The UAE football team that won in Tashkent and clinched a place in the 2012 London Olympics … The president of the country, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed, today awarded each player with 500,000 dirhams. Which converts to $136,000. Which is real money for winning a match you already really wanted to win.

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This is so UAE. You arrive at the office and a discussion ensues about whether it rained last night … or did not. And each side can make plausible arguments. “Rain” being a word we use here to describe any descent of water from the skies. Even the briefest and most inoffensive. And nearly unnoticeable. […]

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I now have an idea of how ridiculous I must have sounded. A couple of years ago, early in my time in the UAE and at The National, I asked a co-worker of Indian origin whether Major League Baseball ought to make a push to penetrate the India market. India is nuts about cricket, and […]

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The UAE and the Gulf are not always dead-serious places, which seems to be their global reputation. Out and about, you see people smiling and laughing. The idea of a professional comedian is, however, a fairly exotic one in these parts. Which in part explains why we went to see a Canadian-Indian comedian named Russell […]

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We have had a bit of a debate in the pages of The National over the past few days about the future of expatriates in the developing world. Those of us who are, in fact, expats have paid close attention to the discussion, and I will refer to it in today’s post, as well as […]

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This is a very big development for the tourist board in my hometown — Long Beach, California. The New York Times, easily the most relevant newspaper in the country … and possibly the most significant in the world … has included Long Beach in its “36 Hours” travel series, in a story posted this past […]

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As a Baby Boomer whose life was heavily influenced by the Cold War, I wanted to go to Moscow before the Soviets went out of business. But events conspired to keep it from happening. I was to have gone to the 1980 Moscow Olympics, but then came the U.S.-led boycott over Afghanistan (them, again), and […]

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It wasn’t the worst example of me leaving behind something important in a cab. But it is in the discussion. A few months ago, I left my wallet in the cab driven by our regular guy, Leonard. That made for a few minutes of panic before we got him on the phone and he said, […]

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To work in a British-English newsroom, like The National, is to regularly hear expressions unknown in the United States. One of the handier is “minus-one,” used when referring to media activities on the eve of a match. That is, it’s about the match, but “minus-one” day on the calendar. It is when coaches come out […]

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Yes. I am in Tashkent. As in “Uzbekistan, capital of.” The places that the game of soccer can take a person! It may be the greatest gig in sports writing. A “dateline” is what American journalists call the name of a city/town (and sometimes its country) that is placed at the very start of a […]

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