National Day

Abu Dhabi takes its heritage very seriously. See, for example, these poems (you can visit them at Heritage Village).

This seriousness translates into what is surely the most overwhelming holiday we've ever encountered, National Day.

About a month ago, it began, with the first wave of decorations - lights everywhere proclaiming the nation's 42nd birthday (clearly not re-usable from year to year...). We can't remember if the cars, or the flags, or the air shows started next, but at any rate, there emerged cars covered in flags and the leaders' of the Emirates faces....(we must apologize - these photos are totally inadequate to explaining just how far drivers would go in their decorations)....

....flags everywhere - lit up in lights across whole buildings, hung meticulously in each and every window of the Adnoc Office building, on flag poles, covering walls....fireworks sporadically....no pictures of those....and air shows, air shows mid-week, mid-morning, when most normal people are at work, with tiny jets spewing smoke of all different colors....

 ....and Emirates Palace, our normally elegant little dive across the way, lit itself up in intensely bright colors, and flashed green lasers into the sky non-stop. You can only begin to grasp the terrifying glow in our picture. We were scared to get much closer.



That decoration is gone, (really, it's the only one we've noticed to have disappeared so far) and the night terrors in our living room have ceased.

We ran into endless celebration preparations on our rambles around town. An inflatable slide at least a hundred feet tall was erected, along with all sorts of lesser inflatables, covering the entirety of the very-large public beach. A cool display on Emirates history appeared outdoors near Marina Mall, with exhibits going all the way up to 2030 (always fun to read about the future). Guides specialized to each decade waited eagerly to walk us through it, mostly by reading the signage aloud. At the end of each decade, we were presented with yet another glossy pamphlet, documenting the array of growth statistics we'd learned. Some of it was really cool (their interactive statistical maps would make Bank of America sit up and listen), but the one statistic we wanted most was missing - how much the display itself had cost. 



And we're still wondering when (if ever) the flags will come down. It's been a few weeks now, and we're told some decorations will last much, much longer than that...

Dubai Creek

Long before Burj Khalifa reared its glitzy, Armani-studded tower, Dubai was a regional trade hub. (For a sickeningly pretentious account of Dubai's current status as a global hub, see this op-ed.) In the 19th century, the British Empire regarded Dubai as the lynchpin for its middle eastern trade, and entered into an agreement to protect it from other imperial interests. Dhows from all over the region wound up in Dubai Creek, a salt-water meander that splits the city in two (it meanders at such a leisurely pace that Dubai's name, most people agree, derives from words meaning "to creep" or "locust").

Welcome to the Dubai Creek area circa 2013. (Some things have changed.)

The area remains a hub of sorts - certainly the hub of Dubai's hubbub, which is no mean feat. We were reminded of our fond encounters with Nepali traffic.

Others haven't changed much at all. Dhows still line the creek, and the sidewalks nearby are inundated with boxes - of vacuum cleaners, bicycles, flatscreen TVs, and other staples.

From the waterfront, Dubai's newer developments are just barely visible.

Near the banks of the creek on the Deira side you'll find a spice souq.... 

...some souqs about which guidebooks are curiously silent.....

....and (yes, really) a gold souq. Margaret's ring didn't quite fit in.

There was so much gold.

Window after window crammed with the yellow stuff.

We found specialty shops for every taste, filled (for example) with massive, unwearable rings shaped into frogs, snakes, and even (ugh) skulls.

Can't find the skull? Here he is, enjoying his Death Metal.

The glare out on the water was much more bearable (it was just the sun). We took a ride on an abra across the creek. (There are two prices for these rides. One, aimed at tourists, is priced at 120 AED. The other, for people who just want to cross the creek, is only one dirham). Nick sniffed out the deal immediately.

 The creek is full of boats, all making similar journeys.

And not to worry - crossing the creek does not necessitate saying goodbye to the souqs! On the other side of the creek is a textile souq, with the most aggressive vendors yet.

We emerged unscathed, and (remarkably) without any pashminas to show for our travails. Back on the water, Dubai was at its most peaceful.

But only for the length of the trip.

The Falcon Hospital (and a very mezze Thanksgiving)

Falcons are a big deal in Abu Dhabi. For the most part, we've been content with the cheesy paintings of falcons displayed prominently in fancy hotels and available for sale in every souq. For the last month or two, there has been a "Birds of Prey" exhibit in our building's atrium. The exhibit lies between us and our main source of sustenance (long live Waitrose!), and on several shopping trips, we've run into some real falcons, brought by their owners to the exhibit of representations of falcons. Deep.

