Desert Island Adventure

Yesterday morning, we bicycled by several male giraffes -- very slowly. I shudder to think what we would have done if they'd startled. A few minutes later (before some "technical" mountain biking that unseated both of us) we paused, breathless, twenty feet away from a napping cheetah. No fence between us. And then a field of running oryx. A leaping Indian gazelle crossed our path. She was stunning.



We went to Sir Bani Yas Island last weekend for an adventure - not our usual sort of adventure, since we rarely visit parks stuffed with dubiously assorted exotic animals. But an adventure we got.








Sir Bani Yas, about a three hour drive from Abu Dhabi, used to be connected to the mainland, and is now divided from the Emirate by a thin stretch of shallow water. It's covered in volcanic rock and barren sand formations -- a bit inhospitable, it would seem, but it's been settled for quite some time. On one end of the island, there are ruins of a Christian monastery from 600 AD under excavation.


Now the island is part of the UAE greening project, which pumps a mind-boggling amount of desalinated water all over the emirate. Most of Sir Bani Yas is irrigated, and trees (including orange, olive, and date palm, which grow produce served in the hotel's restaurants) grow in neat rows. There is even a faux savannah area, where the grass grows in long tufts.

The hotel is in between the ocean, and a large, shallow pond dotted with mangroves, and (much to Nick's delight) flamingos.



Apparently the lesser flamingo (the sort at Bani Yas) get pink in proportion to the amount of shrimp they eat! Ours looked pretty happy.

Sand gazelle and mountain gazelle roam the island. (As does the hydrex, closest living relative of the elephant, and eerily similar to the Ewok. We spotted trees full of them on our morning runs, but have no pictures to prove it.)

We interrupted a huge herd of sand gazelles peacefully munching on our first morning run.



Peacocks also run around, making noises that reminded us uncomfortably of the cheetahs we'd read about.



We would see the cheetahs in good time. In the interior of the island lies a huge, fenced park, where five cheetahs live, along with many herds of sand gazelle and other tasty cheetah-treats.

On our first morning, we went for a drive through the park in almost comical safari vans.

We forgot about how silly we felt in the van when we arrived at a large area where sand gazelle, Indian bucks with funny, twisty horns, oryx, and various birds (Egyptian geese, African crowned crane, more peacocks).

We saw a male ostrich strutting....

...another one motionless, all by himself, in the middle of the desert...


























...a crazy looking bird called a crowned crane...



...and giraffes fighting, swinging their necks at each other.

And oryx, which used to be all but extinct in the wild. Breeding programs in the UAE have restored the oryx population significantly. (Our guide who brought us so close to the sleeping cheetah said he was more afraid of oryx than anything else in the park - apparently they are pretty grumpy.)

Very importantly, we saw a breed of Moroccan sheep that we think might do very well in in St. Meinrad. These guys can stand up to fight, and to eat leaves from the trees.

On our way back, baby reef sharks were playing in the shallows. They were quite visible (and terrifyingly many!) when we took this picture - you can pick out three at the bottom right.

It was lovely exploring the island.

As usual in Abu Dhabi, we were confronted by a peculiar mix of good intentions, curious result, and massive expenditure. The irrigation alone must have stunning logistics...and cost...behind it. Animals don't all belong together, and they aren't all from the Arabian peninsula. Some are gifts from other nations (we wish someone would give the park some camels!), brought in by helicopter or military plane. (Transporting a giraffe somewhere is incredibly hard, apparently, because they have such high blood pressure that putting their heads down is quite risky.) As usual, we find these antics comical, endearing, and eyebrow-raising all at once.

But we enjoyed the rocks, the beach, and the sunset with unadulterated pleasure.

Christmas in Italy: Rome in pictures

We tried out our pizza skills.... 

...our yoga poses... 

...and our honesty. 

We ran on the Appian way almost every day. And down by the river. And around Circus Maximus,and up to orange-grove garden views of the city on the Aventine Hill.

