got gas?

Just a quick post on a bit of everyday life: fueling up. The price for gas, or petrol as it’s often called here, is cheap. It’s quite the story problem to calculate, converting liters to gallons and dirham to dollars but I think I figured out that it hovers around $2 per gallon. What was it when I was in the US last summer? About $4 per gallon? Despite the great prices in the UAE, we still suffer a little pain at the pump. Here, the problem is the lines. All stations in the UAE are full service stations, there is no pump-your-own choice. The pumps tend to look like they were installed in the 1970s but that’s unlikely as most of the stations I visit probably didn’t exist in the 70s. Heck, the road that the station is on might not have existed in the 70s. But still, slow, non-digital pumps without credit card readers are the norm in this otherwise tech-mad environment. Turns out, the vast majority of cars have the gas tank on the driver’s side. And these old style pumps have short hoses that will only reach the tank on the near side of the car. And the station flow of traffic is very regulated, no flipping a u turn to come at the pumps from the other side, everyone must enter one direction and drive through in the same direction. So those lucky so and sos with a gas tank on the passenger side rarely have a wait while those of us in the big majority sit in a line, waiting while the digits on the pump slowly flip to fill the tanks of the other half dozen people ahead of us…

gas lines

Critters

baby mynah fueling up before flying lessons

During my first week of work at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, I was chatting excitedly with the Provost about having seen a real live moose in the woods while hiking the weekend before. He was kind enough not to roll his eyes at me, but as  I learned later, moose were regulars at his place in Park City. They were pesky eaters of young trees and would wander into garages in his neighborhood.

I've seen people in parks take dozens of pictures of chipmunks, the same little rodents that my mom catches in a trap to release across town to try to mitigate the damage they do burrowing up the lawn.

It's funny how the critters you see all the time in a place can start to become less impressive.It hasn't happened here yet though!  Much like in the desert around Las Vegas, wildlife sightings here are a little less ubiquitous and still exciting and impressive.

Birds are by far the animals I see the most of. There are the pigeons and- one time a baby mynah and parents- on my 14th floor window sill, the flamingos In Ras Al Khor (translates, I think, to Head of the Creek)

Ras al Khor flamingos

that I pass on the way to/ from work everyday and the fantastic variety that I see on the ZU grounds. In he courtyard there are little white cheeked bulbuls with bright yellow or red under-bums. On the lawns at the entrance I often see water birds like white egrets or along the sandy road side, little chukkar-like game birds. Every now and again I see this crazy awesome bird strutting around on the ground. It looks a bit like a woodpecker but apparently it's a hoopoe- and instead of pecking at trees/ wood, it pokes its beak into the ground to pull up tasty insects, and if they're a little large to swallow, it bashes them against the ground or a

must confess, not my photo, but a great shot of the hoopoe

rock to knock off wings or legs. I just love how dramatic its crown and coloring. Apparently they can spread open those crown feathers in a fan- got to catch that kind of preening at some point!

A few weekends ago, Michelle and Layla and I went to the Arabian Wildlife Center in Sharjah Desert Park to learn what other critters are in the area. This place was great- it's an indoor zoo! In a climate like this, what a concept. And it was surprisingly large and also had a very modest entry fee for the whole Desert Park which also includes a Natural History Museum, a petting zoo and a botanical museum- but the Wildlife Center was the star attraction. I figured being indoors there'd mostly be rodents and reptiles-
which they did have plenty of! But they also had wild cats of various types and sizes, even a cheetah (the cheetah was outside, but we viewed it from inside), and jackals and foxes, porcupines and bats, an aviary room, some ungulates (mostly oryx- also outside), an Arabian wolf, orangutangs and a little cafe. All the animals at the center can be found (or could be found before they were hunted to local extinction) on the Arabian peninsula. The sheer variety of subspecies of gerbils was pretty staggering. My favorite reptile was this weird creature called the Sandfish (or scincus scincus for the biologist types) that burrows, or swims under the surface of the sand, we weren't allowed to take photos in the wildlife center, sadly, but you can see a really quick video of one diving under the sand here: http://youtu.be/d4hEhgosKfg 

As it starts to cool off and I get to do more camping, I'm guessing I might spot a few of the reptiles, rodents and insects we saw at the wildlife center. On my one overnight in the Abu Dhabi desert so far, I didn't run into anything but in the morning, it was clear they'd been around!

camping: morning after tracks. gerbil?