That was one of our first tastes of real falcons, but - now that we've been to the falcon hospital - we are old hands.



The falcon hospital is located off the island, on a somewhat harrowing stretch of E11, the road to Dubai. We took Nick's dad and sister on the two-hour tour to begin our Thanksgiving festivities.




Though we learned a lot of falcon-facts (for example, the females are larger and better at hunting, so most people own female falcons), what we'll remember is the room FULL of falcons, where falcons wait pre- and post-op. At tens of thousands of dollars a head, falcons are expensive (the most expensive we saw was beautiful, with tiny black spots on a lovely white background, worth about fifty thousand dollars). So the room was full of some very precious merchandise.

Welcome to the world's poshest falcon waiting room.

Each falcon has a fancy top hat on to keep it calm. Some falcons were not so easily swayed, however. This fellow flapped his wings for most of our visit.



Others were more easily convinced (and more beautiful - below is our favorite falcon).



Operations were going on throughout our visit. Anesthetized birds are a sad sight to behold: their necks droop impossibly, so impossibly that they look broken. Operations can be simple; for example, birds in captivity need their talons trimmed so that they don't hurt themselves with over-long claws, and their feathers need yearly help, too.

But falcon treatment can also be more complex - we saw a real, hard-core operating theater (no birds therein) and a post-mortem assessment room.



After a few minutes of stunned watching and listening, as the doctors (?) explained the basics of falcon care, we each held a falcon....

And Margaret got to feed one. He snapped through a whole baby quail in about thirty seconds, bones and all!

And we went home to our mezze Thanksgiving....

....where there was kibbeh and pumpkin oumali (the aptly named queen of puddings)....



...but no birds to be seen, save for this little guy, a Kazhia Kolb original...he flew in specially from the US for the occasion!

International Date Palm Festival

Only three months ago, dates were a novelty -- an incredibly sweet dried fruit bearing an unfortunate resemblance to the cockroaches we came to know and fear in Charlotte.  Things are different now.  We were greeted at our hotel with a platter of dates and received a date on our pillow every night.  The grocery stores have date counters at least as large as the meat counters.  The traditional diet of the area was camel's milk and dates, and while Abu Dhabi has moved on from this monotonous diet, dates are still a very big part of the culture.  So it only makes sense that our new home would play host to an international date palm festival.

The festival felt like a trade convention, rather than what we expected - an elaborate event aimed at hawking extra dates to awed tourists (in fact, we seemed to be among the few tourists there).  There were booths from all over the region: Sudan, Libya, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and many others.  The dates at each booth had different tastes, textures, and even looked quite different (though they were all overpoweringly sweet).

Our favorite booth had an elaborate exhibit on date palm pests, and potential remedies. It was staffed by a jovial professor who plied us with what he proclaimed were especially special dates, and who (it turned out) occupied a date palm chair at a Saudi Arabian university.

Of course, there were some beautiful date pies...

 
...and even a palm with its trunk and soil made out of dates.

We may be date-saturated for the time being. But when we're ready for some more, we now know which grocery store stocks the best kinds. 

Polo at the Palace

We were advised to "say yes to everything" when we moved here, and the latest thing that came up was Coutts Polo at the Palace - Emirates Palace, that is, which of course isn't actually a palace but a lavish hotel.  

For a week before the event, we saw people setting up the field, tents and stands from our apartment, and even saw some of the action on the first day of the event.  But it was much more interesting up close.

Neither of us was too familiar with the rules of polo, and the rules for this series were tailored to its palatial venue. (Abu Dhabi seems to enjoy having their fancy things individualized -- even the designer stores carry special Abu Dhabi lines of merchandise.)  The matches were on smaller-than-usual fields, so play was three to a side, which made for plenty of open space but also a lot of chasing after the ball. The ball was more like a soccer ball than a traditional small, dense polo ball, which meant that long passes and shots almost always missed their mark. 

We picked all this up from the copious reading material that accompanied our entrance fees. But we were well versed enough to know that halftime was a chance to get on the field and replace divots!

At this event, halftime was also a time to go shopping for sports cars and real estate.

We won't go out of our way to make it to another polo match, but did enjoy hobnobbing with the Abu Dhabi glitterati and most of all, admiring the horses.  Next stop: camel racing!