Live in Abu Dhabi long enough, and you lose the “sense of weather” that might serve you well in most of the rest of the world. Waking up, this morning, looking out the window … and it’s quite dark, even at 8 a.m. Let’s run down what that might mean, in Abu Dhabi.

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Well, OK. Make it a 9.8. That fifth snowflake didn’t bloom into a ring, early in the show. Mechanical malfunction of some sort. But otherwise, the Russians did well tonight with Opening Ceremonies for the 2014 Winter Olympics. Which came as a bit of a surprise, given the battering (see @Sochiproblems) Sochi 2014 had taken […]

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Does this work? Really? People get jobs using these methods? Every day, here at The National in Abu Dhabi, we get unsolicited resumes (CVs, in the British parlance) from people who have no idea to whom they are sending them. Often, they are littered with typos and misspellings. We get engineers asking to match them […]

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It’s not just Americans who have an unhealthy attachment to McDonald’s. Anyone who has traveled has found the golden arches in the unlikeliest of places. The McDonald’s on the Champs Elysees, in Paris, tops my list of “unlikely locations” for the brand. But the French do not feast on McDonald’s. Not like people do in […]

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I look forward to two more-or-less regularly scheduled social events each year in Abu Dhabi. 1. The staff party on the anniversary of the founding of The National newspaper. 2. The birthday party of a spouse of one of the newspaper staff. The latter was held tonight, and as usual it brought together an agreeable […]

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We are our own revisionists. What we know now as fact is something we would not have espoused a few years or months or weeks ago. We change our minds a lot; we don’t always remember we have done so. This is a particular problem for sports journalists. Given long enough, we embrace every side […]

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Not sure I’ve ever given an idea of what it is like for a sports writer to cover a soccer game, here in the UAE. Some of it will seem familiar to American journos. But some of it is not at all similar to your experience in a U.S. press box — from being served […]

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International orchestras play concerts in Abu Dhabi about once a year. During the Abu Dhabi Festival. Today was that one day, and we were happy to drive up to Emirates Palace and watch/listen to the Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra. From Venezuela. For those of us who appreciate classical music but prefer pieces with some recognition […]

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Big stir here, over the new soccer stadium in Al Ain. A three-day festival, a lot of pomp and ceremony, lots of conversation about how spectacular the Hazza bin Zayed Stadium is. And it is. It’s quite nice. Fairly striking, from the outside (artist’s rendering, above), when it is lit up with Al Ain’s predominant […]

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Expats come and expats go, in the UAE. And especially in soccer. The South American or African introduced amid fanfare when a transfer window comes open … often is dumped a half-season later. It happens because UAE teams depend so heavily on foreigners to score goals, and goal scoring is such an easily measured number. […]

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