Travel Happens

Before I moved to Dubai I read the blogs of several strangers and acquaintances. I always skimmed or skipped over the bits when they wrote about their holidays in Istanbul or Washington DC, their visits to Petra and the Taj Mahal. I didn't want travelogues, I wanted day-to-day-life-logues. I've got to admit, however, that travel really IS day to day life here for many, including me. I've already blogged about my travels to Muscat and Socotra Island, so far I've let the Doha and Beirut trips pass without writing but I'll partway remedy that with this post, but first, a word on my first trip back to the US.

I won't detail my itinerary, many of you readers got to enjoy part of it with me. Suffice to say I was lucky enough to do a full western US ramble with camping, friends and family, exquisite slot canyons and neighborhood BBQ, geysers and kayaks, ferris wheels, neon and mountain picnics, oh my! And I got to laze away another chunk of time in the Midwest: beaches and berries, more family, all manner of farm critters and sweet corn and pork! There was shopping more familiar sizes and less rhinestone covered shoes, stocking up on Trader Joe's treats and random OTC meds. There was, most of all, a sense of comfort that is still lacking in the UAE. I'll get there, I think, but now, doing the business of living- things like grocery shopping and finding an address- is still not entirely normal. But I'm figuring it all out, little by little. I've got the art of the weekend trip in hand and have been checking out regional cities, north and south, east and west of here.

empty airport

performing arts venue

Back in May, I went to Doha, Qatar to visit my friend Carol who is library director for VCU's campus there. We flew into Doha's shiny new, slightly unfinished airport. We were the only plane on the many runways, the only passengers in the very high tech, top of the line passport control lines. This experience set the tone for the rest of the weekend for me. My overall impression of Doha is that it is
still becoming... We visited a gorgeous cultural village with a Coloseum-like performing arts venue and well laid out art galleries. It was a ghost town. We went to an intimate jazz club for a show by

Carol's view with dirt island

world class musicians and the very small room didn't fill. Carol has an apartment on an island complex with a fantastic balcony view of a man made harbor full of yachts and a funny dirt island that is rumored to be the site of a future low rise, high cost hotel but for now is nothing, unused, gated off. Walking around the shopping arcades on the ground level of Carol's building we saw dueling luxury car dealers (was it Maserati and Porsche?), some haute couture, and a lot of empty spaces, available for lease.

There seems to be an interest from Qatar's ruling family to make Doha a center for arts in the region and some of the investment toward this

Museum of Islamic Art

goal is remarkable. The Museum of Islamic Art had cool collections, a great gift shop, and was housed in a striking building designed by I.M. Pei. We took a ride out into the desert to see an installation piece by Richard Serra that is massive in scale is is only one of several of his pieces in Qatar. The artworks, the jazz, the cultural village and more... there's this investment of money, but they seem to be still teetering on the brink of the whole "if you build it, they will come" phenomena. Will "they" come? And who is the target anyhow? Qataris? Ex-pats? I couldn't get a handle on it. I liked Doha, other than some crappy traffic problems, it seemed very live-able. I found it lovely to look at, well done from a design stand point, but maybe lacking in a little liveliness or spark. Maybe still poised for full launch, with just one

Serra's piece in the desert

airline on the runway for now....

all that glitters...

A colleague and I took a chance on a groupon for gold facials, it seemed a very Dubai kind of thing, super bling. The photo with the groupon made it especially temping. But it was a groupon after all and we paid less than $20 and it was at a place called the Boutique Beauty Saloon, nope, not a typo on my part, not Salon, Saloon, in the Al Karama neighborhood. Karama being known mostly for its sprawling market selling knockoff designer handbags and watches. More on that in a bit, suffice it to say, we headed off for the facial knowing it was likely to be a bit of an adventure.

picture from ad for the facial

It's hot now. Really, really stinkin' hot and the humidity makes it unrelenting. Actual temperatures are reported as only right around 100-105 F but with 60-70% humidity even a breeze or moving into the shade doesn't provide that much relief.

