Sticks and stones? It clearly is possible to hurt someone with words in the UAE, as a Canadian expat could tell you — as soon as he gets out of jail. Insults are taken very seriously in the UAE, as the case of the soccer coach Walter Zenga and a local reporter demonstrated. Zenga called […]

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It takes a typical westerner a long time to become accustomed to the work week here. Sunday is Monday. Tuesday is hump day. Saturday is Sunday. And for most people working in the Muslim world, the restaurant chain TGI Friday’s really ought to celebrate a day earlier in the week.

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I have been impressed, since arriving in the UAE — which is only a few air hours from the subcontinent — at what we Americans do not know about India. And vice versa. Take, for instance, Sachin Tendulkar.

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The UAE uses scads of energy. Oodles. Just lighting up the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, is like lighting up a small city, in much of the world. A story today in The National notes that the country’s demand for energy is rising at 9 percent per year, which is three times the global […]

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It lasted 23 days, but it seemed longer. Twenty-four teams, originally, from New Zealand to Canada, from Argentina to Sweden. They played 52 games in 23 days, and many of us here in the UAE got quite used to having these kids around, and watching them on Al Jazeera, the Qatar cable station that carried […]

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Emiratis like their cars big … and bigger. Envision a highway grid jammed with the biggest SUVs made in Japan, the U.S. and Europe, and that’s pretty much what the roads here look like, in the Abu Dhabi-Dubai axis. A regular occurrence for anyone driving something less than a land yacht (loaded with all the […]

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The UAE does not observe daylight savings. No moving around of clocks here. The country is four hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time the year round. That is not the case in the United States and western Europe, however, and that is handy, for those of us living here. In some ways. Not so good […]

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A pack of cigarettes can be purchased in the UAE for two dirhams. Or about 50 U.S. cents. Marlboros can be had for Dh9 — about $2.50 — per pack. Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that cigarette smoking is a significant issue in the UAE. The World Health Organization puts the level of regular […]

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A lot of hand wringing goes on, in this part of the world, about the future of Arabic. The language. The National often prints stories about how Emirati schoolkids are not quite fluent in Arabic. Neither written nor oral. An astonishing concept, really. (Imagine American schoolkids who can’t actually speak English.) Which usually leads to […]

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This was the sports story of the day, here in Abu Dhabi. Kimi Raikkonen, former Formula One world champion, defending champion of the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix … showed up a day late at the track here in the UAE today and dropped a bombshell. He said he has not been paid by his team, […]

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