A secret I now will reveal. The final few days in Paris, when it had gotten rainy, and even darker … I was looking forward to getting back to Abu Dhabi. Seriously. My preference, there at the end, was to leave Paris … and go to Abu Dhabi. Yes. Seems a bit daft. But we […]

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At a recent soccer match in Dubai, I heard a young fan of the Al Ahli club launch into a tirade in Arabic that (I’m pretty sure ) was aimed at club executives. Ahli had just lost a match and isn’t having a good season. He carried on for quite some time, at a volume […]

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*-Written from the apartment in Abu Dhabi, where the weather today was sunny and in the low 80s. As usual, we will do this as a reverse countdown, “Late Show with David Letterman” style.

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I would still rather be in Paris than just about anywhere, but for those of us who live near the tropics, we do have one … oh, let’s call it mild complaint … about Paris in late November/early December. It’s dark. It’s also a bit cold. By Abu Dhabi/UAE standards, most definitely cold. Around 50 […]

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Now it can be told. We skipped right past any sort of celebration of Thanksgiving Day, in Abu Dhabi, because we were hoping to pull together something in Paris two days later. Yes, it is possible to buy a turkey in Paris, and to round up most of the ingredients necessary for the infamous “fixin’s” […]

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Only by leaving the country can Yanks grasp what a thoroughly American holiday Thanksgiving is. If the country an American expat has landed in has a Canadian community (like this one does), the locals will become particularly confused about this Thanksgiving business — because Canada has a Thanksgiving day of its own. But theirs is […]

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Just when it looked safe — but premature — to get behind the Los Angeles Dodgers again … the club announced a promotional schedule for 2012 … with 10 bobblehead nights, led by a Sandy Koufax doll. And yes, I would do something as lame as pay $50 for a bad seat to an unappealing […]

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My recollection is this: I called Landon Donovan the day before the 2001 MLS Cup final and talked to him for 10 or 15 minutes. Yes. The day before. Called him on his cell, and he picked up, and I wrote a story based on what we talked about on the eve of the game. […]

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The biggest event on the sports calendar in the UAE is the annual Formula One race, the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, and that went down today. F1 probably brings more tourists to the country than any other event. People from the region, certainly, but Europe, as well. The newsroom at The National very much had […]

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Our first two years here … we must have worked on the first day of Eid Al Adha, one of the biggest holidays of the year. Because we bumped into several noteworthy (for a non-Muslim expat) concepts in the course of things today.

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