[A quick side note on measurements: I'm doing well with the miles to kilometer conversions and I love my weight in kilos! But I can't get my brain around the Fahrenheit to Celsius thing. Just a few degrees difference in Celsius converts to bigger differences in Fahrenheit- or bigger differences in my perception of how hot it is at least. It seems to me that since I came in December, I've experienced highs between 75 and 105 F but I swear, on the radio they've only reported highs between 28 - 38 C. I hear that there's some general agreement toward rounding down the high temps in the broadcast media...]

entering the Saloon

do we look golden?

So it's only a block or so walk from the metro station to the Saloon, however, we turn it into a bit more of a walk because there are no addresses here, things are described as being near other things and if you can't spot those other things easily... anyhow, we arrived dripping sweat at the weird little hole in the wall that was our destination. The staff handed us elastic waisted skirts that we were supposed to put on hitched up under our armpits instead of our tops and we were herded into a room with an unused pedicure station and no door to change. OK, now on to the treatment room which consisted of a couple of massage tables draped with plastic and a contraption on wheels that was combo steam wand, lighted mirror, make up table. A little low on the whole spa atmosphere and vibe. The Saloon ladies were pleasant and really, so was the facial, if a little goopy (the facial, not the ladies.) Lots of products applied and massaged (nice massage techniques employed, pressure points and all of that) into our skin, wiped off, and steamed in. They used ice used to cool down the application of some products. Finally the gold! Which was a peel off mask. We took many selfies as the mask dried, hoping to capture that golden bling look but we mostly just looked shiny and slick with goo with maybe a touch of sparkle or jaundice, depending on the angle. At least wearing the armpit skirt thing gave our shirts a good chance to dry before heading back out into the soup.

Next it was off to the Karama market. A little more aimless wandering through blocks of low rise apartment buildings with lots of laundry on balconies and dripping aircon units hanging out over the sidewalks. Very different from the sleek glass and metal highrises where I live or the walled suburban villas of Mirdiff where Sarah lives. We knew we were getting close to the market area as we were approached by guys offering "handbags? watches? Coach? Louis Vuitton? sunglasses?" I learned last week at DragonMart about how there are knockoffs and then there are knockoffs. How the really good fakes are not on display in stores but are stashed in nearby apartments because selling fakes that real is not totally legal. It was way too hot to consider a foray off to some apartment storehouse and I wasn't energetic enough for the haggle and game and process involved in finding a great fake today. Another time. [Another quick side note, this time on safety: people think "oh scary Middle East" when they hear you're living in a Gulf country but I swear, the biggest danger about life in Dubai is the danger

i had ice cream with unidentifiable fruit. wikipedia tells me it's sapodilla

of getting fat from brunches and inactivity and of growing too accustomed to cheap housekeeping services. It's not really dodgy to head off to random apartments, or to walk through lower income housing blocks alone. In some places you might get stared at, but personal crime is remarkably low and if the newspapers are any indication, most violent crime takes place in the home between husbands and wives or maids and employers.] We shopped a few souvenir joints and browsed some others mostly for the AC in the shops before decided we had to go try to find (more confused wandering, this time down an alley that required a scramble over a small wall) an Indian ice cream place I'd heard of in Karama near Burjuman Center. Flavours is a little shop selling tasty and unusual ice cream, I had two scoops of ice cream with names and tastes I couldn't really identify: rajbhog (which when searched in google generates links to several sweet shops or companies making sweets and pictures of fried Indian dough balls in syrup but, in ice cream, tasted a bit of saffron) and chicky chikoo (which featured chiku which seems to be a fruit called sapodilla but tasted of dates or raisins.) We agreed, Karama would make a great neighborhood for a longer wander in cooler weather but that this sweaty adventure was a good preview!

carpets!

