Heritage Village

Heritage Village is a free museum aiming to preserve traditional Bedouin crafts, and it's a lovely walk from our apartment along the waterfront. Why haven't we been yet? We aren't sure either. 

Perhaps it was the uncompelling signage that kept us away.

But we're glad we went in. We saw a camel....always a welcome sign to us...

...and a whole collection of swords. (In our endeavors towards furnishing our house, we've seen a lot of arms of various sorts prominently displayed on walls in people's houses. We have yet to buy any.)

There are boats being built...

...and pitchers for coffee (called Dallah, we think) being hammered. There are fewer and fewer people able to make the traditional Arabian pitchers, which require extensive handiwork for traditional shapes and patterns.

There was a room full of beautiful glass...

We especially liked the glass-animal bedecked perfume dispensers.

And there was a beautiful view of the Abu Dhabi skyline on a beautiful fall night. . 

Abu Dhabi Rain

Nick's presence must be having a bigger effect on Abu Dhabi than we'd thought. The sky this morning looked respectably Washingtonian when we woke up - a huge change from the unrelenting sunshine we've been enjoying.

Lightning flashed...twice. And then catastrophe struck. It began to rain. In Abu Dhabi.

Last week, we felt about three drops of rain on an unusually gusty evening, and thought we had experienced Abu Dhabi rain in full force. But this was real rain, persistent rain, rain that trickled down our windows all morning long.

Though we couldn't hear the sound of the rain on the roof (a Bangladeshi cab driver once told me how much he misses that sound), the feeling of being inside on a legitimately rainy day was immensely satisfying.

Abu Dhabi children would likely agree - school was cancelled for the day! 

Traffic Safety in Abu Dhabi

Drivers in the UAE are crazy.  The government has taken some steps to address the issue: there are sensors along all the major roads monitoring your speed, recording that you stopped at a red light, and so on.  Helpfully, they send you a ticket (and a text message!) when you are found guilty of an infraction.  This isn't a perfect system -- people who have lived here for a while know where the cameras are, and speed like crazy when unmonitored, then slow way down to pass by a sensor, and repeat.  To the uninformed, this just looks like erratic driving.  But in general, the roads seem pretty safe (especially after our visit to Nepal).

Also lending a helping hand is this gentlemen:

Have a closer look...

My, she was Yas

Yas (Arabic for "wow") Island is a man-made island about halfway between the Corniche on Abu Dhabi Island, where we live / work, and the airport.  Until this weekend we haven't spend much time there -- one of the first weeks here we drove through and made a quick stop into Ace Hardware to check out the bookstore / cafe (yes, THAT Ace Hardware, and yes, it was misguided).

This weekend, we allowed Yas to try and live up to the name.  Yas is best known for its Formula One racetrack -- in fact, the race was last week, when we were safely out of the country.  This week it hosted an event we were more interested in: the Abu Dhabi Striders Half Marathon.

The race was Friday morning, and by coincidence we had a friend who was hosting a barbeque on northern part of the island on Thursday night.  Most of the people at the barbeque work for the American Embassy, and have done stints all over the world.  For now, we are all in Abu Dhabi, and had a great time grilling and chatting on the pitch-black beach...because Yas island is so empty, the sky was full of stars!

The half marathon is the biggest running event of the year in Abu Dhabi.  This year Yas Waterworld played host, and we were able to hit most of the highlights of the island during the race.  Ferrari World (the red blob on the map) is the world's largest indoor theme park, and it certainly felt like it took a long time to run around.  We also ran by the Yas Viceroy, on a road that crosses over the F1 track.

 

At the finish, we reunited with some friends from the Striders and headed into the park.  There was a fabulous post-race buffet (!) breakfast and we had free entry for the day.  Yas Waterworld is home to the world's largest slide-within-a-slide (check out this recent article for some more interesting UAE world records).  Neither of us is a big theme park aficionado, but we did try out one somewhat horrifying slide, and otherwise sought out the family friendly rides (drifting around in an inner tube, etc).  Around 11 am when we left, we walked by a jaw-droppingly long line to enter the park; it must be longer in the summer!  Afterwards, it was back to Ace Hardware with a long list to get our apartment fully set up -- this time the shopping trip was more successful.

