Sometimes I’m slow on the uptake. No question. It was about this time a year ago that a couple of goats and perhaps a sheep appeared in the long narrow park that runs between our home and the busy highway. Kids were standing around the creatures, petting and patting them, and the goats and sheep […]

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The UAE has millions of expats. About 85 percent of the population of 8 million comes from outside the country, and that works out to about 7 million foreigners, compared to 1 million citizens. What is curious about the UAE, however, is how all those foreigners tend to come from a limited number of countries. […]

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Halloween is pretty much ignored in the UAE. Makes sense. Only about 1-2 percent of the 8 million people here are Westerners. Emiratis, Indians, Pakistanis. Bangladeshis, Indonesians … October 31 is a non-event. I, however, was caught up in the spirit of the “Hallowed Eve” … so I spent the whole day wearing the same […]

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OK, the downside to a vacation in the south of Sri Lanka: The trip out.

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Abu Dhabi us one of the driest places on Earth. The southwest coast of Sri Lanka isn’t one of the wettest, but for anyone who has been living in the UAE for the past two years … it seems like it. In the near week we have been here, it has rained every day. Sometimes […]

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When you live outside your country of origin, you soon notice that a whole new batch of destinations are within a “reasonable” plane trip. Which begins to explain why we are now in the little town of Koggala, Sri Lanka. Well, and for some other good reasons.

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The Libyan civil war apparently ended today with the collapse of the last loyalist stronghold and the death of Muammar Qaddafi, all around weird guy and former president/leader/king of kings/dictator of Libya. It was a weird afternoon, in the offices of The National, in Abu Dhabi. Early in the day came reports that the last […]

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Yaaaawn. That’s the reaction to the World Series from over here. Well, that or just generic befuddlement. A significant number of people in this part of the world, Arabs and subcontinenters both, know basically nothing about baseball. I mean, they may not even know the game exists, let alone that Americans and some other random […]

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It was two years ago today, October 16, 2009, that we got off the plane at Abu Dhabi International Airport and picked up our duffel bags stuffed with clothes meant to last us … indefinitely. We have spent two years, then, working at The National and living in the UAE. A fair chunk of time. […]

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If I have left you with the impression that the UAE — Abu Dhabi, in particular — is all work and no play, millions of nose-to-the-grindstone people with old-fashioned values … well, that would be wrong. This is a country that loves celebrity and pop culture as much as any and perhaps more than most. […]

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