I moved to the middle east with a little Arabic carpet buying experience under my belt from travels in Morocco, Turkey and Jordan and I knew that being here in the middle of the Arabian peninsula, I'd be feeding a lovely, if sometimes spendy, addiction with some regularity. And so it has come to pass that in the 6 months I've been here I've purchased 9 carpets! Two were gifts and one is only borderline considered a carpet- I currently have it on my dining room table- it's a delicate little embroidered thing that won't really spend time on my floor.

souk is 2 buildings connected by bridges

I've purchased the vast majority of these from a great Yemeni vendor named Rashed who operates the Sheeba Iranian Carpets shops in Sharjah's Blue Souk. It's good to have a carpet guy. And it's good for the carpet guy to have us- a handful of expat shoppers with friends and colleagues we'll bring along for the experience of buying. And it IS an experience.

gold shop window

The Blue Souk is a pretty building designed in an older style, plunked down in modern Sharjah (the Emirate/city just to the north of Dubai.) It's featured on the five dirham currency note. Carpet shops abound there, as do shops for pashminas, souvenirs and gold. The carpet shops hang beautiful knotted carpets, often in silk or sometimes wool, with fantastically intricate patterns in all colors. The hanging carpets conceal tall stacks of folded and rolled inventory which doesn't stay hidden for long when shoppers come looking.

We arrived fairly close to opening on a recent Saturday, around 10AM. I'd called to let Rashed know we were coming so he was there to greet us. These things start out a little slow... we sit, are offered a

knotted wool

tea or water or soda, we start talking about what we might be looking for in terms of size, style or color and then the rugs start flying. Over the course of a few hours 2-4 people look at dozens of rugs, I should keep count some time, I wouldn't be shocked to learn we'd looked at over 100 rugs, over 200. Some it's easy to say, "No, not that." Others get draped around the sides of the room as "maybes" for awhile, sometimes later being taken down and put in a "no" pile, sometimes getting buried under other, more likely "maybes". Meanwhile, on the floor, the piles get thicker. This last visit we started with knotted wool carpets and I had a couple of strong contenders draped on the sides. Then Rashed suggested we consider some kilim (woven wool) or hybrids with carpet and kilim in one rug. I found the one, or OK, I guess the two, among those selections.

Rashed standing on a hybrid maybe that became yes

While we were there, a couple from Europe came in. They were interested in some of the larger, finely done, knotted silk carpets. We were waiting on a guy to come back from the remote storage with a few carpets featuring a certain shade of blue and so we sat around and watched a bit of their carpet shopping as well. The colors on the silks are so amazingly rich and the designs so delicate. Also, it's really lovely to walk around barefoot on the silks. The wools are quite pleasant as well, don't get me wrong. Actually, my last trip to Rashed's netted me the rug under my dining room table which is a lovely soft soft wool taken from the necks of camels!

Carpets selected, deals made, extras (like getting a channel of cloth sewn on for hanging smaller carpets on a rod) negotiated and it was already lunchtime. Rashed invited us, the European couple, another random American guy who hangs out at the shop now and again, and an Irish woman who does a little PR work with him out for lunch

the silks

at a traditional sit-on-the-floor Arabic place. It was fabulous and it's just that kind of impromptu and deeply ingrained hospitality that makes me love the people of this region. Yeah, there's commerce and good business sense in building relationships with repeat customers who bring others in but there's something else too. Just a genuine sense, I think, that it's a pleasure doing business together.

lunch

all carpets require the butternut seal of approval

Experiencial eating

Turns out I have more to say about food. Excessive quantities of food in particular. A few months ago I experienced my first Friday Brunch, thought I'd wait until I finished digesting to write about it. Kidding.... mostly.

dubai landmarks in chocolate

Fridays here are like Sundays in Utah (and perhaps the whole of the south excepting New Orleans), many things are closed all morning and the devout are praying or visiting their place of worship. An enterprising hotelier spotted a market among the aimless non-Muslim expats- just add vodka and Brunch was born. This is Brunch with a capital B for Booze. Most brunches get started around noon and go until 4PM. It's not like in the US where you might make a reservation for 2PM while the brunch buffet is on offer, instead you make a reservation for brunch and it's assumed you'll arrive around noon and stay until they're rolling the carts away and rolling you out the door at 4. Brunch packages come in 2 or 3 sizes. There's brunch with soft drinks which, I think, has grown away from the original intention of having a little "forbidden" entertainment while the believers were stuck at mosque, but in any case, that's always one option. Then there's frequently a beer and wine and sometimes "house spirits", what might be called "well drinks" at bars in the US , package for a bit more. Lastly, some places have the "free flowing bubbly" package which, as the name suggests, includes champagne. We're typically talking about prices in the $70-$100 range for option 1, option 2 might run $85 -$150, option 3 rarely comes