Abu Dhabi Obsessions: A Partial List, to be continued…

1). Frank Sinatra. Margaret’s grandparents were fans, and Margaret has inherited a soft spot for old blue eyes from them….but Abu Dhabi’s passion for Sinatra is far in excess even of the Kolbs', who managed to play other artists on occasion. Store managers in Abu Dhabi, by contrast, love to play the same Frank Sinatra song on repeat. Coffee shops, hotel lobbies, you name it. For example, in Caribou Coffee, where Margaret spent the morning, Sinatra's version of “For Once in My Life” has played all morning. Sometimes a cover gets played, sometimes an Arabic translation. All that matters is that good old Frank once sang it. We’re pretty sure that an instrumentalized version of “My Way” once played for an hour in Emirates Palace. (We haven’t heard "Old Man River" yet – it might tap a bit too far into labor unrest.)

2). America. Yes, we miss it, too (where are the seasonal drinks in Starbucks? Where is the canned pumpkin? How can we possibly know it’s fall?!!!). But we wouldn’t choose to show our affection for the US in quite the way that’s on market here. Here are a few examples of the pastiche of American culture that manages to make it out here.

Facebook FLIP FLOPS in Oman.

Dubiously stitched-together thematics on dubiously stitched t-shirts and jackets. By far the best is the "pro-active" squad. 

 

But the "West-Coast College" is also delightfully vague. 

There are too many examples - but here are a couple more that made us laugh, for good measure:

3). And, to crown this growing list, we give you the weirdest trend of all: Patrick Dempsey. Why this moderately handsome, definitely middle-aged man has attained such prominence in a city so far away from his home base is far beyond our analytical abilities. But he has. He is everywhere. We know it’s hard to believe, so here is one of the many Dempseys we’ve encountered.

Our first weekend in Oman

We went on our first camping excursion in Abu Dhabi this past weekend, under the guidance of the Meetup Group UAE Trekkers. At seven hours each way, the trip was a marathon of driving ("that was a great three hour drive," our trip leader blithely miscalculated, as we stretched our legs at 4 pm, having set out at 8 am). With only one night outside, the driving seemed a bit much. But it was a lesson in border crossing, and a tour of places we'll definitely want to revisit when we have a few days off to see the area properly. 

(Yes, that's Steerforth - after his first try at off-road driving!)

The interior of Oman looks a lot like the interior of Abu Dhabi - scrub land, sand dunes, and not much else (though Oman boasts some very tidy, fancy looking houses in the middle of nowhere, which set us wondering about what one would do each day as a well-to-do, yet isolated Omani). But Oman also has mountains - funny, curious uprisings that look rather like whale skeletons in some cases, and like cliffs plunked down in the desert in others.

And it has castles. Like really, really old castles. Between locals' hyperbole and our trouble translating the Islamic calendar to Gregorian years, we can't pin down their age...but are reasonably sure that they are somewhere between a few thousand and 11,000 years old. Anyway, we saw two castles.

Here is our first (very near Wadi Damm, where we camped). Nick briefly took up residence.

The second castle we visited was under renovation, the Omani man employed to keep visitors out let us in and gave us a tour for a small tip. He explained that the castle was occupied by two families who got along, until they didn't. They ended up fighting each other, then abandoning the castle after it sustained irreparable damage. It was rediscovered in Islamic year 1375 (November 4 is the beginning of year 1435 -- happy new year!).

This castle's buildings are a mix of Persian and local architecture. They are made out of the rock mixed with straw -- even in these ancient structures you can see the straw in the walls.



Near our camp, we saw the beehive tombs. Not much is known about them, but apparently thousands of them have been discovered, strung over the hill sides. These ones were particularly impressive, because of the funny, jagged jebel (mountain in Arabic) in the background.

The rocks in Oman were wonderfully varied, and made us want to learn more about rock identification (something that always seemed a bit too dull to be memorable before). At the tombs, it seemed as if every nearby rock was a fossil - we saw leaf-like prints, shells, and funny textures.

Even the caterpillars are orange!

Once we got to the Wadi, we saw rocks of even greater varieties. There were still fossils galore, but there were also zebra rocks, black rocks with big stripes of quartz running through them at regular intervals. And there were the sandy rocks that make up the California cliffs....and there were jagged, redder rocks that looked almost like hardened mud. And there was also mud...lots of it!




