here awhile.

After five days at the hotel catching up on sleep and meeting with company people, we moved to our town of Al Ain, an oasis resort community on the eastern edge of the emirate of Abu Dhabi. It's a 'village' compared to Dubai and Abu Dhabi the capital, containing about 450,000 residents. It shares a border with Oman. We have been here for a week, and I'll post about that week in separate entries.