in under $100 and could go to staggering heights at the truly swank and experiential places. (Experiential as in "you need to experience this at least once in your life".) It seems extravagant but then you start thinking about what a single glass of wine or mixed drink costs and multiply that time 4 hours worth and add food, a lot of food and...

The brunch I tried- at the Sheraton at the Mall of the Emirates- bragged about its chocolate room- and for good reason. You walk through the chocolate room on your way to being seated and the aroma was out of this world. They had chocolate sculptures, petite fours, bon bons, brownies, truffles, cake pops, a chocolate fountain, tiramisu... They also were pouring a pleasant lavender tea but with a floater of dry ice smoke that somehow smelled of chocolate. You'd "drink" the smell first as the smoke dissipated and then there was just tea. The non-chocolate food of the brunch was hit or miss: grilled lamb was tender and juicy but I was underwhelmed by the sushi selection, the tandoori chicken was a little dry but there was a nice calamari salad... it wasn't especially remarkable food, but solid. Except the chocolate. We went with the mid-range drinks selection- more than soda, less than champagne and I surely drank mojitos enough to justify the bill. Headed out around 4PM to float home on the metro but was sidetracked by a home store where I impulse bought a bedspread that I later returned. Note to self: don't make decorating decisions while under the influence of brunch with chocolate room. I'll brunch again, I'm sure, but I think not so often. Not healthy for waistline, liver or pocketbook!

Had another experience in indulgent eating just this past weekend. A co-worker and her family took me out for Egyptian food. They called it lunch but it was more like all three meals for one day rolled into one plus all of your needed caloric intake for half the next day. Oof. Tasty and interesting food!

We went to a restaurant call Hadoota Masreya not too far from my house. I let them order whatever they thought was best. We began with kaware soup which tasted a lot like a chicken noodle style broth but had stuff in it that might have been softened bones or cartilage? They described it as a gelatine soup good for joint pain and I've found one online reference to something similar where the bones are boiled and softened with vinegar. I don't actually know what precisely I ate, but it was pretty good if a little disconcerting. There was also a Karob juice drink that reminded me of tamarind but was different. Maybe my favorite was the pigeon stuffed with wheat (had the mouth feel of couscous) and herbs and spices then fried crisp. yum. there was also a green herby soup called molokheyyah served over a baked rice made with milk instead of water and with tender lamb chunks baked in it, little turkish style lamb sausages, puffy bread, yogurt dip, and 2 desserts. One, considered a national dish and described by Ahmed as more of a symphony than a dish, was Umm Ali (Ali's mother) and it was a kind of pistachio bread pudding-like concoction which was so wonderful, the only thing that could convince to eat one more bite, the flavor of that dessert! wow. my performance at cleaning my plate of all the dishes served was only mediocre. My hosts, even skinny little Shaimaa, ate as though this were a normal quantity of food, they described it as more of a taster menu, actually!

What's for dinner?

A few words on a favorite topic: food! One of the ways I love to interact with different cultures is to try local and traditional meals and ingredients. The manti (tiny lamb ravioli in a slightly spiced yoghurt sauce) at the Panorama Cafe in Cappadocia, Turkey lives large in my memory of the place. Or the very tender but disturbingly bony guinea pig enjoyed in Cuzco, Peru before hiking the Inca trail! The limoncello of the Amalfi coast, melon from Green River, UT, the polsen (hot dogs) with snappy casings and smart pocket shaped buns bought late at night from street vendors in Copenhagen. Food and place become intimately connected.

So what am I eating here? Subway. Pizza. Quesadillas.

