A Friday night, finished with work fairly early … we decided to go to the leading Mexican restaurant in the city. Let’s call it El Serape, which is not its real name, but everyone who lives in Abu Dhabi, especially the North Americans, will know what place I mean. We could not get a reservation […]

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If you are going to transit through the Gulf, some words of advice. Don’t get drunk in public. Don’t insult anyone based on their religion. The drummer of the German heavy metal band Scorpions, an American named James Kottak, ran afoul of both concepts, and is about to complete spending a month in a Dubai […]

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  The Indian Premier League, the most successful cricket competition in the world, was shifted to the UAE for 15 days involving 20 matches, and I cut it a little close, before going to see a game. Tonight, one day before the last match in the UAE. Kolkata Knight Riders versus Rajasthan Royals, the eventual […]

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When we arrived in the UAE, in 2009, the concept of the Louvre Abu Dhabi had been approved, but its opening seemed remote. Distant in time. Well, not anymore. The Louvre, one of the world’s great art museums, tomorrow will open the Birth of a Museum exhibition in Paris — featuring art works that have […]

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I suppose the people involved with any news website come to know their audiences. And how unpredictable, capricious and utterly inexplicable they can be. Why no “hits” on this local story? Why scads of hits on this non-local or semi-local story? At The National, for instance, we can get a nice number of page views […]

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OK, another cultural entry. This is a UAE/regional thing that is pretty much unknown in the West. Drains in your kitchen floor. And your bathroom floors. About four inches across. With a shiny silver cover that sits in a recessed position, but can fairly easily be kicked loose, by accident … and is able to […]

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I’m not sure where this number comes from, but I’ve heard and will now repeat it: “Expats who spend five years out of their home country begin to lose familiarity with the culture of that home country.” Or something like that. It operates on a couple of levels. One is just plain forgetting some basic […]

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Abu Dhabi, both the city and the greater emirate, is not new to hosting movie makers. But it seems fair to say that never before have two movies as prominent as these in production around Abu Dhabi at the same time. And those would be the seventh episode of the Star Wars franchise, due for […]

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I was in the office today when this story exploded. Which is what stories do in the era of Twitter. They turn into flaming meteors the size of New Jersey which slam into the news cycle, crushing everything else. When the 144-character primary news source (that would be Twitter) gets hold of a story it […]

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This is the first month of the UAE calendar when you can assume a sane person no longer spends a lot of time in the sun. The high every day this week was 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Or more. However, if you pay attention to the meteorological data — or poke your head out the door […]

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