The Corniche - biking, running, and playing

One of the most wonderful things about our new city is the Corniche, a strip of land along the waterfront that's grassy and beautiful, planted with flowers and trees. Most importantly, there is a continuous path along it that goes, uninterrupted by the busy and occasionally lethal Abu Dhabi traffic, for 5+ miles. And they are beautiful miles.



On Friday night, we rented bikes and biked along the whole thing. (On Saturday, we got braver, and ran the same route.)



Taking breaks occasionally to look at the view, which keeps changing. Here is Nick, with a peculiar kind of hat.



The best and the worst thing about the Corniche at night is that EVERYONE is on it. Nights in Abu Dhabi are particularly beautiful, and near sun down, the Corniche begins to feel like a massive party. Kids are weaving around on their bikes. Ladies are walking together and chatting. People are out variously picnicking, stretching, playing soccer, sitting on benches and gazing at the view, running, and searching fervently for ice cream. In places, it feels like mayhem. But it is a very happy and communal mayhem, and it's nice to be a part of it.

Dubai: Near the Top

We bought tickets to "At the Top," the observation deck of the world's tallest building, Burj Khalifa. It was originally named Burj Dubai, but was renamed after the ruler of Abu Dhabi after Abu Dhabi bailed out Dubai in 2010. (Names here are super confusing. Most streets, for example, are named after Sheikh Zayed in one way or another.)






















Here we are "At the Top."

Well, near the top. Here's what we could see below:



And here's what we could see above:

Before heading to the top, we prowled the nearby Dubai Mall, the world's largest mall. The mall went on for miles. There is an ice rink and an aquarium; we gawked at the latter in great awe for quite some time.



Honey is sold much like perfume - in beautiful glass vats, at almost $100 a pound.



There is an impressive array of designer clothes, including baby lines for some of the major brands. For example:



But most of the miles are full of cake. One of us spent a lot of time gazing at the cakes. There were layer cakes, and cupcakes of all kinds.

 A branch of Magnolia Bakery (though *this* Magnolia will screen print your cake with Disney princesses, which we're pretty sure is a no-go at its big sister in New York).



And the loveliest and most wonderful bookstore in the world. Well, in the UAE. Here Margaret is, in delight. For what did she find? The complete work of Dickens in three different editions per novel, and a full stack of secondary Literary Criticism. Not bad.

Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque

On Saturday, we went to the biggest mosque in Abu Dhabi - actually, it was planned as the world's biggest mosque, but there were objections - shouldn't the world's biggest mosque be in Mecca? So it is a very big mosque, but not the biggest.

It looked big enough.


Outside, there are pools and courtyards in dizzying plenty.

Despite its size, every individual piece is crazily elaborate - here is a column, with mother of pearl inlaid into marble.

And there are SO MANY columns! 

Inside, there are six chandeliers, shaped like upside-down date palms.

Here is the biggest of the chandeliers - five tons!

The carpet, we learned, was designed to look as if the chandelier were dripping its many colors onto the carpet, patch by patch. The carpet is handmade - it took two years to make in pieces, and was eventually stitched together inside the mosque!

There are acres and acres of carpet - with built-in rows, so that worshipers can arrange themselves into lines.

Most beautiful of all are the walls - embossed flowers on this one. You can't tell in this picture, but I am actually enjoying the flowers. I am not enjoying the outfit, which made me feel like a Goth Little Red Riding Hood.

 But the walls. The walls are amazing. Each piece of the wall was beautiful...

...fading into a beautiful ceiling, carved with verses from the Quaran, each bit different from the last.

Here is my favorite wall - intersecting circles, with a few patches made transparent, letting the light in. 

In which we paddle board and make a curious acquaintance

"What? You moved from San Francisco to here?!! Excuse me, but I have to go to the bathroom..." the guy we met at the Hilton bar spluttered. He has lived in AD for 30 years - but somehow, our move was beyond belief. He had similarly required a good deal of explanation to process our paddleboarding attempts, so I suppose his skepticism was par for the course.

Paddle boarding is a thing here. Amid a sea of jet skis, paddle sports are doing quite well. Helpfully, there are areas where motors aren't allowed (many of which are full of jet skis anyway, but some of which, like the mangroves, are blissfully empty).

We rented boards from Watercooled at the Hilton Beach Club, where there's also sailing and windsurfing and kayaking. It will be a short walk across the street from our new apartment (more on that pending). Paddleboarding was pretty easy at first.

 We paddled.   We did a little yoga.

We approached the shore dangerously closely.

And then our yoga poses got rather ambitious, and the falling began.

 Apparently, standing on one foot is hard on a paddle board.

And that is how we made friends with people at the bar, who (unbeknownst to us) were greatly entertained by our antics. Our skeptical friend had two cold beers waiting for us on the patio - our first drinks in AD!

Al Mina Fish Market

Abu Dhabi is filled with incredible sky scrapers, palaces, and lots of malls, none of which hearken to simpler times, when its most lucrative industry was pearling.  One remnant is the Al Meena fish market, on the east end of the Corniche.

We visited after work, which is not the most lively time at the fish market.  But most of the stalls were filled with an incredible assortment of fish, prawns, lobster, langoustine - and even shark!

 

With some difficulty (how to choose?!), we bought a small fish and a few prawns, and took them over to a grill-while-you-wait stall. There was much waiting, and what looked like minimal grilling: it took a surprising amount of time to get back our catch, but we enjoyed a couple of cold drinks while they...did something.

We brought the food back to our hotel -- whatever they did was definitely worth the wait.  And it went well with A Night in Casablanca -- NOT to be confused with Casablanca.

Kayaking in the Mangroves

If you look at Abu Dhabi from the sky (like we have...on google maps) you will see a huge patch of green, which one logically assumes is a smudge on the monitor.  It is actually a huge mangrove forest, which serves as a habitat for fish, crabs, shrimp, turtles and birds and protects the coastline from erosion.  A couple of the hotels offer kayaking trips through the mangroves, which is something we've been looking forward to since we decided to move to Abu Dhabi.

We booked an appointment in the afternoon, when it is cooler and less humid than the morning.  We had a few errands to run, which always means a trip to the mall.  While we were at the mall, we stopped by a grocery store to see what was fresh...

And went bowling!

 

Finally it was time to go kayaking.  The site was about a twenty minute drive from where we are staying, and reminded us of the palisades in New Jersey where you can see New York, but actually feel like you're out in nature.  There were tiny crabs all over the rocks.

The mangrove forest actually got quite narrow -- it was a good test of our burgeoning kayaking abilities.

 We took a break for a few minutes for a snack and to gaze at the view.

By the time we got back, the sun was setting -- a beautiful summer night in Abu Dhabi!