I settled on Al Jazira as my favorite soccer team, in my six-plus years in Abu Dhabi. In large part because the club was about 200 yards from where I lived and about 300 yards from where I worked. A club considered one of the biggest in the nation was awfully handy to me; I […]

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It’s called the Five Stages of Grieving, and professional journalists by now know it by heart. Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance. An interesting development in the grim business of companies firing large numbers of journalists, which has been a primary characteristic of the profession for more than a decade now … is how those being […]

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I follow two national soccer teams, the United States and the UAE. Both play twice in the coming week in crucial 2018 World Cup qualifiers. I don’t feel good about either national team’s chances. For reasons that apply to both — key injuries, the pressure to produce results and competent opponents. First, the U.S.

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I love the Volvo Ocean Race. The idea of circling the planet in a boat that has about an inch between sailors and the world’s oceans … is compelling. I became fully aware of the eight-month, round-the-world event, often described as the “Everest of sailing”, in 2011, ahead of the 2011-12 race, which included a […]

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Some odd things happen in the United Arab Emirates and The National newspaper, the English-language publication based in the capital, Abu Dhabi, does a good job of recording them. Today? Cat-killers sentenced to three months of sweeping up at the Dubai zoo … the $10,000 hamburger in (of course) Dubai … and the cardboard faux […]

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Curiously, for the first 44 years of its history, the United Arab Emirates outsourced the making of its money. As in, printing bank notes and minting coins. I know the UAE dirham notes well, having carried them around in my pocket for the six-plus years I lived in the country. I had no idea, however, […]

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We left Abu Dhabi a year ago today, and it seems more distant in time than that. Adapting to the south of France, buying a house, getting key renovations made, moving in … that seems like the effort of more than a year. Meantime, lots of things were going on back in the UAE, a […]

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His given name was Luiz Carlos Saroli, but he was known by the informal Caio Junior, going back to his playing days in Portugal and his native Brazil. And that is how we referred to him in the pages of The National while he coached in the UAE. He died in a plane crash tonight, […]

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Same song, difference verse. Yesterday, I mentioned I had never seen a rugby match. Not so much because I don’t like rugby, but because I do not follow it and it is unfamiliar to me. Then we get to sports I know well, perhaps even quite well, which I would prefer not to see, going […]

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Going back to the Abu Dhabi days here. In the UAE, daily English-language journalism is, 95 percent of the time, not dissimilar from English-language journalism in the U.S. or Britain. Timely, fact-based, well-sourced. But then there is that 5 percent when things get a bit squirrely, and you didn’t really see what you saw — […]

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