The biggest sports competition in Europe is not the various soccer leagues, nor any of the tournaments within those leagues. It is the European Champions League. The competition that brings together the best clubs in the continent. Which I try to watch when I am particularly interested in a match. The trouble? This time of […]

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The UAE won the right to stage the 2019 Asian Cup on Monday … a tournament not well known in the rest of the world but a very big deal in Asia. Almost as big a deal to Asia as the African Cup of Nations is to Africa. Way bigger than North America’s generally limp […]

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Not much ties together these two stories, other than they appeared next to each other on the front page of The National today and seem to recurring themes, here in the UAE. A kid winning one million dirhams in a drawing in Dubai … and a lion being taken from a home in Sharjah.

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I got an email the other day from the L.A. Galaxy media department. “Postgame notes: L.A. Galaxy 2, Chicago Fire 0 – March 6, 2015” The Galaxy season opener, and a victory for the defending Major League Soccer champions. And it was then that I realized …

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I am fascinated by this topic. How do commercial airliners get from Point A to Point B when the shortest route takes them over politically unstable/openly hostile points C and D? They take evasive action. That’s how. For Etihad Airways, over the weekend, flying from Cyprus to Abu Dhabi apparently looked like this. And why […]

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So, on Cyprus Day 6, we headed back to Larnaca and the country’s “big” airport. Larnaca seems a world away from Limassol, but it is barely 60 miles. As the day developed, the temperatures moved into the high 60s. After overnight lows of about 52. A strong sun overhead, the placid Mediterranean Sea, dark blue […]

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You visit a country you like, that you find interesting, one that doesn’t seem too expensive, with a decent climate … What do you do? You consider living there. Especially if you are of a certain age. Such has been the case here in Cyprus after four days. Sun shining, hundreds of miles of seashore, […]

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Of all the things the British could have left behind, in Cyprus: The awful habit of driving on the left side of a street. Cyprus is one of four countries in Europe that has the driver on the right side of the car, and the car in the left lane. The other three?

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Nicosia is probably best known, among soccer fans, as the home of the Cypriot club Apoel, which made the quarterfinals of the 2011-12 Uefa Champions League. Among tourists, Nicosia probably is known for being the planet’s last divided capital city. A sort of post-Cold War Berlin Lite. Complete with passport scrutiny, a dead zone and […]

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This is not the best-planned vacation in the history of tourism. It hardly extended beyond “plane flights, rental car, hotel”. And figure out the rest on site. We knew the hotel was near Limassol, the second-biggest city in Cyprus, and we figured we would go over there sooner than later … but that was about […]

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