Why not? Those were the words from Kefah Al Kaabi, a TV and radio soccer pundit here in the UAE. The question was:

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When I left the new apartment today, the whole of the furniture was a comfy chair, a couch, an old coffee table and a couple of wicker chairs we put out on the balcony. When I got back?

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Having now moved into a tower of about 20 floors … this story has a bit more resonance with me on a personal level. A tower in one of the finest neighborhoods of the Dubai went up in flames, and it appears to be because of shoddy construction. Here is video of the 34-story building […]

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Moving and me. Until recently, it didn’t happen often. Until today it never happened without me doing much/most of the heavy lifting. There comes a time in life, however, when hauling couches around is probably not a good idea. Or renting a dolly to move those boxes of books. So, we decided to spend the […]

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If your average American were parachuted into the UAE, he or she would feel as if they had landed in a very alien place. (Which it isn’t, particularly, but that average American would need a month or three to grasp that.) But one cultural commonality would be recognizable and transferable almost immediately, especially if that […]

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I really don’t know how this works, but the UAE seems to have about a thousand major hotels. Big hotels. Name-brand hotels. They … are … everywhere. So this latest story about the UAE and hotel building? No surprise.

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We are moving. From a (mostly) furnished apartment to one without a stick of furniture. We will arrive there, then, wanting all the basics in place. Bed, mattress, wardrobe, wall unit, dining table, chairs and, given that both of us work five days a week, we would prefer to solve that in one day of […]

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It’s vaguely disconcerting to think you might be boarding an airline that will be out of existence in the near future. Because if the company is in financial peril, doesn’t it begin cutting corners on maintenance? This thought came to me in the shower the other day: How many airlines have I flown that no […]

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The Lakers hired Mike D’Antoni. He will be a far better coach than Mike Brown, who was driving the Lakers over a cliff. (Or abandoned the driver’s seat of the vehicle which subsequently was headed over a cliff. He never really seemed in charge, did he.) I like Mike D’Antoni. I am convinced he is […]

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We get these stories now and then. The ones about some astonishing number of men living in a small space, and an inspector catching them at it and fining the landlord. In this case, it was 20 men sharing a one-bedroom apartment in the Dubai International City neighorhood. How did they manage it?

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