We looked up. And up, and up again. At the ceiling of the Pantheon at freezing-cold midnight mass....

At looming buildings and columns and obelisks of all descriptions (here is St. Giovanni, near our apartment. Lots of popes hanging out on the roof)....

At lights on Via del Corso...

....at meat displays....

And (sometimes) at oddly-placed door knockers....

The excitement was a lot to handle.

We found wrong churches, Christmas organ recitals, hidden squares....

....and favorite frescoes, populated with sea monsters.

We gawked lazily at vistas of the city, glad to take a rest.

  There were other vistas, too. Here, of pastries.

And here, of pastas....

Merry (late) Christmas!

Christmas in Italy: Florence

Florence is a golden city. Honey golden. A potter we met (whose nook of a studio sent Margaret dreaming of leaving grad school and moving to Florence) told us that this was one of the first colors used on ceramics in the region.

We stayed at a lovely, peaceful apartment near Ponte Vecchio, an above-ground piece of the enclosed passageway that the Medicis constructed in order to reach the Uffizi. We discovered that we had to reach the museum outdoors.........but it was lovely outside.

And just about as cold inside! Here is Nick, wearing his coat for the first time in months.

We spent a good deal of time craning our necks, looking up: at ceiling frescoes, at the gorgeous blue sky, at the hillside. Here Margaret is, looking the wrong way - she had been searching for what Michaelangelo called the Gates of Paradise the whole trip.

Found them.

We got a chance to rest our weary necks with a lesson in pizza and gelato making, which has radically changed our philosophy of pizza. Here we are, being converted.

We loved being outside in the clear, crisp cold, surrounded by our beautiful golden city. At Palazzo Pitti....on our morning runs up into the hills and down by the river....

we stumbled upon beautiful nooks and hidden surprises: delightfully rotund statues....

Solemn, grand statues....

....film projections onto a church....

 ....a sudden glimpse of the soft, rolling hills of Tuscany.

We wandered, were chilly, and took frequent breaks in search of hot drinks and hot pizza.

24 Hours in Doha

While Margaret was enjoying the Polar Vortex in the US, I decided to go on a solo mission to Doha. Doha is not a top tourist destination (not until the World Cup arrives in 2022, at least); the trip was largely prompted by a desire to see the controversial Damien Hirst exhibit and the Islamic Art Museum.

I arrived on a Friday evening, and made my way to Souq Waqif for a bite and a taste of Qatari nightlife. Locals call Souq Waqif the "new souq" -- it was built about two years ago next to the "old souq" -- but it has a traditional feel.  Most of the shops have hand-made crafts, all the buildings are one or two stories, and like all places in the Middle East, it is impossible not to lose one's bearings.  

When I arrived, the souq was bustling and Qatari women were singing as they made their way through the alleys.

 There was a row of restaurants, a mix of fancy sit down places and shisha cafes.

I chose the most street food-y place I could find. It had a menu in Arabic, accompanied by the transliteration of the menu into Latin characters, which didn't help a whole lot.  But thankfully, one can order by going back into the kitchen, where there are big toughs of food, and pointing.  I ended up with chicken curry and a savory lamb bread pudding.  Tasty!  I ate with a British man who had moved to Doha a week ago to work on the new zoo.  He'd already had some interesting experiences...

The next day, after a rainy run along Doha's Al Corniche, I went to the Islamic Art Museum.  The museum is at least as famous for the building (designed by I.M. Pei) as for its collection.  Both are spectacular.  The museum's exterior is particularly beautiful when lit up at night.

The inside is spacious without being cavernous.

There was a room full of beautiful Korans.  The doors on the right are covered in Arabic.

And they love their falcons just as much in Qatar as they do in the UAE.

Final stop was the Damien Hirst exhibit, conveniently next door to the Islamic Art Museum.  As expected, most of the art was very, very weird, some of it was stomach turning, but some things were exquisite.  My favorite were "butterfly paintings" meant to look like stained glass that were actually made out of butterfly wings.

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...