Food Truck Festival

Every year, Abu Dhabi has a food festival. This usually entails fancy chefs from around the world doubling their prices, and sending their underlings for a series of demos and shows. This year, a somewhat more interesting concept popped up: a food truck festival.  

Interesting, if only because Abu Dhabi only recently got its first food truck, which had been heavily featured the week before at an Emirati food festival, where our friend Julien famously ordered himself some food.

How to host a food truck festival without food trucks? Never fear. In Abu Dhabi, solutions to such piddling problems come (too) easily. Intrepid event planners brought in food trucks from around the world for a three week tour of its cities.  Trucks, staff, supplies, owners, and all.

The most exciting place we tried was a London truck selling "Bracos," i.e. British tacos, little bites with grilled halloumi, blackberry salsa, and slaw.  

It didn't touch the greatest food truck, but it did hit the spot. 

As night fell, and the festival's lights began to glow, we couldn't help but think of Lake Merritt....another beautiful spot, where food truck festivals make slightly better sense.

Art Galleries Abu Dhabi

It rained this year for the annual Art Fair, and the tents that the emirate had planned to use for the art displays proved too leaky. We weren't planning to go anyway - the whole thing sounded so small, especially in a city where both the Louvre and the Guggenheim (below) are growing closer to opening every day.


But as we look at the slow-moving construction sites on Saadiyat Island, we realize that an art fair might have been a nice thing to write into our calendars, leaky tents or no. We have seen precious few representations here not featuring falcons, Emirati leaders, horses, or combinations of the three. (Our apartment excluded, of course, where Kazhia Kolb reigns supreme.)

So we were glad to discover Art Hub, a gallery/cafe/studio space where the art on display is various and interesting. And for sale....at pretty exorbitant prices. They can afford to be -- they are pretty much the only show in town.



Art Hub is in Mussafeh Industrial Area, where Margaret has been lost twice....alone, and traumatically. Expat circles speak of finding places in Mussafeh in hushed tones, and advise that anyone venturing there bring a buddy - not because it's dangerous, but because street signs are inscrutable, roads end suddenly, and pedestrians hop in and out of the highways with reckless abandon, sometimes wielding bicycles. So we were glad to find Art Hub after being lost only once.


We saw shadow puppets....

....many rooms full of big oils.....



...and some curiously appealing paintings of sky scrapers, despite (or perhaps because of?) their eerie colors.

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.

Coconut Island Kayak

Nick has a crush on an island. It is a little, almost uninhabited island that was dredged from the Gulf. (This is a frequent practice here - Bahrain has expanded by 10% via dredging - and an environmental problem, as it's bad for the corals in the Gulf, which have been shrinking drastically in the last few decades). 

Almost uninhabited. There is one mansion there, amid the undeveloped sand.

The island was supposed to be a luxury resort, we learned via "the Google." But the Internets haven't quite kept up to speed on why the luxury resort hasn't happened yet. What we have found are articles from 2008, 2009, and 2010 that gleefully proclaim the island's completion by 2010. We also found claims that the island is "rightfully named so because it has many coconut palms." False. 

And there is no Ritz Carlton Luxury Hotel, and no discernible labor is going on. So the poor man on the island must be very lonely. This is his view:

And this is his rubble-strewn beach. Yes, we kayaked there, despite our fears that a man living alone on an island in Abu Dhabi might be a little xenophobic, and possibly well-armed. We didn't land on his dock, at least. 

If you come to Abu Dhabi, we probably will not take you to Coconut Island. But we will take you where we ate afterwards - the Lebanese Flower, where banana smoothies are to die for, and the falafel sandwich costs a little more than a dollar.