Another one of those “only in the UAE” stories. Well, maybe in Qatar. Or Bahrain. But pretty much only here in the Gulf, where many regular Joes have more cash than common sense. A Turkish businessman fell afoul of the law in Dubai (perhaps still the world capital of conspicuous consumption) … because he abandoned […]

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Is this well-known in the U.S.? I tend to think it is not. The Manchester City football team that plays in the English Premier League … that just won the English Premier League … is owned by an Abu Dhabi sheikh, Mansour bin Zayed. So when City was trying to nail down the Premier League […]

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To live and work in the UAE is to believe water is plentiful. A fair amount of green, especially in Al Ain and Abu Dhabi. Fountains. Plenty of the stuff streaming out of our taps. Which is madness, because the UAE is on the edge of one of the driest deserts in the world, and […]

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Sharjah FC is one of the UAE’s most storied soccer franchises. The club won the first domestic title in the history of the UAE, in the pre-history of 1974, and added four more after. They also have won eight President’s Cups, the second-biggest prize in domestic football, and those eight are the biggest total among […]

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The Rams moved to St. Louis and became dead to me. Never appreciated the Raiders gangsta thing, and then they went back to Oakland. The Dodgers fell under the spell of the necromancer Frank McCourt. Never was an Angels guy. (I still consider them the Johnny-come-latelies who play 10-man ball.) Don’t care about hockey. Major […]

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I don’t make a habit of watching the final of the FA Cup, the second-biggest domestic prize in English soccer. Most of my life I just wasn’t interested enough, and I probably could not have seen it, anyway. Tonight I watched one for the second time in my life, and the first time since 1991. […]

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To recap, Thursday night in the UAE is Friday night in the West. The end of the work week. And when we got word from a newsroom colleague that the detachment of Marines at the U.S. Embassy here in Abu Dhabi were hosting a Cinco de Mayo party … well, as Americans and Californians, don’t […]

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Putting this into historical context, I believe countries have a point where they feel a need to prove themselves to outsiders. This is when they enter their “biggest, longest, tallest” phase. Eighty years ago, the Empire State Building was built in an America coming to grips with its position in the world. As a major […]

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The UAE Falcons have been mentioned previously on this blog. Back in February I drove up to Dubai to watch them practice. A batch of guys, led by a German coach, are trying to play American football, as it is known here. (Just plain “football” in these parts being soccer.) They actually got a game […]

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One of the great urban myths from the days shortly after we arrived … was the “abandoned luxury car at the Dubai airport.” The narrative was this: High-flying foreign investor, realizes things have gone south as the real estate market implodes, well aware that white-collar crime is often heavily punished here … goes to the […]

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