At the culture lunch before everyone dived in

OK, it's not quite so consistently sad as that, but it is actually a bit of a challenge to identify and enjoy the local cuisine. When Andrea visited we went to the Sheik Mohammed Center for Cultural Understanding to a "culture lunch" with traditional foods and the chance to ask questions and have an open dialogue with the staff about all things related to the Emirates. (It was a must-do introduction, very nice experience.) We had dishes of rice and chicken, rice and lamb, a layered veggie dish in what was essentially a bechamel sauce. Rice was introduced to the emirates, possibly from India, certainly the spices and flavors of the rice-meat dishes are reminiscent of Indian biryanis. We had deep fried dough balls in date syrup for dessert. I think every culture has come upon the bright idea of frying dough! At work one of the staff brought a kind of crepe/ pancake that is considered a traditional breakfast food and I've enjoyed a camel meat burger and camel's milk chocolate and a

camel's milk shake

camel's milk shake. But essentially, the UAE, and especially Dubai, is, has been for most of its history, a place of international trade and culture swapping. A large variety of familiar and unfamiliar food is on offer at restaurants and in the grocery store. The international-ness of my diet is determined by my choices.

When I was living in the temp housing, the nearest grocery store was a big French chain called Carrefour. This particular branch always had tubs of moutabal in the deli. Moutabal is what we might call babaganoush, a smoky smashed eggplant dip. Babaganoush is also on menus here but it usually means a chunkier eggplant and tomato dish, more along the lines of a ratatouille. So I developed a slight addiction to moutabal with soft Lebanese bread. That was my dinner a few nights every week. Now the closest grocers don't seem to carry it so I'm at a loss.

I am having some fun trying to incorporate some of the interesting grocery options into my diet. I was planning to make tortilla roll ups for a potluck when I discovered that Philly cream cheese here comes in a sweet Thai chili flavor that is out of this world. I made tomato soup one day but was out of bread or croutons or crackers but I had some Indian snack mix on hand to make bhel puri and so I sprinkled these little crunchy lightly spicy rice puffs and potato crispies in the soup and it was awesome. I wanted to make the Italian sausage and tortellini soup recipe that Andrea gave me but Italian style sausage isn't super easy to find. A friend suggested I try this butcher shop near the bank metro stop (Prime Gourmet) and sure enough, they had Italian beef sausage AND they had a lamb rosemary sausage too so I went with half and half and it was amazing. Plus I found basil and pine nut tortellini which I haven't seen in the US before.

pizza hut delivery not so unusual, but dunkin donuts delivers too!

As for going out to eat, there is every chain restaurant known to man in town and they'll all deliver. I saw a Hardee's delivery guy in the elevator yesterday, a McDonald's delivery motorbike cut me off in traffic last week, there's a Subway at the Dubai campus of ZU and a Starbucks at the Abu Dhabi campus. I've eaten at celebrity chef Jaime Oliver's restaurant and had my birthday dinner at a Cuban/ Mexican place whose flagship location is in NYC. There's a Garrett's of Chicago popcorn shop at the Dubai Mall- I don't think you can get Garrett's outside of Chicago In the US, can you?

I got away from the chains and franchises last night though with a trip to Buq Tair aka the Jumeira fish place. Some guys from Kerala India go fish in the morning, rub the fresh catch with a lightly spicy rub/ sauce and then in the evening, fry up your choice in a converted shipping container and serve it to you on plastic picnic tables in the sand/ dirt outside. It's got quite the following these

we picked from the pile

days so there's a line out the door. You wait for your chance to get up to the counter and look at the tub of spice rubbed fish, heads on, tails on, the works. We went with a hamour and a sherri and half a kilo of shrimp. Then you go sit on some plastic stools and wait for them to call your name. When your fish and prawns are ready, they grab you a table, offer you some paratha (flat bread), some curry sauce, rice, drinks... that's about it for your "sides" options and then you dig in. Using fingers and bread. I

the orders go into a pan

found the shrimp to be especially addictive. We didn't eat the head but apparently the hardcore fans and Kerala locals do. So fresh and tasty! One of my favorite Dubai dining experiences so far.

they lightly fry it up in one of these wok-like things

our dinner- ready to dig in!