We went for a run, and then clambered up to the biggest pool we could find and went for a swim. The rocks were slippery, so the easiest way in was to make a big jump off a rock, about a meter high. It took Nick a while to be reconciled to this method. It was a lovely pool - a waterfall on either side of a deep, greeny-blue swimming hole in the hollowed-out rocks. We didn't end up taking pictures of our swimming hole, but this one (from a nearby canyon) looks rather like it.

When we got back to camp, dinner and a sky full of stars were waiting for us.



On the drive there and back, we were delighted with many run-ins with camels.

There were real camels, grazing in the scrub lands on the sides of the road....there were herds of camels right at the Abu Dhabi side of the border, in some kind of camel farm....and there were camels getting transported....all of which made us very happy. We have a tourist's delight in seeing camels in any and every context.

We also learned the relative confusion of border-crossing here, which probably accounted for an hour or so of our trip each way. To cross into Oman, we had to leave Abu Dhabi - pay, get passport stamps, get our car vaguely looked at and waved through. Then, we had to enter Oman - that's right: pay, get passport stamps, get our car vaguely looked at and waved through. On the way home, there was the added necessity of showing that we had previously entered Oman (people have nightmare stories of too-faint entrance stamps that officials won't acknowledge) and exited Abu Dhabi. Contrary to the signage, the process was anything but peaceful.

Next camping trip will definitely be on the Abu Dhabi side of things - we've got some good tips to go to Wadi Kitna next time, which has a cave!

Abu Dhabi Film Festival

Abu Dhabi has its own film festival, something we heard quite quickly once we knew we were moving here - it is a major point of pride for the emirate. What we didn't know was that the festival was taking place right below our future home. One movie theater is in Emirates Palace, just across the street (home of the camel burgers and camel lattes). The other is in Marina Mall, a pleasant stroll away now that the weather is easing up.

The festival is extraordinarily well-organized, with a website that far exceeds most Abu Dhabi websites in sophistication and organization. Every day of the festival, we can look up what movies are showing on a calendar that shows what's playing by time and by theater, and choose what we'd like to see given our schedules. Each movie screening concludes with a Q&A with the film's director and one or two prominent cast members.

Here's what we've seen so far, with our (highly subjective) reactions.

Cairo Drive - a fascinating documentary about driving in Cairo, that goes from 2009 (before the Arab Spring) up to Morsi's election. 77 minutes was a bit long, but it was worth the watch. The movie gives an insider's view into the crazy logic of excessive traffic that *just manages* to avoid total gridlock every day. It opens with a traffic cop gesturing at cars - because we're zoomed into his gestures, we don't see the logic of his directions, or the total havoc that he's attempting to organize. During the revolution, ordinary citizens took over his job, and would come out and bravely direct traffic for a few hours! The highlight of the movie for us was a marvelous shot of a baker bicycling through near-gridlock with huge trays of bread balanced on his head.

Belle - an English film, telling the story of a woman who was half-black in eighteenth-century English society, amidst the legal machinations surrounding the case of the Zong ship. The case was instrumental in accelerating abolition in England - a ship's crew cast diseased slaves overboard, claiming that the ship had insufficient water and had to ration scarce resources. In fact, they were hoping to force their insurers to recompense them in full. (Some people have argued recently that Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is actually all about the Zong case.) The movie was fun to watch, but a bit simplistic -- it made the abolitionist cause in England feel far, far more inevitable than it really was. One left wondering why the Brits ever trafficked in slaves at all, if all its citizens were so easily convinced of the abolitionist cause.

These Birds Walk - an occasionally beautiful, but mostly poorly shot and mystifying documentary, telling the story of runaways and orphans in Karachi. Abdul Edhi started a house for runaways long ago, and made caring for them his life's mission - the film shows him washing babies, chatting with toddlers, and so on. But the older children inside the house seemed largely unoccupied (one wondered, for example, if they received any education), and eager to re-find their families. The film also tracked ambulance drivers connected with the house, who collected and washed corpses from poor families, retrieved stray children, and restored them to their homes. It was a hard movie to watch, because (unlike Belle) there was no obvious "side" to be on -- we weren't convinced that Edhi's organization was actually doing any good -- and by the end of the film, the total impossibility of identifying any solutions to the crushing sense of lost-ness the children experienced was disabling for us as viewers. Though some children were returned home to sobbing mothers, others were clearly unwanted. And the children all showed obvious discomfort and dissatisfaction in the runaway house. They seemed trapped. But, unlike Cairo Drive, there was no metaphor threading through the film that gave voice to this sense of entrapment.