Amber Palace

Amber Palace sits on a hill just outside of Jaipur. The palace is golden, not amber, and got its name through a complicated game of telephone we haven't sufficient memory to rehearse. 

We do know that it's a short elephant ride to the Palace entrance (and that we will likely not take up riding elephants as a past-time).

Amber Palace is part-palace, part-fort.  It reminded us of Karak, in Jordan -- definitely built to withstand a marauding army, but also designed with the pleasures of life in mind.  And maybe a touch of Abu Dhabi as well -- there was a beautiful garden on a man-made island in a man-made lake for the lucky residents to enjoy.

Agra Fort

Food is not allowed at Agra Fort, for fear that monkeys will congregate. Monkeys still congregate, but they concentrate on the entrance, where food is confiscated. This monkey is about to make off with some chips -- a feat of athleticism that stopped the crowd in amazement.

The rest of the fort is pretty amazing, too.

Shah Jehan spent his last few years here, locked up after his (least favorite) son took charge. He could see the Taj Mehal in the distance....

...wander through beautiful white marble rooms....

                               

....and gaze at the blue sky, framed by the red of his wonderful fort.

We don't know how he felt about it, but for us, Agra Fort is heart-wrenchingly beautiful. 

Happy National Day (43rd edition)

It seems like it was only yesterday that the UAE turned 42.  This year, we enjoyed National Day abroad, but still had plenty of time to take in the lavish decorations.

On the way to the airport very early (or very late, depending on one's schedule) on National Day, two Emiratis pulled up to us and asked, "it is our National Day -- are you happy?"  We said yes -- but didn't tell them it was partly because we were about to escape the impending madness.

Happy Halloween!

We spent ours at a game night, hosted by a witch and a self-proclaimed "skillington."

We had to leave early, though. There was an aquathlon at Emirate's Palace the next day: an event we've been waiting for since we first laid eyes on Emirate's Palace.

Here we are, first-time aqua-thletes, victorious....

....and fueled by pie.

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...

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!

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.